This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names (and perhaps distinguished through other means too); if the error was instead "Username cannot contain 'discord'", it'd be more obvious.
At least in the naming, sure. Everything else, not so much. I had to switch my whole house over to Echos because you can't change the wake word on Google Home. Every time I said, say, "Hey Google, turn the bedroom lamp off", the Home in the bedroom would say ok and turn the lamp off, both phones in the room would activate and complain that they didn't have a device named lamp listed, and every other Home in the house would start talking about how it couldn't hear me clearly. Then you yell "Hey Google, shut the fuck up!" and the blasted things start whining about how they "have feelings too" and I shouldn't be so rude. Few technological problems have made my fingers ache more for a sledgehammer.
The developers of these things need to stop treating people swearing at them as a time to lecture them and instead realize that if someone is swearing at it then they’re probably not satisfied with how it’s functioning in the attempts before that.
Funny enough Google Assistant on Google Maps does this just fine. When it asks me if I wanted to navigate to the Pizza Hut that's five miles away or the one that's 38 miles away, it understands "the closest one, you stupid piece of crap" just fine.
I can see this being useful. There are multiple Krogers and Walmarts where I am. They vary greatly in quality and selection. Depending on where you are and what you want to get, you might not want the closest one.
Haha I wrote a HN comment years ago about the same issue. Everytime "do you want to go to the Wegman's 5 miles away or the identical Wegman's that's 20 miles away?"
This only happened to me once, but I was leaving BWI airport and asked Google to drive home. I really only needed a bit of help getting onto I-70 because some of the signs were confusing. Well it started navigating and after a few turns, it definitely seemed off. Turned out it was taking me to a Home Health place. I've always been super careful since then to make sure Home was Home.
Glad someone is, been trying to figure out if there was a command in Siri to communicate I'm dissatisfied with how its wasting my time with the past query attempts, no luck so far although I've basically given up using the thing at all at this point.
The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.
You can't change the wake word because a separate, dedicated chip is listening for it and is not connected to the rest of the device except to wake up the main processor.
Then they could at least provide more than one option. Though while far from perfect, one of the things I like about Alexa/Echo more than the ability to change it, is that with multiple devices you will generally only trigger one (the others within earshot will listen and then ignore it once one of them has picked it up; works well in my house at least apart from one place where echo/reflection sometimes causes one in another room to get preference, but even then only one device usually triggers). Sounds like that was the main problem for GP.
Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".
Yep. Echoes also don't make you pause after the wake word, so you can actually talk to it naturally. Also, when you tell them to shut up they shut up. The way Google Homes throw a tantrum when you're rude to them will make you want to reach through the cable line and strangle the arrogant son of a bitch who OK'd something that pointlessly infuriating.
Google devices function the same way when configured properly. The mention of multiple devices responding, and some not knowing about the light, makes me think GP has something set up incorrectly.
Dedicated wakeup chips can be designed to have a different matrix shoved in for the word they're detecting. Google presumably did not do this, but they could have.
Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor) so it’s possible the extra electricity is just generating heat, waiting to go to the processor. I’d lol if they have 5v coming in, and they’re stepping it down to 3.3v for the wake word processor (hence heat) while the main processor runs at 5v.
That's interesting, I did some digging into Apple device communication and it turns out they have a protocol called CompanionLink that handles this exact circumstance - devices can communicate securely with each other and decide who is going to handle the Siri activation - HomePod's seem to get preference, then phones then laptops. I'm surprised Google hasn't done something similar.
I have no idea how things work under the hood, but this doesn't match my experience as a user. If I'm in the bedroom and ask to turn the lamp off, and phones are around, the phone screens sometimes lit up as they are listening to the command, but then only the bedroom Google Home actually executes it, while the phones turn their screen back off without saying anything.
Unfortunately I'm with the other guy. We have a Nest Mini in every room, and a Hub Max (only paid for 2, another 2 were free with Spotify and the Hub Max was an Instagram giveaway win).
We have to whisper to the Hub Max in the kitchen, from 3 inches away, and the Minis in the dining room and living room often still hear. If I don't whisper, even the ones upstairs hear. Sometimes I get 2 timers for my cooking, sometimes I get one on the wrong speaker. Then I try to cancel the timer, and the Hub Max hears instead and tells me I have no timers set.
The Hub Max asks on the screen if the wrong device responded. It clearly ignores your response, as the wrong device also responds the next time. I have pressed that button easily over 50x before I gave up and stopped.
Something clearly changed ~6mo-1yr ago because they never used to be this bad. It used to be that they would all listen, then only the closest one (that heard the command the loudest) would respond. Problem is, when I'm cooking the Hub Max is 1ft away and the rest are through (often multiple) walls metres away from me.
If this means you set each echo with a different wake word, you probably don’t need to do that. As long as each one knows about the other (same account) they choose a single device to respond based on the one which heard you best.
Google should have done that too, but it seems you might not have had them all part of the same home (or something else was broken/buggy).
Well, the verbification of the word google introduces its own difficulties there.
The ideal would be for the voice assistant to have some completely unique word, ideally with sound combinations that are very rare in your native language. And if for some reason, that still doesn't work for you, have a way to change it. Or maybe just not have a default, and require users to pick their own keyword.
My roommate had an Alexa and we changed the wake word to computer... Didn't last long. Apparently the word computer comes up on casual conversation much more than you probably think.
In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing that fact, making wake words super “easy” to recognize and hard to accidentally say.
Looks like I can search for " T S " to find the "ts sound that's not at the end"
% grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
991
Some of the non-proper nouns include ACCOUNTANCY, ANTSY, and ARTSY. I'll assume this is too close to the end to count, so require two sounds after the " T S ":
% grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
853
(It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.)
Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end:
% grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b
ITSY-BITSY IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0
TSETSE T S IY1 T S IY0
For me, I apparently say "Hey, go [get, find, etc]" a lot and my phone wakes up unnecessarily. It seems to also happen with "Let's go". It's pretty annoying.
My personal conspiracy theory is that "Isis" is a result of the US "convincing" media organizations to use that name for the Islamic State after realising that intercepting communications using the term "is" was an impossible task. Even further, they then tried to impose "Daesh" but it didn't catch up.
Didn't they get death threats and insults on Facebook? Not only from people that would do that kind of stuff online, but also the kind of person that thinks that a terrorist organization has an official Facebook page.
They had to rename their page to "ISIS the band" or something like that.
Strong disagree. The whole "Karen" meme reeks of old-fashioned misogyny wrapped up in 2020s language. "A woman, complaining? How dare she!". I recognise the meme is about entitled women being rude, but that behaviour is hardly isolated to women.
Where's the simple line that gets crossed? If I ask for a refund but am refused, am I being "entitled" when I push it? There are some obvious examples of both ends of the spectrum, but a lot of less obvious ones in the middle.
I worry these memes encourage timid people not to even ask for what they are legitimately entitled to, for fear of ending up on some Reddit channel.
As Scott says in Weak Men Are Superweapons [1], a meme aimed against a specific, easily disliked subgroup is unavoidably an attack on the entire group by association.
It is impossible to say "Karen, who is a woman, bad" without implying "women Karens, women bad." Or if there is a way to disentangle them, it certainly won't fit in a meme.
> a meme aimed against a specific, easily disliked subgroup is unavoidably an attack on the entire group by association.
So that comment, by attacking a specific, easily disliked subgroup of memes is undeniably an attack on all of the memes by association. Or am I applying this wrong?
Perhaps that hints at the problem of intentionally developing a meme stereotype, and then using it as a stick to beat people with. The bar for having that stereotype becomes ever lower, and thus the set ever bigger. People then self-censor perfectly acceptable behaviour to avoid being part of the set.
Karen is a _white_ woman who uses their entitlement to attack people in services.
I like how you just white washed the problem of racism with misoginy here.
That whole group of Karens is probably a product of white male misoginy towards white women so these women found of way of coming back at it by directing their anger towards even less priveleged groups.
Mental health is more important than telling yourself that adapting makes you weak. And please stop with this bullshit along the lines of "just ignore it", that's not how bullying works.
Heavily bullied as a kid. Never conformed. Maybe not the right solution for everyone but I learned those were not the types of people whose approval I needed in life.
I hope not, my daughters name just happens to have syllables similar but not the same as “siri” in her name and calling her name sets it off ALL THE TIME.
Your data is about "percentage of female names in whole population".
I'm talking about "most popular name to assign to newborns".
Sorry for misunderstanding.
Alexa is not such an uncommon name. They should team up and sue, being designated as the obedient servant for the benefit of someone else's brand is a non-negligible annoyance. Ignore people who say 'tis' not that serious,' they're the sort of people who never care about anything until it happens to them.
I also feel bad for that Google kid I knew in high school. People were always asking him where to find stuff. He thought that changing his name from Alta Vista would stem the tide.
Oh at first with my cafein lacking early morning brain, I mistakenly parsed it as "Developers should not be able to call their bots regular names". But it's nothing to the bot's name but how it's registered on the system right? So the suggestion is, the username should be discernible from platform users usernames.
> This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names
I disagree. The username can be clyde_discord/clyde_bot and the display name could just be "Clyde". Then the username Clyde wouldn't be taken, and the users would be able to still message the bot and not be confused.
Though I personally really dislike simple human names for bots because it sounds cheesy and dumb.
It's not about the username being taken, it's all about what people appear as in the client; bots and scammers might impersonate Clyde to steal credentials, social engineer, etc, so you cannot be "Clyde_help" nor "Clyde_Official" nor any variation that would make people think the bot/user is speaking on behalf of Discord.
Why not just put a special logo or symbol or something on that profile to mark it as special/official, or have some sort of "user type" displayed that says "human" or "official bot" or "third party bot"? I feel like making it look like a regular username makes it _more_ likely people will be scammed by "other" regular users rather than less likely.
Discord already does this - they just don't trust average users to be aware enough to check. (Based on my experience moderating some discords, they aren't wrong.)
Which is funny when you take into account that people are still using special characters to get a Clyde name that mostly resembles it. I question the effectiveness.
There's not exactly a list of canonical human names per se, but "bots can't use human names" would still be a very sensible rule for us to have. Put the cost and the burden on companies making bots, not on individual people who got unlucky.
Also names are part of human culture, and Alexa for example has been in use for a very long time. There are valid reasons for names to die off in a single generation (eg adolf) but this is not a reason that our culture gains anything from imo.
There are certainly far more Clydes than there are Discords (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?)
I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.
..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.
If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece.
The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord.
In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.
> has anyone even been legally named Discord before?
There was a Roman goddess named Discordia (where "discord" came from), and in the 90s Hercules and Xena TV series the Greek goddess used that Roman name instead of Eris, but simplified to just Discord.
Those two series were pretty popular, so I can see it being more likely recently than in that 1950s census sibling comment found. On the flipside, that character is probably not something parents would want for their daughter.