[parpfish]

i think by "magic prompts", what the previous post meant was that you knew all the possible commands (e.g., "Music, playlist alpha").

in theory, you could just look at a manpage for the speech api and know every keyword. there's no manpage for siri/alexa so you don't know what the commands are -- you just have to guess and when it works it supposedly "feels like magic"

[TeMPOraL]

And this is a mistake, IMHO. I mean, it sort of works with ChatGPT - now, and only somewhat reliably since past 3 months. It didn't work and doesn't work with voice assistants.

There is fun in exploration, in discovering new and useful or interesting functionality on your own. At least, when you're young and have ample free time for it. For adults... well, between blog posts and in-app examples, they gave us scattered map of the language anyway. Might have just compiled it into a reference guide from the start.

After all, those voice assistants still have a command grammar, similar to that of my system. Users end up having to learn that grammar anyway. Hiding the grammar, adding some fuzziness in command matching, and then putting an unconstrained voice-to-text engine in front... didn't really improve anything, and only made the problem much, much harder. A self-goal. And the only way it "feels like magic" is that it feels like your phone's being haunted by an angry poltergeist.