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by kelseydh 462 days ago
Agree, Siri is a damaged brand. Microsoft had the insight to drop Cortana when it flopped too.

In the age of LLMs I also increasingly view my experience with "Hey Google" and "Alexa... " with similar contempt. Their output feels so bad compared to what ChatGPT's voice gets me. All of the big tech companies seem to be struggling immensely to deploy the latest in AI advancements.
1 comments
hu3 462 days ago
I never tried advanced things with "Hey Google" but it always gets the basics right for me:

"go home" opens maps app with a route to my home.

"alarm in", "alarm at", "what time is it?" works well too.

In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini.

Alexa is the same with basics, works well for me with "reminder in X hours", "reminder at 10am on every workday", "alarm at", "play The Strokes", "add coffee to the list" (groceries)

Alexa is really bad with any advanced stuff I've tried. Didn't try with "hey Google"

Any other basics that work?

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fernandotakai 462 days ago
>In fact I'm afraid they'll break it by shoving down Gemini.

i have a pixel 9 with gemini. i absolutely hate it. google assistant is miles ahead.

and btw, i'm not the only one complaining https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1jdpvnq/gemini...

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hu3 462 days ago
oh nooo! for now they still allow me to stay with the good old Google Assistant.

But it's only a matter of time until some exec removes it to "improve Gemini adoption".

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fernandotakai 462 days ago
yeah, android authority has said that 2025 is the last year of old google assistant. i dread having to use gemini every single day.

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-killing-assistant-35...

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kelseydh 462 days ago
I agree Alexa/Hey Google are generally great at following commands.. but lately I find myself most wanting to use voice primarily for getting quick answers to factual or opinion based questions. There the results are abysmal vs ChatGPT voice.

It also doesn't help that ChatGPT's voice cadence is much closer to sounding like a real human.

Siri meanwhile is still far behind both Alexa and Google Assistant in its basic voice-to-text conversion capabilities -- a pain point I experience everytime I talk into my Apple TV remote to search for content.

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