[wenc]

Right now Alexa+ and Gemini are objectively better.

The best is ChatGPT voice mode. It understands non English words and accents amazingly well, and even though the LLM model isn’t the full fledged one, I can have deep conversations with it for an hour without it missing a beat.

[barumrho]

Siri doesn't need to have conversations with you. ChatGPT can do that. But, it should be able to do actions you'd do on your phone.

[cachius]

Speech to text should work. I regularly have to manually edit the transcribed input. The more special words the more frequent. Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary.

[nozzlegear]

> Completely disregards the context of the current input, for example, on Hacker news might involve special technical and IT vocabulary.

Does any voice assistant do this right now? Genuine question, I don't actually know. It sounds useful as long as it's not invasive.

[mh-]

Any of the LLM-based ones should pull this* off - so that's to say.. none of the popular commercially available ones, yet?

Alexa+ does, but I don't use it for anything except kitchen timers and home automation triggers, so I can't speak to how well it works in a longer conversation.

Zoom's meeting notes excels at this, Google Meet is terrible at it. Meet mishears our company name about 90% of the time; various attendee names are a coin toss.

* "this" being: context consideration in speech-to-text/transcription.

[skeledrew]

Pretty straight forward on Android at least to wire up a harness that talks to Tasker[0] or another full automation app.

[0] https://tasker.joaoapps.com/

[nozzlegear]

The iOS equivalent would be Shortcuts, which, while not as powerful as Tasker depending on the context, is an official Apple feature that most apps support. Claude and ChatGPT both have various Shortcuts hooks, including voice conversation.

[mh-]

The experience of having to tell Siri to "Ask ChatGPT <about something>" really sucks, though. It doesn't consistently do it, the handoff frequently just stalls out and you never get a response, the transcription that gets passed to ChatGPT is low quality, etc.

And though I have the feature enabled that should cause it to ask ChatGPT about things it can't answer, that works even less frequently.

But even if all of these things were true, the stuff on your phone you would expect to be exposed to the model as available tool calls, are not. So their efficacy is very limited.

(edit: iPhone 16 Pro Max, if anyone is curious)

[nozzlegear]

Oh I was just thinking creating a shortcut that you'd tap on your Home Screen/control shade (whatever it's called) to activate ChatGPT, or wire up to the action button. I forgot you can have Siri do the "ask ChatGPT xyz" thing – I agree, that integration sucks.

[mh-]

I'd definitely do the former. I don't even think this is specific to ChatGPT or Claude's apps.

There seems to be something about how intents get triggered by Shortcuts on iOS that feels flaky to me. Whenever some app suggests a shortcut (most recently Starbucks promoted a shortcut that orders your "usual"), the success rate when I tap it is <50%.

It's possible it's uniquely worse on my device, since I haven't done a "clean install" (vs letting the device upgrade flow copy over) in like a decade. But I'm also not up for dealing with the pain of setting up from scratch just to find out it's bad on a fresh profile, either.

[HereticLocke]

I agree, ChatGPT voice mode is pretty impressive. Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably.

[bobthepanda]

Scarlett Johansson is suing OpenAI, in fact

[nozzlegear]

> Almost similar to Samantha in 'Her', laughably.

Things that Sam Altman would prefer people not say lol

[alfiedotwtf]

This! I talk to ChatGPT every morning, and will listen and navigate my feeds while I drive, summarises posts, answer my questions. It just works.

[CountHackulus]

Alexa+ has been a massive downgrade for me. It's extremely laggy and constantly misunderstands me, whereas the old one never did. "Set a timer for 20 minutes" used to be instant and just work, I did this the other day and it took 10 seconds to respond and set a timer for 10 minutes.

[mh-]

I had the same experience until I upgraded my Echo (we have a few, but the one in the kitchen gets 99% of the voice commands).

Just looked it up in my order history: I went from an "Echo Show 5 (1st Gen, 2019 release)" to a "Amazon Echo Show 8 (newest model)".

Whether I should have needed to upgrade is a separate question, but, yeah.

[hamdingers]

Same here. I can see why LLM-driven voice assistants makes sense to product people in the abstract, but introducing non-deterministic behavior into a device I primarily use to help with timekeeping and control lights is nothing but a regression.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

I concur that the ChatGPT voice mode is excellent. I can't even think of anything to knock it for other than for whatever reason it never 'hears' my kids, but that's probably because it's not intended to be used in multi-participant chats?

But for one-on-one, it is a really outstanding experience. Especially since they tamped down the way over-the-top humanisms.

[DaiPlusPlus]

"objectively better" is a subjective statement :)

My preference, however, is for a voice-control UX just like I get with my Amazon Echo and "classic" Alexa like I have been for the past 10 years I've been using it: I think I can best describe it as a "voice-driven command-line" just like your OS' CLI shell, which makes its interactions predictable, even if it means I need to "know" what commands are valid in a given context. We all need predictability and reliability when it comes to my home-automation integrations.

...but computer interaction with a LLM / transformer-driven / "AI agent" is anything but predictable. When Amazon opted everyone into Alexa+ I agreed to give it a go and see if it really made things better or not - and it did not. I opted-out of Alexa+ and went back to something actually reliable.

[thrtythreeforty]

Here's a question: I don't understand the gap between these LLM powered voice agents vs CLI coding agents, the latter of which are obviously useful and quite resourceful at getting something done when asked in plain English.

Seems like an agent given 20-30 tool calls like "read_sms" "matter_command", and "send_email" would be able to work out what to do for things like "set the house to 72° and text Laura that I did it."

[DaiPlusPlus]

> Seems like an agent given 20-30 tool calls like "read_sms" "matter_command", and "send_email" would be able to work out what to do for things like "set the house to 72° and text Laura that I did it."

Incidentally, a major headline in the news this past week was about a coding-agent that wiped its company's entire system, including backups; which the company's staffers were confident was utterly impossible (as it didn't have any access to that system), and yet somehow, it did[1] (the TL;DR is the agent randomly came across an unprotected God-tier admin API-key/token saved to a personal text-file in a filesystem it had read-access to). If an agent can do that with only read-only access to a company's routine/everyday storage area then there's no way I'm giving it the ability to deactivate my house's fire-alarms and security-cameras via Google Home/Matter/Thread/HomeKit/X10/OhFfsNotAnotherCloudBasedAutomationScheme.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/27/cursoropus_agent_snuf...

[8note]

If you are really worried about that, the agent already has that access since itll go find that key anyways.

the HN thread about that case was much more of a "why are you putting your prod keys in random text files" and "the sota in prompt engineering is that putting DONT FUCKING DO THE BAD THING" makes the agent more desperate to get stuff done

putting limits at the harness level would do just fine. one LLM call, one tool call per voice message.

you dont have to give it a ton of turns

[redwall_hp]

Siri's one job I care about is doing exactly what I want while I'm driving. I need it to check my text messages, take dictation, start phone calls and deal with music. I don't need to have conversations with it, I need deterministic responses to known commands.

[mh-]

Agreed, and I've been waiting for it to do all of those things reliably && consistently since work gave me an iPhone 4S in 2011.

I'm on the iPhone 16 now.

[wat10000]

"Objectively" has become a generic intensifier. It's literally infuriating.

[ShyCodeGardener]

Whenever I see one of these comments, it's always from someone that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience. And many times there are more people commenting back that this was essentially the 1.0 version and that the current 2.0 version is much better. So as someone that uses none of these products (old voice assistants vs. ai ones) it's really hard to evaluate if any of these anecdotes mean anything.

You could have tried Alexa+ at the start when it was shitty compared to plain Alexa, and maybe it's better now. But equally none of the people that comment that it is "amazing" in its current iteration qualify their statements with their experiences comparing and contrasting the old version vs. the new version making them seem either unqualified to make statements based on how much "better" it is than the old version or at worse they are shills (paid or not). The best take is that they are comparing (e.g.) day-one Alexa+ vs. the current Alexa+ without a comparison to the original Alexa.

... which is to say that it really feels like there are no clear conclusions that could be drawn from all of this.

[circuit10]

No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that

[ShyCodeGardener]

> All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Aren't hallucinations part of GenAI? I would assume that "AI" voice recognition doesn't have that baked in, but I'm not working in either of those spaces so maybe I'm missing the details. So many things are being looped into the "AI" umbrella that would have just been called machine learning or pattern recognition a decade ago (e.g. "facial recognition" vs "AI" at a time when "AI" also means chatbots like ChatGPT).

[circuit10]

The point is Amazon is adding an “Alexa+” mode that uses LLMs. The plain voice recognition + keyword matching or however the old version works is more reliable (I assume, I didn’t use the new mode much because it immediately failed at what I wanted)

[DaiPlusPlus]

> that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience

I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to.

Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?

[ShyCodeGardener]

> I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better,

I'm not telling you this. I'm basically saying that with Alexa/Alexa+ and with Google's Gemini vs Goole Now(?) I've seen many posts like this. Where someone complains about the AI version, but then there are other posts that come in and claim how much better it is. Even for things like Claude Code you get people complaining about how many mistakes it makes, and then people coming in and saying that it's because they are "doing it wrong". Either "Claude has improved by 10x in the last 6 months. It's so amazing! If you used it a year or so ago it doesn't even compare!" or "You aren't using the most expensive tier of Claude which increases context and thinking abilities that are hobbled in the cheaper versions!"

I never really see a comparison on the same level and it sounds like people talking past each other or some people having legitimate complaints and then others coming in to shill for a product.

I'm not in anyway implying that "You should totally try this out now that they fixed everything" or anything of the sort. I even stated that I don't use any of these tools, and I was commenting as something more akin to an "outsider."

[cachius]

The current photos app on Win 11 has accumulated a whopping one gigabyte of - what actually?

[DaiPlusPlus]

I don't run Windows 11 so I haven't taken a look, but I speculate it's because it contains a bunch of ML blobs for Windows Photo's image-classification and photo subject/contents keyword search.

On Windows 10, the Photos app package is about ~140MB on my computer. A good chunk of that is because the package includes a lot of dependencies - including platform deps that I'd expect would be part of the UWP runtime in the OS - kinda like how since the introduction of Swift/UIKit/etc in iOS the IPA packages all bundle their platform dependencies, even though they're demonstrably redundant, because UIKit isn't an OS-provided framework anymore... I'm not up-to-date in the iOS dev scene so I'm unsure why Apple went with that approach.

[dudeinhawaii]

I'm not an Alexa user myself but I have watched my wife interact with it for around 5years now.

The new Alexa powered by an LLM is objectively better that previous Alexa in a few ways. This much was apparently from day one and has only gotten smoother.

1. It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.

2. Speech recognition seems better (less instances of 5x round trips)

3. Conversational with multi-turn --- my wife can have a back and forth clarifying a topic.

4. Seems to understand intent a bit better. (user asked A so they are probably thinking about B)

Those may seem small but they were a tremendous source of annoyance for her -- and thus for me -- "Alexa is not listening, do something!"

[DaiPlusPlus]

> It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.

...how does that work, exactly? (or rather: what's the context here?); there's no possible way for an Alexa+-powered Amazon Echo to control my AppleTV or interface with VLC on my desktop.

[swiftcoder]

Presumably, FireTV?

[_DeadFred_]

It's not the early 2000s where just messing around and wasting time on this stuff is cool in itself. None of that time wasted turned into much long term apps that stuck with me. Maybe a banking app and a trail running app.

I ruined multiple dinners with timers that didn't work (with a time/labor cost).

I had to get out of bed in the freezing to turn the lights out. It's easy to hit the lights when I go to bed but annoying having the tool fail and getting back out.

Music stuff didn't work well because I used Youtube Music not Spotify.

Those were my 3 use cases for Google voice, and it failed them all enough I just stopped using it all together. Who cares if it works today if in another month they just change something and break it again? They've shown it's not a tool to use for tool things, it's a 'gee wow' thing. I don't need to be impressed. I need not burnt food.

[stronglikedan]

Alexa+ is terrible compared to Alexa. It's so bad that I've dusted off my v1 echos cuz they're too old to run Alexa+. Complete shit show that is.

I do like Gemini better than Assistant, even though it's not quite there yet. But that's just a matter of time because they actually designed it from the ground up to be a drop in replacement for Assistant.

[acdha]

I’m curious, what are you talking about for that long? It sounds like that’s moving out of the home automation space into something else.