[bsimpson]

There was an Amazon UXR study that floated around ~8 years ago that said the only things people care about from a voice assistant are music, weather, and alarms.

PMs keep trying to make them "smarter," and it just makes the core user journeys worse.

Surely they think they're inventing cars when we're griping about buggy whips. But it really feels like voice assistants peaked ~10y ago for the things people actually want them for.

[Xeoncross]

Considering the decade of poor results from doing anything other than music, weather and alarms I think we've all learned to avoid using them for anything else.

[esafak]

Don't forget recipes. They went and bungled up the only good things about it. Every day I suggest Google fire the whole division responsible for the product when it cheerfully says "I'm still learning" and asks me for feedback.

[RajT88]

For a bit, our Amazon Echo's were pretty decent at doing things other than music, weather and alarms. Then there was a big regression, and we stopped trying to make it do more. I guess the exception is turning the lights on and off.

My wife and I both would love for the voice assistants to do more. They just won't. Even with weather, anything more than "what's the weather like today" will usually not get a good result. "When will it rain today?" gets OK responses.

As soon as I figure out how to put a decent GPU into my old rack server(s), I'll see how far I can get with HomeAssistant. I suspect it'll be some effort, but it'll be better at the end of the day.

[cfiggers]

I have a crystal clear memory of the day I stopped trying to make voice assistants work for me.

I use a timer every day to brew my coffee. With a voice assistant I can set a timer, but with the lack of a screen I can't see how much time is left. One day I thought, "I'm going to finally get around to digging into this voice interface and see what the options are," hoping for something like, "Hey Dingus, set a five minute timer and notify me when there's 10 seconds left."

Or better yet, "Hey Dingus, five minute timer, with notify at 10 seconds."

Notice that this almost maps 1:1 onto a shell command with option flags, just verbally interfaced: "$ timer 5m --with-notify 10s"

Notice also a complete willingness on my part to learn how the thing works and change how I'm using it accordingly. This is the opposite of end user laziness. I'm willing to invest effort in becoming a "Power User" of my voice assistant.

So I looked for documentation, ready to read and use my brain to understand it and do what it tells me in order to start and stop my timers with greater proficiency.

...I found none.

Literally, there isn't any. They don't have documentation. Nowhere is there, even for someone motivated and willing to learn, the ability to do so.

Ok, well that is understandable if these things are changing rapidly. Maybe there's the equivalent to a "$ timer --help" baked into the assistant itself. Maybe it can tell me what options exist so I can use them. I ask the assistant to explain itself. "What are my options when setting a timer?"

It can't parse my question. Literally, it doesn't know what I'm asking for. Because nobody ever considered that a user might ask that question or even want to know that information.

At that point, on the spot, I gave up. Clearly this thing is not designed or intended to be a thing that one could gain skill with. It's an utterly unserious product.

I would very happily learn an entire verbal DSL, a whole pidgin dialect of English, purely for interacting with my voice assistant. "Hey Dingus, five minute staged timer: thirty seconds, two minutes, one minute, one minute, remainder, with countdown from five seconds" is not "natural language" anymore. But you can bet you'd hear me saying it, if that's all it took to make the voice assistant run my coffee brewing recipe with nothing but my voice. And then, hey bonus, let me bind that to a personal shortcut so all I need to say is "Hey Dingus, coffee timer" and I don't even need to reach for my phone.

But you can't do that. It literally does not support being taken seriously. Or, if it can, the design is utterly hostile to me discovering how. So I've never even tried to do anything, since that very day, other than turning smart lights on and off.

My point is: I didn't fail the technology. I came to the table with willingness to tinker and experiment, willingness to change my expectations to suit the design as I discovered it, willingness to work to make it a part of my routine. The technology failed me.

[econ]

You are now technology enough to finally be ready for a mechanical cooking timer. The really old ones are even made from metal.

My preference goes to steampunk level wear and a sticky grease shell made from 50 years of cooking.

I got an electronic one once, it's only a few years old and it keeps eating batteries as if some subscription plan. "Progress" here already offers one more thing to do of the when I just woke up type.

[hyperhello]

What you’re getting at is a personal basic language parser that input-output-maps to a safe subset of operations. It can’t delete your hard drive, but it has a “set a timer X, Y, Z” to some wait function execution. That would quickly be adopted and no one would ever upgrade in their life, so how is it profitable?

[RajT88]

I don't disagree with what you said, but as a workaround, why don't you just set your timers for 4 minutes and 50 seconds?

[cfiggers]

Hey, that's clever, actually. I didn't do that because I didn't think of it!

[jimbokun]

And knowing how old Geena Davis is.