Matt Birchler on putting Google Assistant and Siri through their paces:
The tech narrative is that Siri sucks and Google Assistant is the second coming. I have been using Siri for years, and have been going 100% in on Android over the last few weeks and have given Google Assistant a solid effort. My experience has been a little different than the popular narrative.
Watch the video for the details. Bottom line, I recognize this experience. Siri does a lot really well. To maximize your Siri satisfaction, learn the boundaries, get a sense of what Siri does reliably that fits in your day-to-day workflow.
In my experience, Siri does a lot that’s pretty bulletproof. One example is reminders. If I need to remember something, the first thing I do is figure out an ideal time to be reminded, then pull out my iPhone or “Hey, Siri” my Apple Watch and ask Siri to remind me. If there’s failure here, it is always up front and obvious. And that’s easily repaired.
Where Siri is less reliable, I find another path. If I ask Siri a question she can’t answer, I don’t get frustrated. These are early days still, for Google, Amazon, and Apple’s Siri.
I totally agree with your assessment. Right now the voice assistant is a user interface that must be learned just like any other user interface. Once you “learn” Siri (or any of the other voice assistants), they can be highly useful interfaces.
The difficulty is that people expect a voice assistant to act like a human assistant. That is currently beyond the capabilities of any of the voice assistants, and it may be a long time before we get there.
But how many times have you had to correct a human assistant who misunderstood what you said? “No, Janice, I said Jay, not Jake…” People brush that off as part of normal conversation — but let Siri make a mistake, and there’s blog posts galore. The standard bar for a digital assistant is much higher than a human. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but there is a double standard.
Siri helps you with tasks it already knows how to do. In fact, it’s shortcomings are not doing enough of those tasks.
Google can give you answers but not good task management.
Siri hasn’t evolved significantly in the last 5 years.
Google keeps growing.
another Apple fail.
Maybe Apple should take a cue from the traffic cone president-elect. Listen to what people want. Don’t
tell them what they need.
This is a fair point, though humans are better at using context to automatically error correct. If the directive is to set up a business lunch, the human assistant can figure out that you meant Jay the client rather than Jake the babysitter, even if he couldn’t quite hear whether you said “Jake” or “Jay”. The human assistant will ask for clarification if and only if there is true ambiguity.
Voice assistants will have reached a milestone when they can fail the way a human assistant fails. If AI assistants fail in ways that are different, then even if it isn’t worse by some objective measure, it will remain a user interface that people must learn to use. The milestone will be reached when people can use their skills learned from interacting with humans to interact with AI assistants. Even if it was like interacting with a dumb person, the key is that it be person-like.
Dude isn’t even using the Google Assistant on the Pixel or Home. He’s using the gimped version in Allo