Ask HN: It's 2024, why are voice assistants still so buggy?

[samuelg123]

Still feels like 20% of the time I try to use Siri/Alexa, they hit one of these failure modes:

1. Fail to activate

2. Fail to respond (just keep listening forever)

3. Activate on the wrong device (talking to Siri on Phone, HomePod 2 rooms over responds)

4. Fail to access data they should have ("Who is speaking?" or "I'm having trouble...")

Thinking over it, I think voice assistants have the most bugs of any technology I use daily.

[smt88]

It's because they're a cost center. They don't generate revenue for any big tech company. No one makes purchase decisions based on the voice assistant quality.

I know a few people who lightly use them for timers or music, but almost no one goes deeper than that.

[smitty1e]

The technology as such isn't bad.

It's just the idea that the gear is spying on me, and I don't know where the data go for processing, that is the big downer.

[samuelg123]

Yeah, makes sense (but still disheartening).

I wonder if Apple will roll out a paid Siri Pro tier (with LLM). Maybe that would incentivize investment into tablestake features (ie. responding reliably).

[65]

I built an Alexa skill at work. It's mostly a ton of edge cases and prompt variations you have to handle. Alexa also has a very short time out, something like 8 seconds, so your skill will time out very easily. Handling state is a whole other fiasco.

Some things are out my control, like if Alexa picks up the skill invocation phrase or parses the response correctly.

I suspect LLMs will help with this. Alexa is already integrating LLMs with their newer skill kits.

[diebeforei485]

For #3 I recommend setting up your phone to respond to "Siri" but Homepod to respond to "Hey Siri".

[trav4225]

Because everything is buggy these days. ;-)

[drivingmenuts]

1. Scottish accents ... 2. See #1.