25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer
A big problem with the assistants is that as soon as they fail at a query they seem stupid, I feel stupid, and I stop using them for a long time.<p>Last weekend I had the following failed queries:<p>"OK Google, what is the air quality like at Mt. Shasta today?"<p>"OK Google, add a waypoint for the last gas station before the mountain pass"<p>"OK Google, what percentage of people can you detect to be wearing masks on recent Instagram photos tagged at a location within a 10 mile radius of Mt. Shasta?"<p>These are all things I would <i>expect</i> a computer assistant to do really well. They have access to so much data, and so many APIs, that they should be able to break down these sentences into a SQL-like query and give me results. The third, for example:<p>"recent Instagram photos" -> Instagram has an API<p>"tagged within a 10 mile radius" -> parse the cities within a 10 mile radius and look for tags in all of them<p>"people" -> use your wonderful person detection networks your friends at Waymo developed<p>"wearing masks" -> I'm sure your internal datasets have this label, so run an object detector<p>Then compile and reduce the data to give me the number I want.<p>That's what I want an <i>assistant</i> to do. But it couldn't even do the first, which just involves a single API query to fetch air quality index information. Bleh. And as for the second, it has no idea what "last gas station" or "mountain pass" means; it's a query a human would know to be extremely commonplace.<p>It turns out that the current generation of "assistants" are mostly just template-matchers which really doesn't help me much at all. I can set my own alarms, thank you.