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