alt Hacker NewsI haven't kept up. Are Siri, Alexa or Google's smart speakers any good now? Or are they still mostly for setting timers and controlling spotify?
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Not sure about the others, but a Google Home device with Gemini enabled gives you basically short conversational LLM interactions. It can set timers and play music and all that, but you can also pretty much ask it any random question and it will give you an LLM answer.
It's far more useful than the previous Google Assistant answers which were always of the form, "According to petmd.com - [direct quote]".
I've had a good time using my Google Home devices exclusively as kitchen timers and music playing devices, though they semi frequently get song requests wrong.
Can't speak for the other's but Siri asks me if I wanna use ChatGPT when the questions get hard
Judging by the frequent frustration I've witnessed whenever visiting two separate friends who own Alexas, no they are not good now.
On another note, I am continuously flabbergasted that even Google cannot get an agentic LLM assistant right. I used to use the Google Assistant ALL the time when it did not make use of LLM's. It was AMAZING. I could just say "wake me up at 7" and it would understand that I meant 7AM the next day, or call "mom", or "set a timer for 10 minutes" while I'm cooking. It was genuinely useful to me.
Google Assistant last week sent me to the Google Search page with my prompt "wake me up at 7am", and Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.
I had one of those Apple speakers (HomePod Mini) and the only other thing I ever did with it was speaker phone calls. It was really good that that.
I ended up selling it for $50 or something.