• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    9 months ago

    Google Assistant recently stopped responding to “set a timer for 5 minutes”. It’ll say it didn’t understand, and the suggestion bar will say “set a timer for 6 minutes”.

    Maybe the LLM power of bard will restore this extremely complex functionality that basic string matching simply can’t do. I can only hope.

    • ijeff@lemdro.idOPM
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      9 months ago

      Amazon Alexa does significantly better when it comes to recognizing these basic commands and for smart home controls. Extremely quick and consistent. It’s useless for web search question though.

      • MakeItCount@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        And then you try in french and suddenly 80% of the command result somehow to a kitchen recipe one

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        9 months ago

        The app transcribes my voice input perfectly, so I don’t understand how that would help? Maybe it’s an issue with using Google’s voice assistant in another language, but as you can see here, the thing suggests the exact same thing with a different number.

        • MrQuallzin@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Oh dang, yeah it’s probably the language. Wouldn’t surprise me that other languages aren’t being prioritized by Google, which is a shame. German’s an awesome language.

          Edit cause I’m gonna look stupid for saying German without actually checking. I’m high, blame the grass. Whatever language it is looks awesome

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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            9 months ago

            It used to work, that’s the annoying thing. Some update somewhere broke the functionality and I don’t think anyone over at Google noticed. The worst part is that it’s such an easy command to translate into English.

            Language is Dutch, by the way. Close enough :)

          • danhakimi@kbin.social
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            9 months ago

            OP also said it used to work.

            This is AI black box voodoo. They take something simple, shove it into something complicated, and hope it comes out understanding the simplicity.

            it would be trivial to hard code “set a timer for \ ,” but that doesn’t give Google an excuse to spy on people.