Poll: What do you use your voice assistant for / what do you expect it to do? (multiple selections)

Voice Assistant Contest
1

I am curious what the most popular uses are for voice assistance, select all that you use are would want in a voice assistant.

Edit: The poll allows multiple selections, if you want all of them check all of them, the point is to collect how popular individual features are.

  • Responds to a wake word
  • Controls devices on/off open/close etc
  • Knows which room / area it is in for context (“Turn on the lights” only impacts the same room)
  • Streams music based on verbal requests
  • Answers math questions
  • Answer general questions
  • Plays games with interactive voice prompts for choices
  • Adds items to Reminders / Lists
  • Adds events to a calendar ( Add Dentist appointment for 4pm on Tuesday to my calendar)
  • Has a screen to display info
  • Creates short lived timers (Set a timer for 5 min)
  • Sets future alarms based on specific time, day (Set an alarm for 6am tomorrow))
  • Make phone calls / act as a hands free phone
  • Other
0 voters
2

I went with “Other,” mainly because “All of the Above” wasn’t an option While I personally might not use some of those things, having the ability to make the Voice Assistant subsystem do all of those thin in some form is ultimately the best outcome.

3

It’s a multiple-choice, so you can choose all of the options instead :wink:

4

Exactly, the point what to find which items where the most popular as I had a hunch it some are hardly used and others are considered essential.

Having a All option would actually not work with collecting that so the poll lets you select them all if you want.

Edit: also had a hunch screens where not that popular. which so far seems to be true for others.

5

Sadly, responding to a wake word is what most of us want, whilst also being the most difficult thing to accomplish reliably and without unintended triggers.

1 Like
6

Well there seems to have been more good progress on wake words just in the last month.

1 Like
7

Voice identification for voice assistant would be nice in some cases.

2 Likes
8

Not in the list but I REALLY want it to have some intelligence behind it to come closer to Alexa etc in controlling devices. Out of the box, it’s really basic and dumb and needs a lot of configuration it seems. Way too much effort. I know there’s an experimental link to AI but it doesn’t expose your devices for obvious reasons. I want something much better than Siri or Alexa that securely controls my stuff. Shouldn’t that be the top choice and answer?

9

I’d really like to have the ability to use multiple (2 or 3) wake words.
Using the exact same one every time is not exactly a natural way of interacting with any person\entity. Image you’d need to address your partner in one way, and one way only, to get them to respond. That’d get boring and a chore pretty quickly, and it is not the way humans naturally interact.

10

All of it. Here is some good inspiration from a voice controlled Home Automation system I had running in my old house back in the day. I started this system 24 years ago and I still miss most of the capabilities.

2 Likes
11

I’d like my smart assistant to have some kind of contextual awareness for when I’m using media. So I could just say “pause” and it would know if I’m watching a youtube video or listening to a podcast, and then pause that, without the need to specify what I wanted to pause.

It wouldn’t even need to be particularly smart. It would just need to look and see if I’m actually playing something and then pause that.

For example, if I have a Youtube stream running in a room with a smart speaker and that speaker hears me saying pause, it pauses that stream, without me having to say Pause Youtube, or Pause device name.

1 Like