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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Personal preference: I want it -as an absolute minimum- turned off. Yet better removable. But above all I want it absent. I don’t need and don’t want my stuff to listen to me, my family, my music, my life.
It’d be cool to use different wake words instead of the same one every single time. Mixing it up a bit would make it feel less robotic. So, if they could figure stuff like that out, I’d probably use mine even more.
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I’m a bit confused by respond to a wake word. Ultimately all functionalities listed are predicated on first detecting and responding to a wake word. Conversely, ONLY responding to a wake word without any instruction is kind of pointless. But perhaps I’m missing something.
You could imagine a device that only wakes up when a button is pressed, so there is no wake word.
Conversely, imagine a “wake word” that was really a short command like “lights on”. In this case, you don’t need anything outside of the wake word to know what to do.
Wake words exist largely because it is too easy to trigger things from TV, Guests, general conversations.
I would VERY VERY much like to have different wake words for different assistants.
IE maybe Hey Nambu to trigger automations for light control, but Hey computer, to ask generative AI natural language questions like a unit conversion, what the weather forecast is etc. While one can probably do both I suspect it would be easier to have a narrow focus one do automations REALLY well and consistently and the general one just answer questions.
