visiting a friend at a facebook office a few years ago, we walked by a small room near the bar cordoned off with caution tape. "oh, they're replacing the TV again, people keep using the oculus and smashing it by accident, has happened a few times" -- i can't help but picture that small, broken room today. #meta
as someone who switched to an iphone yesterday after having using google flagship models since the nexus one, i agree that this is an important direction for google's product strategy, but i think they're playing catch up from far behind.
i remarked to my wife last night that the biggest difference in the ux between the two was that my android was always a phone, and this iphone has become a platform/ux that's larger than a single device, a whole set of humanistic little devices -- airpods and the home ipad in my case. i'd always thought i couldn't switch because i use google services, but those are largely commodities now -- i've got a wide range of good enough options for photos/music/email/cal/etc. -- the google android apps are a little better, but not enough so to make a difference. even siri has been good enough so far, though my queries aren't especially complicated.
That might very well be true that Google Assistant is better but there’s a certain class of user, like me, that finds voice interfaces obnoxious.
The first thing I do with a new phone is turn Siri off because I don’t want to use my phone that way. So it doesn’t matter to me which is better or which is worse.
However privacy is important to me so I use that as a driver of purchases.
If Assistant is that far ahead, then it's really funny because assistant is very disappointing. These companies are pushing voice onto the general public before it is ready to be actually useful. I got a free google home with something and half the time I try to use it I end up closing the conversation with something like "hey google you are completely useless".
When it comes to voice recognition and language modeling we are still rubbing sticks together to make fire. But Google and Amazon are marketing their voice products like it's a zippo lighter.
They really have a chicken and the egg problem. They need more data input to train their AI and make the service better, but they need the service to be better before more people will adopt it and feed data to train the AI.
Assistant easily recognizes voice and even has continued conversation mode. One data point isn't going to change that. If these weren't ready people wouldn't buy them in troves.
Just a heads up on the site itself -- the height/width/clipping of your .header-background is glitching in Chrome for me so everything in the content body is blurry. Looks nice when i disable that element!
Basically just a proof of concept at this point, but I've been hacking on something that would help mitigate these concerns for people who like App Engine's Golang abstractions, but not the lock-in. Contribs / thoughts welcome!
Context Matters, New York, NY - Hiring an engineer in NYC. Sorry, no remote.
Context Matters is a platform that the world's largest pharmaceutical companies use to make strategic drug development decisions. We're looking to add another developer to our small team. If that sounds like a good time to you, please check out the attached job description and answer 3 short questions online at http://www.interviewzen.com/apply/5x2pbm or you can email me: travis.donia (at) contextmatters (.com)
