8 ms·
Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts. These products are just hilariously bad.
by dxhdr 3y ago
Had the same experience at a friends house trying to get Alexa to play Bach. I gave up after a half dozen attempts.
These products are just hilariously bad.
- cubefox 3y agoNames are a hard problem though. How would it know how "Bach" is pronounced? It seems you would need pretty advanced multimodal AI, some sort of GPT which is trained both on text and audio.
- khazhoux 3y ago“Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation.
- lostlogin 3y ago> Bach” is a word like any other, and unambiguous in English pronunciation. There is another pronunciation if you want a holiday in New Zealand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_(New_Zealand) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_(New_Zealand)
- bitwize 3y agoReminds me of the doublewide that served as a motel suite I stayed at in Australia. It was dirt cheap and better than you might think -- very cozy.
- cubefox 3y agoThere is no "English" here, it's a name of a concrete person which has only one correct pronunciation. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach.ogg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/De-Bach....
- khazhoux 3y agoThe accurate pronunciation in German is irrelevant. Siri is always constrained to one language (Settings > General > Language & Region), and when set to English you get English pronunciations. Same way Siri understands the english “Los Angeles” even though the G sound is completely different from Spanish. The english IPA for Bach is straightforward.
- nicky0 3y agoYou’re talking as if there is an anccepted standard English pronunciation of Bach. The only one I know is the German one which I would use when speaking English. Perhaps I would soften the ending.
- khazhoux 3y agoMy point is that there's nothing particularly special about this name of foreign origin, compared to any other word. Every word has lots of variations in how they're pronounced. The audio clip the person posted was for a true German pronunciation, which happened to be very different than how 99% of English-speakers would say it.
- cubefox 3y agoSo how would you have to pronounce "Chopin" in "English"? This doesn't make sense. There aren't even consistent pronunciation rules for many genuine English words, like "ead" in "read" and "thread". It's not even straightforward for English speakers to correctly pronounce "Eliezer Yudkowsky". Which means it's even harder for Siri.
- dividedbyzero 3y agoLots of Americans seem to try to pronounce Bach the composer "correctly", which leads to batch, bash, buck, ... which is fine, the German hard "ch" is very hard to form for English throats, and it's always better and more polite to at least try than to simply pretend foreign words and names are just weirdly spelled English ones, but it's not as straightforward as with a John Bach from Ohio.
- zwilliamson 3y agoDo you have to say Johan Sebastian Bach. Siri will work with that
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BoorishBears 3y agoGPT doesn't need to know, I told it to convert possible mistranscribed text to commands, "Play me some back" => "Play me some Bach"
- nicky0 3y agoYes, GPT is particularly good understanding, even when you misspell things. It would make a good front-end interface to something like Siri. take the human input and make it something that makes sense to the dumb computer.
- cubefox 3y agoYes, but large language models are very compute intensive and require a ton of RAM. So they wouldn't be able to run locally (this is currently possible with Siri), would be relatively expensive and possibly slow. So they might still be a while off.
- dxhdr 3y agoThat's kind of my point, it's a product that doesn't work. It's a language interface that can't understand language. FWIW I tried many alternatives like "Bach classical music" etc to no avail.
- dividedbyzero 3y agoHow do you pronounce Bach?
- inferiorhuman 3y agoThe problem I've had with Siri and music has nothing* to do with parsing individual words. What I've found recently is that if you don't give an exact match Apple just puts in random shit. Hey Siri play the album Rubber Soul by the Beatles on Apple Music gets me random songs by the Beatles because apparently I have Rubber Soul named "Rubber Soul [some edition info]". Hey Siri play songs by the band Duran Duran literally just plays the eponymous album because reasons. You don't need AI, machine learning, GPT, LLM, or whatever fucking buzzword is all the rage, you simply need to revert to behavior that was standard in iOS 15 and earlier. The upgrade to iOS 16 completely nerfed Siri on my phone, starting with some mandatory trial subscription bullshit. It's to the point where I've given up trying to use Siri while driving. * Almost nothing. I still have to say "play underground eight zero s on soma fm" because reasons.
- khazhoux 3y agoIt's one of those products that makes me think: "Do the eng directors in charge of it even use this thing??"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cubefox 3y agoYeah, some others also had the impression that it got worse over time in some aspects. I wonder whether this was some kind of tradeoff with other abilities. Or perhaps they rewrote the code, which had unintended side effects.