“As it stands today, we’re not ready yet to tell people that our voice assistant is a replacement for Google/Amazon,” Schoutsen wrote. “We don’t have to be as good as their systems, but there is a certain bar of usable that we haven’t reached yet.”
Key among the improvements that need to happen, according to Schoutsen:
- Audio input needs to be cleaned up (speaker voice separated) before it is processed
- Error messages need to be more clear about what’s going wrong, and input has to have more flexibility
- Non-English languages need a lot of commands and variables
- Compatible hardware that features far-listening microphones has to be more widely available
- Most people will want local processing to be faster
I use it to set and manage timers in the kitchen. It’s not as good as Google, and the setup to get timers working is hacky, but it does the job and has fully replaced my Google Home when combined with a home assistant dashboard I have on my kitchen wall.
That would be the one thing I’d want it for, I’m thinking about it. I never really found the need to use one of those until I was making a large dinner for friends and they used their watch to help me keep track of everything.