Home Voice Assistants - I'm Sorry, I Can't Help You With That.

The other day I was halfway through watching a movie, Altered States (1980) and, without any prompting from me, our Google Home Mini Assistant pipes up, "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that."

Good to know.

I don't know what it thought the question was? I hadn't said anything at all, and I'm pretty sure no one within a movie released in 1980 said 'Okay Google'.

The movie itself is about altering reality by somehow projecting thoughts into existence but I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking 'Okay Google' at any point during the film.

Perhaps, after weeks of nobody asking it a question, our Home Mini just wanted to give a voice to the depression it must be developing as a result of not actually being helpful with anything at all?

"I'm sorry, I can't help you with that."

Voice assistants are trendy right now but they're really just a stepping stone to autonomous robots. Machines that you can speak to as if it was a living, breathing, intelligent entity.

Sure I could deck my home out with all sorts of things that my voice assistant could turn on and off for me but that's not nearly as cool as having your personal chef robot help you cook almost anything.

These robot arms have been personally trained by a real Master Chef.
It works through a touch screen user interface.
Image: Moley Robotics

Sonny from I Robot.

Because, really, that is the end goal, creating machines that can understand us well enough to be controlled through voice commands.

Ultimately I think it's creating fully sentient machines/beings in our own image but short term, an android assistant along the lines of Sonny, from the movie I Robot is a more achievable goal.

Home voice assistants aren't really there yet. Along with Home mini, I have Cortana on all my computers, and Google assistant on my smartphone. My partner has Siri on her phone. We don't use any of them for actual assistance.

Occasionally I might give one of them a shot but they nearly always make an easy job much harder. I have to consciously try and speak the words clearly so the voice assistant will understand them the first time. (If you've got a voice assistant you'll know the struggle of trying to get any kind of help if it doesn't actually recognize the words). Once you get into an 'argument' over what you know you said but the assistant can't understand, you may as well have just used a keyboard.

That's not even the kicker. If your voice assistant does start giving you an answer, you can't quickly scan for just the bit you need. You have to listen to that computer voice drone on, and on, or you have to cut them off because you've just realized, it would have been much simpler to have used a keyboard and screen in the first place.

Until a voice assistant is placed inside a machine whose only purpose is to assist with whatever task the voice assistant has been instructed to do you'll be hearing this quite a lot:

"I'm sorry, I can't help you with that."

"Yeah I know. That's why I never asked in the first place."

Comments

Australian Federal Election 2025 - World's Most Boring Government Re-elected by Landside - We're Even More Fine!

Anthony Albanese Victory by ChatGPT and TET. W hen I started writing about the 2025 Federal election the polls were suggesting the world's most boring government was crusing to a defeat . As it turns out, boring is good, and Australia wants more of it, handing the current government a landslide win with a majority vote. Anthony Albanese became the first PM since John Howard to win a consecutive term, and the first Labor PM since Bob Hawke to do so. Some of that comes down to the leadership revolving door both major parties had through the mid 2000s. Although Anthony is my preferred PM over Dutton the irony is Dutton sounds more like a leader with a fairly commanding voice and an ability to speak well, without sounding like he's waffling and dodging questions, even if he is. Anthony, on the other hand, does have the ability (and speech writer) to say a lot of inspiring things but it gets lost in the delivery. He doesn't seem to know when to emphasise a point for effect. In h...

TV Series Review: 12 Monkeys (2015 - Season 1 ) Spoiler Free

Being a fan of the 1995, Terry Gilliam movie, Twelve Monkeys , when I discovered SyFy channel had adapted it into a TV series, 12 Monkeys , I was interested to see how that would pan out. Although the show has been aired in Australia on free to air TV (I'm pretty sure I've seen it listed there at ridiculous hours on occasion), it's only recently that the first two seasons were added to Australian Netflix. So I added it to my list of shows to watch. This article is not so much a review of the show, rather it's my thoughts on adapting to the TV version after being a big fan of the film. At this point, I've only seen all of season one and the first episode of season two. Going into the TV series I literally went in cold, not knowing anything about the approach to this adaptation from pre-publicity or trailers beforehand. I didn't really have any expectations other than wondering if the show would stick to the movie plot lines closely and, if they did, how w...

Review: Beware the Batman - Animated TV Series

I first wrote about the 26 part TV series, Beware the Batman in my Animation and Video blog when the initial trailer was released back in June of 2013. At the time I was underwhelmed with the shows CGI and almost immaculate Gotham City streets. For some reason the show was only ever aired at odd times on late night TV here in Australia, which seems to have been it's fate for the second half of the series in the USA too. As a result I only ever caught two or three episodes before the show disappeared. Apparently being declared a financial failure by Cartoon Network .

TV Series Review: The Peripheral (2022 - Prime Video) No Spoilers

It's rare these days that I come across a TV series that disappoints me at the end of each episode because I don't want it to stop. The Peripheral is exactly like that. However, now all of the first season's eight episodes are on Prime Video, you don't have to wait week to week, as I did. Binge them all in one go if you must. My only disappointment in Season 1 is that now I have to wait and hope there is a season 2 because (minor spoiler) the story is only half way done (or less if they do a third season). At the time of writing season 2 was not yet confirmed but The Peripheral overtook The Rings of Power as Prime's top streaming show, so that is very promising for the show to return. Based upon a William Gibson novel of the same name, which I have not read, but I am aware that Gibson is a big gun amongst influential Sci-Fi authors. I've only read his book Neuromancer many decades ago which influenced the rise of Cyberpunk in popular culture during the 1980s...

James Gunn's Social Media Monkeys Joke Was a Highlight of His Superman Movie For Me

B efore James Gunn's Superman Movie was released there was a whole rumor going around that the movie would feature monkeys on computers trolling Superman's social media, sparking much outrage. #supersh*t. I didn't know this was even a thing until just prior to writing this article. I did a search to see if anyone had posted a clip of the monkeys scene from the movie and got pages of discourse featuring videos and articles prior to the film. Most of it from Gunn detractors (let's say) seeing it as some kind of childish swipe at them... well not them specifically but, you know, those other people who have every right to hate on anything sight unseen. Anyway, I'm not going to give even one such example a link or air because it's kind of sad watching someone devote so much commentary to a throw away gag that is absolutely a nod to James Gunn's Superman trolls. The whole reason this post exists, is to say I loved the joke, because fourteen years ago, and I...

Commodore Computers Are On Their Way Back With a New CEO and Many of the Original Team Founders

Commodore 64 Ultimate: Starlight Edition. An updated C64 for today. C hances are, if you grew up in the 1970s and 80's, the first computer your family owned was a Commodore 64 (or possibly the Vic-20, also by Commodore, that preceded it). I taught myself to code in BASIC on our Commodore 64 (C64), making ASCII based games (i.e. graphics made from the letters and symbols assigned to the various keyboard keys). I coded a Tic Tac Toe two player game, a simple shooting gallery game, and a flash card game to help me learn the Periodic Table, which (much to my... I want to say horror... got me bumped up to an advanced science class in high school). Later I'd go on to dabbling in true 8 bit, and 16 and 32 bit, graphical games, when we upgraded to the C128, Amiga 500, then Amiga 600, but I never actually finished anything because, by then I'd gotten into skateboarding, so I was trying to make my ultimate skateboard game - ambitious much? It was Commodore machines that showed me mak...

Big Hero 6, Baymax and Real Inflatable Robotics

Baymax - a fictional example of a 'Soft' robot. Baymax , the inflatable robot from the animated Disney movie, Big Hero 6 is probably the most famous 'soft' robot in the world of fictional robots today. I didn't really give it much thought when I saw the film but it's not too surprising that Baymax is inspired by real research into the potential of soft robots. I realize I'm a bit late to the party as Mashable wrote about this very subject in their post 'Big Hero 6' star Baymax was inspired by a real robot back in November of 2014 (which is where I first discovered real world soft robotics). However, since I'm somewhat obsessed with the almost certain robot uprising of the not too distant future, I thought it best to bring soft robotics to your attention.

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog