Selling more gas

I have an app that'll read out new messages so I know the content and thus decide if I need to stop to respond or not. It does text to speech within the phone. The app can also do speech to text for a reply but needs to be online for that to work. That can be handy but it's accurracy leaves a little to be desired, presumably because of the background noise whilst driving.

Agreed text to speech or speech to text just isn't relaible enough IMHO. Not to mention the delay whilst it "thinks about" what you have said. It just a makes the whole process so cumbersome especially for commonly used sequencies which w,ith proper buttons, you learn the order of. Note proper buttons not touch screen "buttons" that may or may not register a touch or register more than one.

Having now tried out the "free" google device I certainly wouldn't want my lighting, audio, heating to be *only* controlled by it, but it's a useful extra method for the lazy ... "Hey g**gle, turn off the ceiling light, and turn the bedside light on minimum and stream Radio4" from beneath the sheets.

I say, "ok google, read my last message" and it reads it out to me. It then reads each new message in turn and offers the option to skip to the next or reply each.

I think you might be misinterpreting that. It will still allow interactions in all the normal ways, but will also handle extended contextualised conversations better. If you like making it a more natural conversation.

Android already does it to a limited extent. You can say: "send a text" and it will ask "Who to", you then say a name. If it can uniquely identify the recipient in your contacts from what you say it will ask for the message, else it might read a list of names and ask which one. (or it might ask you to chose when number to text when there are multiple for a given contact). Once you have spoken your message, it will read it back, and ask if you want to send or edit etc.

In other cases its a bit more stilted, since you may have to use the "ok google" wake up to continue a conversation. e.g. "ok, what is the weather like", will cause it to speak a summary of the weather for the current location. You can then say "ok google, what about tomorrow", and it will understand that is an extension of the previous question, and tell you about tomorrow's weather even though I did not mention weather that time.

Its plenty reliable enough for some things like a kitchen timer. I use mine almost every evening meal and I cant remember the last time it failed reliability wise.

The only real quirk is that siri wont don't multiple simultaneous timers and alexa does and I very occasionally tell siri to set the multiple timer instead of alexa. I normally set 2 or 3 timers for the evening meal,

Don't get that either.

Much more convenient to tell siri to turn all the lights off last thing at night than to fart around with switches.

Even better first thing in the morning when it reads me the weather forecast, tells me the current temperature etc and turns on the lights needed given that I always get up in the dark. And turns the do not disturb off, with just one good morning command which it never gets wrong.

Not just the lazy, for those who want to do things more efficiently too.

I don?t use any physical switches at all anymore, its all done with movement sensors with a few very short commands to turn off all lights last thing at night and turn on what is needed when getting up in the morning in the dark etc.

"Hey g**gle, turn off the ceiling

Makes more sense to have a few scenes for common configs and just use that scene word to initiate multiple changes.

Just morning first thing in the morning etc Hey google morning.,

I'm trying to avoid getting google too deeply involved in the system, have a local hub to talk to all the devices, but happy enough to use google as voice input, don't want the signal from a light switch to go half way round the world and back to tell a light bulb to turn on.

google assistant often gets confused about types of timers, if I've asked it to stream music or radio, I can ask it too set a sleep timer for e.g. 1 hour when it will shut off, but sometimes instead it sets an actual timer called sleep to make an alert in 1 hour ...

Zigbee lights like the Philips Hues don?t do that, they work fine with no internet

I don?t do sleep timers so I don?t know how well siri and alexa does those.

some systems do though

Hue are a rip-off, I have a hubitat hub and zigbee bulbs, this is just a "learning" exercise at the moment.

Alexa is fine for sleep timers and alarms. She is less accurate when finding stuff on my Plex server, often completely failing to retrieve artists or albums when requested.

Annoyingly, she won't skip a specified number of tracks on Plex. and will not wind forwards or back on iPlayer.

Chris

Not with the best amazon discounts.

I have a hubitat hub and zigbee bulbs, this is just a

I don't do either of those either.

Google is hopeless at playing the most recent podcast that I always listen too

Which is a pity because the google home mini has much better audio than the iphone or the echo dot. Hopefully they will fix that.

Alexa does it fine.