
Personalized Hey Siri - dantiberian
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2018/04/16/personalized-hey-siri.html
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brd529
My biggest problem with the homepod is that my 5 year old has learned that he
can turn on _any song he wants_ whenever he wants by yelling "hey siri." He
loves it! He yells at the dinner table, when his little sister is asleep, and
when we are on the phone. His favorite phrase is "Hey Siri, set volume to
100%." His favorite song is the PJ Masks song, which Siri dutifully plays when
called upon. Every. Single. Time.

I'd love it if HomePod recognized who was speaking, but I'd settle for Siri
just recognizing "this is a kids voice" and ignoring it!

~~~
StephenMelon
Unfortunately “Hey Siri” starts to grate the 70th time you say it in 3 days. I
would actually now rather walk across the room to touch the Homepod than have
to say the phrase so much. It’s still in uncanny valley territory a lot of the
time as it isn’t smart enough to keep context between interactions or react in
a human-like way.

I think a retroactive activation feature would be the way to go, ie. be able
to say “Siri” at the end of a sentence and have it parse the phrase that came
before. It feels more natural to say “skip this please Siri” than “Hey Siri,
skip” because it lets you amend the mistake of not identifying the subject
earlier in the sentence rather than the phrase-exasperation-hey Siri-phrase.

I asked Siri to DJ and my daughter said “hey Siri, I don’t like that song”.
Siri said “I’ll remember that” and played something else. Now I have no idea
how to amend Siri’s notion that I dislike one of my favourite tracks. There
should really be a Homepod app where you can see recent interactions and
correct misinterpreted ones.

There are also some artists and tracks with unusual spellings that are always
going to cause problems for a voice interface and so they need a solution for
that.

~~~
randcraw
It could be worse. "OK Google" is annoying the _first_ time you say it.

~~~
lstamour
You can say “Hey Google” now, though it’s not quite as smooth as Alexa.

~~~
JeremyBanks
I recommend "Eh, Google!" 🇨🇦

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gervase
To clarify, this is about training your phone to recognize only "Hey Siri" as
spoken by you, as opposed to letting you personalize your trigger phrase to
something other than "Hey Siri".

~~~
mattigames
Yeah, they don't want to give users too much control; Siri is an important
brand by itself and Apple doesn't want people going around skipping it.

~~~
sib
Yes. In this case, the selection of a wake word ("Alexa") or phrase ("Hey
Siri" or "OK Google") is driven primarily by performance (i.e., reduction of
false accepts & false rejects). The folks designing these products know that,
even though customers say that they'd like to customize the wake word or
phrase, if the actual performance is significantly worse, those customers will
not be happy.

We experimented with this extensively.

~~~
ExactoKnight
"Computer" should be the wake word, and everyone would be happy with that
thanks to global, english interoperability in all places and contexts.

But thanks to the hubris of corporate branding and marketing departments we
are unlikely to have this universally understandable command usable. Instead
to use any light switch every consumer will need to ask what bloody set up the
person has...

~~~
djur
Alexa devices actually have "Computer" as an option. I did it for a while,
because I dislike pretending a computer is a person ("Alexa") and I certainly
don't want to address a company ("Amazon"). I ended up switching back to
"Echo" after I realized that people in my house say "computer" too often for
it to work well as a wake word.

~~~
mattigames
Weak move by Amazon, "OK Computer" would have been so good of an option, also
for being a small tribute to Radiohead.

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smortaz
On a separate note, I have yet to get Siri to transcribe "Isle of Dogs"
correctly. It's always "I love dogs" which is quite ok by me :).

~~~
duskwuff
The title of that movie was chosen specifically to be a homophone for "I love
dogs", so Siri's confusion is understandable. :)

~~~
sowbug
In 1992 Apple gave me a T-shirt for supplying speech samples used to train
their System 7 voice recognition. Below a picture of bunch of apple cores
strewn on a beach was the caption "I helped Apple wreck a nice beach!"

~~~
dkonofalski
That's amazing.

"I helped Apple recognize speech" for those struggling.

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pwython
Cool little insight into their progress.

I'm excited for the day Siri can differentiate my voice and my wife's so we
can use a single HomePod with two iCloud accounts. For example, Siri reading
off calendar appointments from an iCloud account based on who's asking.

~~~
jorvi
That feature is not blocked by technical but by arbitrary limits. Whether it
is a family iPad, Apple TV or HomePod, Apple strongly believes in 1:1 device-
person (or more accurate, device-iCloud account) mapping.

~~~
geerlingguy
Macs do multi account quite well, and iOS/iPad does it for schools. I’m not
sure why Apple hasn’t at least made iPads for consumers have the same multi-
iCloud-account feature available, it would make things a lot easier at home!

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srcmap
What's the technical reason to limit the wake words to only "Hey Siri", "OK
Google", etc?

Should one be able to "Personalized" to his/her own phase PER Device such as
"Hey Commander Data" for Iphone 6, "Hey Counselor Troi " for IPad Pro or "Ok
Skynet" for the google phone?

That should also solve the problem where someone said "OK Google" in TV
Shows/Podcast and wakeup all the google devices.

With the latest "Deep Voice" tech, the device should be able to response with
the actors' voice too.

I remember seeing a clip of Chinese TV show when the actress said (in Chinese)
"Honey, Honey where are you?" and the phone on chair wake up and said "Honey,
I am here, I am here. " And tons of folks in the youtube comments ask "What
kind of phone is that and I want it!". I told my wife that and she immediately
said she wanted it too.

I still don't know which brand of Chinese phone actually has that features or
if that was just imagination of the TV show writer. Someone should build and
and I know my wife wants it.

~~~
pwinnski
I don't work on such projects, but on other ML projects, and I suspect the
answer is: training data.

There are many, many, many samples of people saying the approved trigger
phrases. Many, many, many samples. To use your own custom trigger phrases, you
would likely need to say it thousands of times to being to approach the
accuracy the current systems ship with out of the box. Maybe tens of
thousands.

That's just my conjecture, though.

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chongli
I would love this feature if they found a way to implement it without draining
the battery by listening constantly and trying to recognize 'Hey Siri' from
all the background noise. It's especially bad when you play music nearby!

~~~
gok
Are you sure you’re actually getting your battery drained from this? The
phrase spotting happens in a super low power processor which can run without
the rest of the phone doing anything.

~~~
chongli
I remember one day I played music through some speakers connected to my phone
for about 6 hours and the battery usage showed 40% for music and 40% for Siri.
I put two and two together and figured the music was keeping Siri awake.

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tomphoolery
I'm not convinced this Siri thing is really that revolutionary until I can
invoke something on my phone by screaming "AYYYYYYY MUST BE THE SIRIIIIII"

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snootyresearch
God this is depressing. Only 3 years behind Amazon and Google.

~~~
__david__
Really? I'm pretty sure "Alexa" is known for responding to the TV.

~~~
gaius
Yep
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/07/tv_anchor_says_alex...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/07/tv_anchor_says_alexa_buy_me_a_dollhouse_and_she_does/)

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zython
related:

[https://maachinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-
voices.ht...](https://maachinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.html)

~~~
sp332
Your link has an extra "a" in it.
[https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-
voices.htm...](https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/08/06/siri-voices.html)

