
Stanford Team Aims at Alexa and Siri with a Privacy-Minded Alternative - marban
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/14/technology/virtual-assistants-privacy.html
======
physicsyogi
The title of the article suggests that Siri is not privacy-minded, but that is
definitely not true. Having more choice in virtual assistants would be great
though. And, if it's good, hopefully it will not go the way of Viv.

------
pixelbath
I can't see myself needing most of the commands on this list because I simply
don't use those services:
[https://almond.stanford.edu/thingpedia/cheatsheet](https://almond.stanford.edu/thingpedia/cheatsheet)

I can see that some of these are "wanted to scratch an itch" but then there's
things like "when matrix67 publishes something new." Since the service relies
on Thingpedia, can I choose which Things to include? Does this namespace run
the risk of becoming cluttered (if I search for "matrix" is that going to give
me Matrix films, or posts from Matrix67)?

I see that a one of the trigger keywords for ArXiv is "paper". This causes
Almond to fail for fairly trivial searches like "how is paper made?" When I
try things I'm fairly certain won't be recognized because it's not a Thing, I
get completely random results:

    
    
      "wikipedia article about paper" -> YouTube Category ____ if the title contains "paper"
      "wikipedia" -> Dropbox (demo only message)
      "play a random video" -> Spotify gets "YouTube videos matching ____ and then play the artist the result" (saying Yes transfers control to YouTube Thing)
      "random facts" / "random fox" -> No problem, surely.
      "news about Kanye West" -> random fact about Kanye West (because that's all that Thing does)
    

And a few other searches which will need some love before they're ready for
broad release:

    
    
      (any search for "price of ____ on Steam" must be an exact title match)
      "what is the price of "the witcher 3" on steam" -> not found
      "what is the price of "the witcher 3: wild hunt" on steam" -> The current price of the witcher 3: wild hunt is $11.99. (correct, but GotY edition is $14.99 right now)
      "how much is "THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT - GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION" on steam" -> Cannot use 'in' operator to search for 'price_overview' in undefined.
    

I'm not sure what my overall point is with this post; I'm very likely going to
contribute, but I can see there's still a ways to go before it compares with
the commercial products.

------
snthd
>Almond

>The Open, Privacy-Preserving Virtual Assistant

[https://almond.stanford.edu/](https://almond.stanford.edu/)

