I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for "wind speed" until I told it to stop.
They all do stuff like that. It'd be really nice to have a button to turn that off entirely. I never want a device to literally read me long-form webpages. Stop trying to LARP as a Starship AGI when you aren't one.
Echo can actually tell you wind speed and humidity (with forecast). I use that a lot. Also, I like to run at dawn, so I often ask the Echo when the sunrise is.
Totally possible that I just phrased the query in a way it didn't understand, and totally possible that a Google Home just can't do this (or couldn't at the time). If anything, I think that kind of illustrates another important point; not only is it hard to figure out what exactly a given voice assistant is capable of doing, it's also pretty hard to tell the difference between "I need to phrase this differently" and "this device can't answer the question I have". I guess it's like how professional dog trainers say that they're really training the person rather than the dog; the quickest path to getting a voice assistant that people can use isn't just training the language model, but training people to talk to it correctly. This makes sense, given how similar trends happened with text-based search engines.
Agree 100%. I realize my comment sounded like a flippant dismissal because, well, that's what the internet does, but I meant that this phrasing works on Alexa and maybe also on Google. Siri answers by telling me it's clear and 36 degrees, FWIW. What's the wind speed today? worked for Siri, but its voice response isn't the wind speed but "it looks completely calm right now". Did I ask for your opinion, Siri?
A lot of apps have tie-ins to Siri but it's very hard to discover them and understand how to use them. I think the negotiation of the shared language between us and our robot servants/friends/overlords is going to be difficult until we can answer that question.
I remember one time I asked my Google Home the weather to see if it was cold enough to put on a jacket, and after hearing a temperature that I was ambivalent about, I took a risk and tried asking it what the wind speed was. It started reading out the Wikipedia page for "wind speed" until I told it to stop.