You're just provided with a way to automate a task and have Siri trigger it. It doesn't address the OP's key complaint that there's no clarity on what kinds of tasks Siri can do.
For instance, from 9to5mac, these comments -
"While Siri and native integration with the operating system is fantastic, this is still very much the Workflow app, with a few extra bells and whistles. It works and function in a similar fashion by creating blocks that trigger one after another"
"One example of using Shortcuts with Siri is creating a Shortcut that grabs your current location, creates an ETA home, enables Do Not Disturb, and then sends a text to your roommate that you’re on your way home, and plays some music. All while you’re getting into your car, and preparing to leave. And all you have to say is “Hey Siri, I’m on my way home.” Alternatively, you could also just go into the Shortcuts app and start the request there."
All Shortcuts is adding is a way to trigger all of them in one new step. It's like a dumber IFTTT for Siri, basically, one you can't build new behaviors in, you can just script together existing ones. Useful, but it's still hard to tell what can Siri do.
A voice assistant should be able to tell you what it can do. Maybe there should be a mode you can turn on where Siri will watch what you do and when there are things you could do more quickly with Siri, it could tell you.
A huge area all of the voice assistants could improve upon is in error conditions. At home I'll say something like "Alexa, turn on the bedroom light" and it will respond that it doesn't know any device of that name. It should offer to tell you device names it does know about.
>Maybe there should be a mode you can turn on where Siri will watch what you do and when there are things you could do more quickly with Siri, it could tell you.
You say that as if it's a completely non-trivial thing to implement.
I think you mean 'as if it's a completely trivial thing to implement', since non-trivial means hard and complicated.
But, assuming that's what you meant, how does that compare to, say, speech recognition and understanding? Apple, Google, and Amazon are up to their eyebrows in machine learning and AI. They're working to solve very, very hard problems. But the next step of that needs to be to make it so their hard work is discoverable by users organically.
Sorry, you're right. I did mean "trivial" rather than "non-trivial" but barfed the second out anyways. :-P
I think that problem is much harder than just plain machine learning because you have to somehow gauge what the user is doing or what tasks they're performing well enough for the AI to be able to even tell where it can insert itself. I don't know of any product or service right now that can "watch" a user's behavior and suggest places where the AI can insert itself and I suspect the reason why is because doing something like that is very, very difficult.
It's one thing to detect that you leave work at 5pm every day and that you usually drive home. It's another to say "I noticed that you set a cooking timer every day around 6pm, do you want me to set that for you automatically?" You're not setting a timer just to set a timer, you're setting a timer because maybe the recipe you're using requires it. Different recipes will have different timers. The AI doesn't know the intent behind the action just the action itself.
That might be the case but it's definitely not watching what you're doing, like you suggested. There may be prompts that are triggered by repeated actions (think hitting the Shift key 5 times in Windows and getting the Sticky Keys prompt) but there's nothing in there that's watching you and suggesting where you can make improvements.
Again, what you're asking for isn't a trivial implementation.
What I'm asking for is pretty much exactly what JetBrains have done in IntelliJ. When they system sees me do something manually that could be done with voice, tell me. For example, if I enter an address into maps then start navigation, the machine could suggest I use Siri next time with the phrase "navigate to 123 main street".
At the very least, it would be nice if I could say "Hey Siri, what voice commands can I use with app X?"
Why would I do that? If I want to know what Siri can do, I can just say "Siri, (do the thing)" and find out. That's -way- easier than scrolling through a list (and more accurate, to boot; just because she can do it, if I can't figure out an acceptable magical incantation, she can't, for all intents and purposes).
Just looking over the list still doesn't address the OP's point. Maybe if I memorized it, in the way that if I had an exhaustive list of everything a 4 year old child can do that I memorized I'd be able to 'intuit' what they could do, but why would I do that?
That's just it; the whole 'theory of mind' is basically the idea that we can intuit what someone else can do, think, etc, without such a list. I'm able to limit my own own mind to have the same limits as someone else. That is, I can imagine what someone else is likely thinking given a subset (or even theoretical superset! I.e., "They know if there is money in this account. If there is, they are likely to do X. If there isn't, they are likely to do Y") of information that I have. I can determine what a child will be able to do based on exposure of other things they can do.
None of that applies to Siri. I can't infer what she has access to (both in terms of data and functionality). I can't use capabilities of one thing to infer capabilities in another. She can order me an Uber; can she order me a pizza? Can she order me a highly detailed expandable oak table from a boutique vendor? I can infer what a real PA is likely to be able to do (even if I don't know the specifics of how), but I can't do that with Siri. It's a black box. Giving me an exhaustive list of all the things doesn't change that; it's now a black box with a manual. Yes, okay, maybe if I memorize the manual I can determine what she can do, but the point the op is making is that for a real PA I can infer what capabilities they have without memorizing a manual. Until Siri can as well, she's not a replacement, feels gimmicky, and has real barriers to adoption to overcome.
>Why would I do that? If I want to know what Siri can do, I can just say "Siri, (do the thing)" and find out. That's -way- easier than scrolling through a list (and more accurate, to boot; just because she can do it, if I can't figure out an acceptable magical incantation, she can't, for all intents and purposes).
Funny, I'm the opposite. I like the ability to flip through and see "Oh, I didn't know it could do that!" Then I mentally file it away as a thing that exists.
I would never have learned that Siri (via Wolfram Alpha) can tell me what planes are overhead just by trying it except for having read it in a list somewhere, because I would never have thought to ask that. But since I read a list of interesting things that Siri knows, I now know it has that information.
Just trying to guess what capabilities are available is like trying to learn how a unix command works with no man page. "Just run it with every possible flag and see what happens!" It'd be great if Siri could do everything, but she can't, and the search space of possible actions with natural language is far too large to find everything I might use by guesswork. A black box with a manual is better than a black box without one.
In the example you gave, you learned about a specific thing siri can do- tell you what planes are overhead. Now say you know from experience that WA also provides the current altitude and speed of those planes. If you had a strong ToM for Siri you would have a very good intuition about whether you could rely on siri for info as well. As it is, I have no idea. Do you? Don't you think it'd be a much better experience if we did know what to expect?
In the new shortcuts app, there's a pretty clear view of what siri can do. Basically any text editing you want (someone even made a C parser)
There's a fairly concise list of areas. With a 10 second skim, you can get a sense of "oh, Siri can be taught to do stuff in these areas"
In the same way you wouldn't necessarily know what a dog could do without a little outside research (per their theory of mind dog example)
Meanwhile, with ios 12 all apps will be able to add prominent "add to siri" shortcuts in their apps. So as you use an app, you'll see "ahh, Siri can be trained to work with this all in this way"
Then these can be chained together. So you can now get a fairly clear general idea of what may be possible.
You still need to learn details to do specific training, but this seems like a big step up, and closer to the dog example. You can at least form a theory of what Siri can likely be taught to do.
Not a PA yet, but to me this new iteration is at least graspable.
Just like a manual transmission that doesn't have a diagram on the shift knob. You need to take apart the engine if you want to find out. Or grind out the gearbox a few times accidentally trying to put it in reverse at 50.
For instance, from 9to5mac, these comments - "While Siri and native integration with the operating system is fantastic, this is still very much the Workflow app, with a few extra bells and whistles. It works and function in a similar fashion by creating blocks that trigger one after another"
"One example of using Shortcuts with Siri is creating a Shortcut that grabs your current location, creates an ETA home, enables Do Not Disturb, and then sends a text to your roommate that you’re on your way home, and plays some music. All while you’re getting into your car, and preparing to leave. And all you have to say is “Hey Siri, I’m on my way home.” Alternatively, you could also just go into the Shortcuts app and start the request there."
All Shortcuts is adding is a way to trigger all of them in one new step. It's like a dumber IFTTT for Siri, basically, one you can't build new behaviors in, you can just script together existing ones. Useful, but it's still hard to tell what can Siri do.