this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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The only thing I want it to do is use simple context when searching something for me. If I have a sports event in my calendar, tickets saved to my wallet, and I say "Hey Google, what time does the {team} match start today?", it currently gives me a garbage answer linking to a Reddit post where someone asked that a year ago or something. The ecosystem already understands the info I want in this situation, they have all the data points, theres no sophisticated logic required to connect them. But Google Assistant can't do it, making it pretty useless other than for setting alarms and stuff. If your question isn't on the list of discrete preprogrammed functions then it just searches what you asked, which for my case should actually be "'{team} fixtures" or something. So it's often faster to just search manually in the first instance rather than trying to learn the obfuscated scope of what Google assistant can actually do.
I've found the bing AI with ChatGPT 4 is really good at stuff like this.
I just asked when my team's next football match is. It gave me the time/date location who they are playing and sourced its answer.
It's a genius combination. Uses ChatGPT to compile a query and then feeds it the results back.
I basically use it as a search engine now since you have the sources there.
There's nothing genius about this. Google Assistant can do the same thing if you give it the appropriate prompt. Sometimes it does and sometimes it just says "sorry I can't help with that" and sometimes it just doesn't respond at all.
An actually useful assistant would use context from what it knows about you (like that you purchased tickets for a specific game) and reply accordingly with a very basic prompt.
That's what separates a personal assistant from a search engine.
That's pretty cool! But hell, I bet even Siri could do it. My gripes are with the google VA in its current state. I can't just call out "Hey Bing" and get an answer from my phone unfortunately