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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Another Google A while back the Boy took it into his head to upgrade some of our lightswitches with voice commands. He is like that, always experimenting with new gadgets and seeing what can be done with them. And we became used to speaking orders to an invisible servant who turns the lights off and on for us. It seemed harmless enough, although I noticed that the process took longer than a quick flick of the lightswitch. The point was not that this new thing saved on time but rather that we were spared the journey to the switch. A sort of glorious fanfare for the truly lazy amongst us, I suppose. You might expect that’s about all that need be said about this innovation. But this is merely the introduction. It seems we have welcomed a new individual into the household, a female by her voice (there are options but we never experimented with those). Give her an order and she performs the deed and confirms it by repeating your order. Only she seems a little hard of hearing at times. For instance, she has made me realise that the words “on” and “off” are very similar when spoken. Far too often, we enter a room, speak out the words, “Hey Google, living room light on,” only for nothing to happen while Google pronounces the response, “Living room light off.” Even though this forces us to be more careful with our diction, it still makes me wonder why we continue with the system. The truth is that Google has many other uses, some of which are quite welcome. She can talk of the weather in great detail, for instance. This would be more useful if we went outside occasionally but at least we now know what to expect if we do. And she answers questions on quite a range of topics, almost a vocal version of the computer search engine of the same name. But there are subjects that she turns out be completely ignorant of, unfortunately. Andrea used her for switching on the coffee machine while still abed in the morning (she would prime it the night before) but gave that up when Google started to get the commands all wrong and do strange and unwanted things instead. And she also seems to be determined to play music whether we want it or not. There are times when I swear she deliberately mishears a command so that she can play some weird thing she’s found on Spotify. Of course, once she’s started a tune, she pretends not to hear our orders to stop the music. I use her for timing things like how long to leave food in the microwave after completion. She sounds an alarm when the time is up but then gets really awkward about turning it off. There are even times when she does things completely without any order remotely resembling the sound of an order to do so. It is extremely disconcerting to have all the lights in the house turn off at once. And takes some serious memory work to remember the address of each light that now needs to be turned on. All of which goes to show that this new resident in the house is hardly worth the rent that she doesn’t pay. I have no doubt that we’ll scrap the whole system in the end. But not right now, not right now. Word count: 567 |
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