Hacker News with Generative AI: Voice Assistants

'Hey Siri, What Month Is It?' (daringfireball.net)
Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”
Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus (theverge.com)
Amazon is finally launching the long-awaited generative AI version of Alexa — Alexa Plus — that, if all goes well, will take away much of the friction that comes with talking to a speaker to control your smart home or getting info on the fly.
Show HN: I built a voice AI investor clone for fun startup pitches (vercel.app)
Parth.ai🏆 Leaderboard FAQ will my ai intern invest in your startup? Start a call On start, you'll be asked questions via mic/speakers. No-BS feedback given after the call. Real pitch of Juicero 2.0
Show HN: Fixa – an open source Python package for testing voice agents (github.com/fixadev)
fixa is a python package for testing and evaluating AI voice agents.
Siri "unintentionally" recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M (arstechnica.com)
Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads.
Apple will pay $95M to people who were spied on by Siri (theverge.com)
Apple has agreed to a $95 million settlement with users whose conversations were inadvertently captured by its Siri voice assistant and potentially overheard by human employees.
Siri mixes up baby kangaroo with Friends sitcom actor (mastodon.social)
The era of open voice assistants (home-assistant.io)
We all deserve a voice assistant that doesn’t harvest our data and arbitrarily limit features. In the same way Home Assistant made private and local home automation a viable option, we believe the same can, and must be done for voice assistants.
The Alexa Skills revolution that wasn't (theverge.com)
The first Amazon Echo, all the way back in 2014, was pitched as a device for a few simple things: playing music, asking basic questions, getting the weather.
Launch HN: Hamming (YC S24) – Automated Testing for Voice Agents (ycombinator.com)
New Google Pixel 9 voice assistant Gemini is a trainwreck (fastcompany.com)
Show HN: ShortLoop – Replay Audio Calls and Test Your VoiceAI (shortloop.dev)
Launch HN: Martin (YC S23) – Using LLMs to Make a Better Siri (ycombinator.com)
OpenAI starts rolling out new voice mode (twitter.com)
I coded an AI voice assistant using AssemblyAI, OpenAI and ElevenLabs (youtube.com)
Ask Siri, Dictation and Privacy (apple.com)
Show HN: A fast OSS voice assistant (vercel.app)
Ask HN: How does Alexa avoid interrupting itself when saying its own name? (ycombinator.com)
Show HN: Local voice assistant using Ollama, transformers and Coqui TTS toolkit (github.com/mezbaul-h)
Show HN: 100% open-source voice assistant – as a HAL9000 (github.com/juergenpabel)
Making my local LLM voice assistant faster and more scalable with RAG (johnthenerd.com)
Show HN: Pi-C.A.R.D, a Raspberry Pi Voice Assistant (github.com/nkasmanoff)
Show HN: An open source framework for voice assistants (github.com/pipecat-ai)
Apple Will Revamp Siri to Catch Up to Its Chatbot Competitors (nytimes.com)
Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over? (macrumors.com)
Ask HN: It's 2024, why are voice assistants still so buggy? (ycombinator.com)
Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills (arstechnica.com)