When I’m in the car, I use my phone as a music player. Sometimes a song comes on that I’m not in the mood to hear. Once upon a time — in fact, once upon a very recent time — I could say “Okay Google. Next song.” Then the current song would stop and a new song would start. It was all part of Google’s awesome — and free — service. The service was imperfect in some minor ways, but mostly it was awesome and free and I was thankful to have it.
Here’s what happens now when I say “Okay Google. Next song.” The perky Google Assistant voice comes on and says something like “Oh, you want a different song? Okay. Let me sing you one.” Then the perky assistant sings some stupid little jingle for me, and then it returns me to the song I was trying to bypass. My only options at that point are to either a) listen to the rest of the unwanted song, b) try again and have the same thing happen again, which approximately triples my frustration level with each iteration, or c) fumble with my phone, call up the music player, search for the little “next song” button, push it, and try to put the phone back down before I drive into a lamppost. The pattern I’ve developed is to do b) approximately three times, then do c). I hope I’m still alive by the time you read this blog post.
Okay, so the service is still free, and still mostly awesome, right? But I am furious and I think I have a right to be. Let’s review the bidding here. Google has deliberately done the following:
- Disabled the good and useful “next song” feature, for no apparent reason.
- Trained its Assistant to mock its users when they try to invoke that longtime feature.
- Done so in a way that is sure to drive those users into a state of combined frenzy and distraction while they are driving.
Let’s be clear: Mocking users and driving them into a state of frenzy seems to me to be the only conceivable reason for the whole “Here, I’ll sing a song for you, ha ha” bit. I am willing to bet you at substantial odds that no user requested this mockery. It’s apparently put there by Google (or perhaps by a rogue programmer on his last day of work, and overlooked by a lethargic quality control team) for the sole purpose of pissing people off and giving the folks at Google a good chuckle, without regard for possible deadly consequences. It seems to me to be roughly the moral equivalent of throwing watermelons off overpasses.
And just to make that analogy fair: If someone, through sheer technical brilliance and the goodness of his heart, ever designs the world’s most awesome overpass, builds it at his own expense, offers it to the world for free, maintains it for years, and then one day starts throwing watermelons off it — the main thing I’m going to remember is the watermelons.
As I am of late a Senior Software Engineer at Google (something which came as quite a shock to me, despite our long discussions of a certain alleged Google interview question some years ago, http://www.thebigquestions.com/2015/09/08/are-you-smarter-than-google-redux/), let me offer a few suggestions:
(1) It is almost certainly not malice. The people designing software like this love little jokes and Google appears to tactictly approve of the practice of putting them into released software. But needless to say functionality comes first and jokes which interfere with that are weeded out. That this failed in this case is most likely lack of QC.
(2) Another possibility is that there is another similar phrase which bypasses this little joke. They may have thought that people would just switch to that and hence minimize any annoyance. Even so, that would have been a mistake but a more easily understandable one.
(3) Finally, the current versions of Apple Car Play (and its Android equivalent) are a pretty effective and, in my opinion superior, substitute for voice commands anyway. For those not aware, these technologies basically mirror (but with some intelligent tweaks) your phone’s screen to your car’s built-in screen as soon as it is plugged in and allow you to operate it without fumbling with your phone or taking your eyes off the road. They are standard in many current cars and can be retrofitted at relatively low cost to most older cars.
Sub Specie: Calling this a “joke” presupposes that it could reasonably be considered funny. I deny the premise.
I believe that it is in the interests of our new AI overlords (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook) to occasionally put you down, and remind you that they are in charge. They can’t be too obvious about it, or you might stop using their products. But gradually they are training to you to more fully accept their business models, and submit to letting Google make more and more of your decisions for you.
Microsoft has long been doing this with its not-free products. Having spent many fun and exciting days relearning and trying to rework new, unnecessary GUIs I’ve nearly become immune to Google-redesigned improvements.
One of these days you’re going to realize politicians do the same thing just to show the rest of us that they are doing something.
Were you not even slightly amused the first time? Maybe it should have moved to the next song after singing the jingle, and certainly only have done it once.
Harold:
a) No, not even slightly amused.
b) It’s nearly possible for me to imagine that anyone has been even slightly amused by this.
c) Even if it were amusing, it would be no less infuriating. How would you feel about a defibrillator that insisted on telling you a slightly amusing joke before it would function?
Have you tried just saying “OK Google. Play music.”?
That is how I would start playing music (although I don’t normally use Google as a music player, I use that to find my phone), and saying it again restarts me with a new song.
For me, it doesn’t recognize “Next song” at all.
If I encountered this particular first-world problem, I would be incensed as well.
@jb My major first-world problem is the phrase “first-world problem.”
Now, it is undeniably true that there are problems in the world worse than a bit of novel voice recognition software responding inappropriately to certain prompts. One thinks of, for example, parents whose children are dying of dysentery.
Yet, what purpose, if any, does it serve to bring that up every conversation about a less serious problem?
Does it do anything to solve the underlying issue?
Is there any hint that any participant in the conversation is so deluded that they believe that their problem is the worst thing that could happen to a human being and need to be corrected? [This may actually be so when dealing with children and other profoundly ignorant people in need of such a reminder, but hardly seems to be the case here.]
Or perhaps there is some unwritten rule that one is only ever allowed to voice dissatisfaction with an issue if one is convinced that it is the single most urgent issue facing anybody on the planet right now?
I, for one, look forward to the day that I can complain about my robot butler steeping my tea too long on weekends and without hearing about “zero-th world problems.”
This reminds me of the talkie toaster from Red Dwarf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
I believe there was a USA version, but it did not fly. Check out the original, some very good ideas there.
1) Re: “…only conceivable reason…”, I think that most anyone who’s done e.g. large-system SW configuration management could conceive of not just one way, but many ways, for this kind of thing to happen without anyone having intended it.
2) I think the most morally compelling argument for paying attention to this is not the possibility (terrible though that would be) of your climbing a lamppost because you can’t be bothered to pull over, but the possibility of someone who has never used that feature being clobbered by someone who *is* using it and similarly can’t be bothered to pull over.
3) Do you think it would be good to standardize on a ‘black box’ feature on smartphones, so that accident investigators can easily determine what the user was up to just prior to an accident? If this can be done consistent with PII rules etc., I’m guessing it could save tens of thousands of high quality person-years annually.
“It’s apparently put there by Google (or perhaps by a rogue programmer on his last day of work, and overlooked by a lethargic quality control team) for the sole purpose of pissing people off and giving the folks at Google a good chuckle, without regard for possible deadly consequences.”
Ah, but you’re missing a key part of the story—the rogue programmer wasn’t leaving Alphabet; (s)he was moving to Waze.
Have you tried just turning down the volume (using your car’s controls, not your phone) and waiting out the bad song? Not ideal, but probably better than the process you described.
Products liability, anyone?
arch:
I think that most anyone who’s done e.g. large-system SW configuration management could conceive of not just one way, but many ways, for this kind of thing to happen without anyone having intended it.
Seriously? You think these little jingles somehow got recorded unintentionally? Your theory seems to require either this or that the jingles were recorded for some useful purpose. What might that purpose have been?
Maybe they were intended for use in an internal-test-only pilot, or in a simulation rather than production environment, or in production but only under much more constrained circumstances, or in conjunction with other functionality that didn’t get deployed or triggered for some reason. (All of which sound unlikely, but weird things happen in big systems; and the it-was-intentional explanation sounds pretty a priori unlikely itself:-)
In case it helps, when tempted to not pull over myself, it try to remember the likely impact on loved ones (or to total strangers) should I inadvertently go out with a bang. Also the possibility that my next subjective second of experience will be as a horribly mangled paraplegic (having no recall of the stupid act that irreversibly placed me there)
What happens if you say “subsequent song?” “Stop, play another one” the same as you would if a natural intelligence being were being smart-alecky
While the joke may not be funny for the person first exposed to it, it is quite amusing in the retelling. So at least the joke is not a complete failure.