• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, August 31, 2016

Using voice commands to make things happen in the Internet of Things still has some distance to go.

In its coming upgrade, Apple is expected to improve Siri so that it can control some third-party apps.

This would be a step forward, along with anything else Apple does to improve the voice capabilities of the sometimes infuriating voice agent.

Yesterday I had a brief chat with Christian Peterson, director of product at Comcast’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center about the state of voice commands.

Petersen pointed out that voice agents like Siri and Alexa have inherent limitations. They are basically limited to dealing with commands, as in an IoT application, ‘turn on the lights.’

Petersen and his team are working on the next level of how these voice agents will interact with people in a more conversational matter, and we look forward to that.

As do many Apple and Android owners, I regularly use Siri and Google for various things.

For driving direction, saying ‘OK Google’ and then ‘directions to’ wherever typically results in flawless understanding, a link into Google Maps and the course to the location. Siri is almost as accurate, though not always as fast.

But for me, Siri has had other issues understanding what I’m looking for.

Generally, I just switch to Hound, which is lightning fast at both understanding what I’m saying and providing a result, as I wrote about here some time ago (Music Recognition App Moves To Be Consumer Translator For Internet Of Things).

It sounds just like Siri, but works a lot better. (It also has the advantage of having access to jokes, so if you tap Hound and say ‘tell me a joke,’ off it goes. This is not a statement about the quality of the jokes --‘What’s red and smells just like blue paint? Red paint’ – but at least Hound has access to some, unlike the relatively jokeless Siri.

On the plus side of all of this is that there is a lot of activity and focus on improving the voice-assistance experience.

This is the story of the entire Internet of Things. Get something into the market and then work on making it better. And better. And better.

It’s all just a matter of time.