Using alexa as a timer is about 99% of what I do with mine. Occasionally I'll ask it the weather. The push for engagement is what is killing it for me. Just about everytime I ask it for something, it follows up with suggestions for other commands. Most of my commands now end with me having to tell alexa to shut up. I've toggled the flag in the settings to reduce this behavior but I guess the setting is all but ignored. Very frustrating when there is a lot of potential
This is why I stopped using my Google home devices. No matter what I did, any time I tried to use it, I had to endure an extra minute of dialog telling me how to use the thing. Every. Single. Time. No exceptions, no matter what command or what settings, I got these "hints" every time.
Sure, it makes sense to help your customers understand the abilities of the device, but trying to annoy them into using it more is just never going to work.
I haven't used Alexa in sometime, but the current state of Siri leads me to believe that after a decade of heavy investment, core technology just isn't mature enough for voice assistants to provide much value. Ex, siri is great with a simple command like, "hey siri, play something I like." But struggles mightily to do anything beyond...
I find Alexa/Echoes great for a highly limited set of use cases. Like, I use it all the time to set timers in my kitchen (it's really nice when you've got like four timers going and when they go off they say their name).
Adding things to grocery lists is great.
We use it to set the light level of our "smart" bedroom light.
Checking weather before you go out when your hands are full of other stuff is nice. A few other things.
Ive used Alexa to order our regular dog food a handful of times, and it ended up being easier to just get my phone out, find it, and buy it there. If there’s any background noise, Alexa struggles - TV, music, kids playing, etc. The interactions are super slow.
Voice command stuff won’t be broadly useful to people until they can damn near read your mind. I can translate my thoughts into actions far faster with buttons and a device than I can explaining it to a voice assistant. That’s the real technical challenge here.
Alexa doesn’t have to be better than Siri. It has to be better than me using my phone or a computer.
For what it's worth, I find the Google Assistant better than Siri, but not much better. The functionality of the product hasn't improved much since it was delivered, and this includes the "smart" speaker hardware that they regularly refresh.
I bought a GPS with Alexa because it was over $50 cheaper then the same model without the Alexa integration. Big mistake. The device doesn’t function at all without enabling Alexa so that thwarted my A plan. Instead Alexa is always listening and always trying to inject itself into conversations. My B plan was to never say the A word (Alexa!) but apparently there are a long list of other words that trigger it. I can always tell when I’m someplace without cell service because Alexa is quiet. North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana are all Alexa free zones. My C plan is to train everyone in the car to yell “Go away Alexa!!!” As loud as they can whenever it talks and that does seem to make it abort whatever search it is running at the moment and keep it quiet for an hour.
The next time I buy a GPS I’ll spend the extra $50 to not have Alexa.
Amazon missed the boat on their voice assistant. They could have absolutely dominated. They were first to market with a general in-home appliance with home automation integration.
They did a good job with shopping and music (and timers and junk) but even today Alexa is still far from a full personal assistant.
Amazon should've launched an email service: forward or CC [email protected] and have your assistant keep track of it. Flights, meetings, reminders, even just responding to emails. The voice-to-text transcription is excellent but so underutilized.
They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature.
Podcast and ebook support was always such a mess and clearly an afterthought.
Amazon's devices were clearly always sold at cost or at a loss. Maybe there's a universe where this is anti-competitive, but there was nothing substantial ever there.
They hired like crazy, but for what? Why doesn't my car have Alexa built-in? Why didn't they obliterate Sonos?
I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized.
My best guess is that leadership and product vision really, brutally fumbled here. I don't think they knew what they had, and were unprepared to harness its true potential.
>I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized.
And neither did Siri. Neither did Google Home. I guess neither did Nuance if you want to go further back.
It's like autonomous driving. A partial solution isn't exactly useless. But it's a long way from opening up the possibilities of, in this case, a computer that could do the tasks that even a very subpar human secretary could.
I don't think so. I've worked a lot in NLP and spoken with one of the founders of Alexa. Imo there is a lack of core science about language which leads to crazy scaling difficulties in voice applications. (eg.Alexa had over 15000 engineers working on it...) until someone pushes that core science forward, the same issues will remain.
About the only thing we use it for is shopping list management for the grocery/costco/home improvement etc and reminders, timers, and alarms. We routinely run into simple usage woes.
See a yellow ring. “Alexa, give me my messages.” “You have no messages. <pause> You have one notification; would you like me to read it to you?” “Oh FFS, yes.”
For a long time I've been thinking a key to these thing is maintaining enough context to identify pronouns. For example, in the above question the key word is "that" or "that alarm". Being able to get a reference to the correct alarm should make it easy to answer. Not being able to do it certainly makes it impossible to answer.
We have at least 8 of the things around the house and use them all the time. They're vastly superior to Google/Apple offerings for us.
It would be superduper if AMZN would work with customers to ensure Alexa solves problems that actually exist in ways that are genuinely satisfying, instead of trying to be clever or whatever it is they're doing.
The "By the way" intrusion, for example, has nearly evicted the whole concept.
The "by the way" thing is awful. I would legit pay a $50 premium for a voice assistant that only tried to do the few things that voice assistants are good at and never bothered me with Amazon's attempts to get me to use it for useless crap.
"By 2018, the division was already a money-losing pit. That year, the New York Times reported that it lost roughly $5 billion. This year, an employee familiar with the hardware team said the company is on pace to lose around $10 billion on Alexa and other devices."
Clearly anticompetitive practices. It's about time the Amazon hardware division dramatically increases prices or gets fined out of existence.
Voice assistants, chat bots etc. are all premature technologies that are dying slow deaths.
The primary reason is quality control. The way these devices are tested can never truly represent the massive variation which would impact their ability to process and parse sound. For example, the wide range of accents for a language like English. The variations in ambient noise in real world environments etc.
Beyond that, generative language models have only recently become powerful, but they need server side processing which is incredibly expensive for the majority of contexts where an AI is useful. Think of call centers. I HATE when companies try to use voice AI in call centers, thinking it's a good way to save money.
Bank Call Center Phone Cal example:
Voice AI: "tell me, how can I help?"
Me: "I'd like to request my final statements for a recently closed account."
Voice AI: "I'm not sure I heard that correctly"
Me: "Statements for a closed account"
Voice AI: "Do you want to close an account?"
Me: "Statements"
Voice AI: "I'm not sure I can help with that, let me get you to a customer care representative. Please enter or say your 16 digit account number"
What was the point of that? The vast majority of customers know how to use online banking to get information at this point. Why did you make me do this? And then, imagine I get disconnected and need to call back. Go through the same process again. The bank may have saved some money (questionable, as they have already outsourced the call center anyway to somewhere cheap), but they've irked me so much, I'm always ready to switch. To bad all banks are the same where I live.
Point being, the tech is too premature, unfinished and hard to build and it offers questionable value.
Voice AI is mostly useful in situations where I need to be handsfree. I think what SoundHound is doing makes the most sense. Sell your Voice AI as an API to manufacturers who build good quality speakers.
My problem with any voice assistant is that it doesn’t have a UI, so it’s hard to know what it’s capable of. You have to try a command and have it fail. And then you don’t know if maybe you worded your request wrong. Or you can go to the marketing website and try to memorize all the commands it understands which is too difficult. So that’s why we all just use it for timers and weather and nothing else.
So what were the 10,000 people working on? How does that staffing number compare to Google Assistant or Apple Siri?
Now that Google and Apple have offline on-device speech models, Amazon could provide offline speech recognition plus the ability to script 3rd-party APIs without going through their cloud. They could even limit that feature to Prime or other subscription, if they want to retain a surveillance business model for non-subscription users.
For people with visual or physical impairments, Echo/Alexa can be life changing, as it can control lights, sound/video, TV, internet radio, fans, microwave and landline phones. Yet, it could do so much more, if their stellar far-field microphone platform was a trustable (offline) voice interface to any home/IoT device or cloud service with an open API.
New Echo devices even include motion detection, another under-utilized capability in a sea of sketchy IoT devices with questionable firmware. Amazon already has robust security for AWS and mindshare with developers, they are missing the opportunity to offer the most secure, most hackable voice platform for home security and automation.
Have big companies forgotten the cardinal rule of platforms? First you let creativity and innovation explode, THEN you steal the best use cases and incorporate them into the platform. It doesn't work in the other direction, no matter how many PMs, whiteboards and lego-filled rooms you throw at early markets. See the Twitter API for prior lost opportunity.
Voice UX is a combination of CLI grammar and a long tail of use cases which are unique yet frequent enough to memorize commands. It's not too late to make Alexa an offline-first, developer friendly voice platform for ... everything, not just whitelisted partner devices and interfaces.
The vast majority of people don't care one whit about online vs. offline. At least outside of niches such as mobility and visual impairments. All those companies--and doubtless others to a lesser degree--have just spent billions developing what are loosely smarthome capabilities that most just don't care about or find useful. It's a case of solving the relatively half of the problem doesn't necessarily buy you much.
The issue is not speech to text but rather "now that you've got the text, what do you do with it?"
How do you make "play my favorite songs" to "play some music that I like" to do similar (if not identical) things? What infrastructure behind the voice assistant will need to be made accessible and how do you hook that up?
This is where Siri and Alexa work well. They've got operating system level access to the rest of their eco system. Alexa has access to all your Amazon stuff. Siri has access to all your apple stuff.
"By then Alexa was getting a billion interactions per week, but most of those conversations were trivial, commands to play music or ask about the weather. That meant less opportunities to monetize. Amazon can't make money from Alexa telling you the weather — and playing music through the Echo only gives Amazon a small piece of the proceeds."
I get that Amazon doesn't make money on those things, but those are the things that I value. I might be willing to pay them to stop saying "Did you know that I can also <thing I don't care about>? Would you like to try that now?".
Having founded and flopped on 2 voice-based startups (sonictrade & verbl) I can attest to the difficulty getting user adoption and the importance of being really, really good at simple, but useful tasks. If Alexa gets the plug pulled it won't be because of a small userbase, but rather failure to stop annoying the userbase with recommendations...something Siri does well. And Siri on the Apple Watch is absolutely killer. It is the ultimate functionality on a wearable device, with voice search being the best utility. Command-based voice AI is still in its infancy. The ability to summon cars, book flights, trade stocks, donante funds, turn on the lights, bet on sports, etc. all are doable now and improving in quality of execution daily. But 15,000 engineers working on Alexa? That's where your $10B went!
The other morning, Alexa had a yellow notification. I asked her to read it, but I was still groggy in bed, so barely listening to what she was saying.
I only registered the phrase 'do you want me to add this to your basket?' at the end. No idea what it was, but she was trying to randomly sell me stuff while I'm chilling at home.
Like others, I find Alexa and its ilk are handy for some specific tasks. Setting the alarm in my bedroom or sometimes timers in the kitchen. A quick, cursory weather forecast. Playing an album or playlist in bed or in car though confusion is more likely at that point. Turning the one switchless light in my bedroom off and on.
The key is that you basically need to get the exact wizard incantation right.
That's not useless for a fairly low $$ device. But it's certainly not going off and booking my travel to San Francisco for me. Or even ordering from Amazon given I probably want to check prices.
I don't actually have an issue with using Alexa etc. in general. The same data is going to be in a search engine or somewhere in any case.
There's just not much it's good for and therefore it's really hard to see thousands of highly paid engineers working on this stuff. For my uses, Alexa hasn't improved one iota for the past n years. How much money has been pissed away on salaries and other expenses in that time?
More of a meta question related to the working of HN...I crossed posted in one of the submissions mentioned below. This one was posted 2 hours ago. Earlier posts with the same link and some comments appeared 3 hours and 5 hours ago and are also visible:
My experience is that posting something that was posted before, even sometimes within days, will link to the same post. Or get's, sometimes within seconds,
noted as a "[dupe]" . Even if not the same page, but might be the same subject or event.
Amazon succeeded in making a viable, well-maintained Fire OS that used Android Open Source Project (AOSP) as an upstream. Unfortunately, that and $4.99 will get you a venti latte. The only reward for hard work in doing that is more hard work.
There is an alternate strategy, which is to create a family of app-layer and system software that fits Google's OEM model, and become an Android OEM, more like what Samsung did (though that isn't the best example because a lot of Samsung's software is terrible). Maybe this would be a viable backstop for Amazon.
Google can throw more money at the problem because Google's upside is everything from phones (a notable Amazon fail) to TVs to cars, in addition to smart home devices.
The vibe I get from Amazon Devices is that all the innovation and drive came directly from Bezos. Not much tends to happen after he loses interest (or worse, retires).
The Kindle is another example of this situation.
[+] [-] awithrow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennend3|3 years ago|reply
this is my experience as well. Often my Alexa gets told to F-off.
ME: "Alexa play music"
Alexa : Playing Spotify...
Nothing..no music.. repeat asking it to play music.. nothing.
> The push for engagement is what is killing it for me.
It had potential, but instead of getting the basics working they keep focusing on everything else?
I dont care about Alexa telling me about all the new things it can do when it cant do the core reason i bought for reliably.
Now it is relegated to telling me the weather, being a kitchen timer, and adding items to my shopping list.
[+] [-] rolenthedeep|3 years ago|reply
Sure, it makes sense to help your customers understand the abilities of the device, but trying to annoy them into using it more is just never going to work.
[+] [-] smrtinsert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sf4lifer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|3 years ago|reply
Adding things to grocery lists is great.
We use it to set the light level of our "smart" bedroom light.
Checking weather before you go out when your hands are full of other stuff is nice. A few other things.
[+] [-] seventytwo|3 years ago|reply
Voice command stuff won’t be broadly useful to people until they can damn near read your mind. I can translate my thoughts into actions far faster with buttons and a device than I can explaining it to a voice assistant. That’s the real technical challenge here.
Alexa doesn’t have to be better than Siri. It has to be better than me using my phone or a computer.
[+] [-] solardev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|3 years ago|reply
The next time I buy a GPS I’ll spend the extra $50 to not have Alexa.
[+] [-] mmmlinux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzzy_plugh|3 years ago|reply
They did a good job with shopping and music (and timers and junk) but even today Alexa is still far from a full personal assistant.
Amazon should've launched an email service: forward or CC [email protected] and have your assistant keep track of it. Flights, meetings, reminders, even just responding to emails. The voice-to-text transcription is excellent but so underutilized.
They introduced device to device calling, but as far as I can tell true VoIP never showed up -- why? This would be a killer feature.
Podcast and ebook support was always such a mess and clearly an afterthought.
Amazon's devices were clearly always sold at cost or at a loss. Maybe there's a universe where this is anti-competitive, but there was nothing substantial ever there.
They hired like crazy, but for what? Why doesn't my car have Alexa built-in? Why didn't they obliterate Sonos?
I wish I could use Alexa as a personal assistant, but it never really materialized.
My best guess is that leadership and product vision really, brutally fumbled here. I don't think they knew what they had, and were unprepared to harness its true potential.
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
And neither did Siri. Neither did Google Home. I guess neither did Nuance if you want to go further back.
It's like autonomous driving. A partial solution isn't exactly useless. But it's a long way from opening up the possibilities of, in this case, a computer that could do the tasks that even a very subpar human secretary could.
[+] [-] diamondage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|3 years ago|reply
Good point. They even sell a hardware interface for PSTN lines.
[+] [-] sethammons|3 years ago|reply
Alexa, stop alarm.
silences alarm
Alexa, what was that alarm for?
"I have no alarms set"
About the only thing we use it for is shopping list management for the grocery/costco/home improvement etc and reminders, timers, and alarms. We routinely run into simple usage woes.
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UncleMeat|3 years ago|reply
"OK Google, tell me my shopping list."
"Eggs, Kale, Chicken Thighs and four other items."
I laughed until I cried.
[+] [-] phkahler|3 years ago|reply
For a long time I've been thinking a key to these thing is maintaining enough context to identify pronouns. For example, in the above question the key word is "that" or "that alarm". Being able to get a reference to the correct alarm should make it easy to answer. Not being able to do it certainly makes it impossible to answer.
[+] [-] ben_w|3 years ago|reply
"Ich kann nicht 'Badezimmer' auf Spotify finden"
(We don't even have Spotify set up).
[+] [-] ergonaught|3 years ago|reply
It would be superduper if AMZN would work with customers to ensure Alexa solves problems that actually exist in ways that are genuinely satisfying, instead of trying to be clever or whatever it is they're doing.
The "By the way" intrusion, for example, has nearly evicted the whole concept.
[+] [-] aetherson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] louthy|3 years ago|reply
For those of us that don’t use Alexa, what’s this?
[+] [-] jqpabc123|3 years ago|reply
You're providing a large corporation with a direct line of communication inside your home --- one that you have absolutely no control over.
It's virtually inevitable that they will try to "monetize" this in any way possible --- and not necessarily to your benefit.
Thanks but no thanks.
[+] [-] Nemo_bis|3 years ago|reply
Clearly anticompetitive practices. It's about time the Amazon hardware division dramatically increases prices or gets fined out of existence.
[+] [-] rafiki6|3 years ago|reply
The primary reason is quality control. The way these devices are tested can never truly represent the massive variation which would impact their ability to process and parse sound. For example, the wide range of accents for a language like English. The variations in ambient noise in real world environments etc.
Beyond that, generative language models have only recently become powerful, but they need server side processing which is incredibly expensive for the majority of contexts where an AI is useful. Think of call centers. I HATE when companies try to use voice AI in call centers, thinking it's a good way to save money.
Bank Call Center Phone Cal example:
Voice AI: "tell me, how can I help?" Me: "I'd like to request my final statements for a recently closed account." Voice AI: "I'm not sure I heard that correctly" Me: "Statements for a closed account" Voice AI: "Do you want to close an account?" Me: "Statements" Voice AI: "I'm not sure I can help with that, let me get you to a customer care representative. Please enter or say your 16 digit account number"
What was the point of that? The vast majority of customers know how to use online banking to get information at this point. Why did you make me do this? And then, imagine I get disconnected and need to call back. Go through the same process again. The bank may have saved some money (questionable, as they have already outsourced the call center anyway to somewhere cheap), but they've irked me so much, I'm always ready to switch. To bad all banks are the same where I live.
Point being, the tech is too premature, unfinished and hard to build and it offers questionable value.
Voice AI is mostly useful in situations where I need to be handsfree. I think what SoundHound is doing makes the most sense. Sell your Voice AI as an API to manufacturers who build good quality speakers.
Everything else is pointless right now.
[+] [-] offsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrs235|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walterbell|3 years ago|reply
Now that Google and Apple have offline on-device speech models, Amazon could provide offline speech recognition plus the ability to script 3rd-party APIs without going through their cloud. They could even limit that feature to Prime or other subscription, if they want to retain a surveillance business model for non-subscription users.
For people with visual or physical impairments, Echo/Alexa can be life changing, as it can control lights, sound/video, TV, internet radio, fans, microwave and landline phones. Yet, it could do so much more, if their stellar far-field microphone platform was a trustable (offline) voice interface to any home/IoT device or cloud service with an open API.
New Echo devices even include motion detection, another under-utilized capability in a sea of sketchy IoT devices with questionable firmware. Amazon already has robust security for AWS and mindshare with developers, they are missing the opportunity to offer the most secure, most hackable voice platform for home security and automation.
Have big companies forgotten the cardinal rule of platforms? First you let creativity and innovation explode, THEN you steal the best use cases and incorporate them into the platform. It doesn't work in the other direction, no matter how many PMs, whiteboards and lego-filled rooms you throw at early markets. See the Twitter API for prior lost opportunity.
Voice UX is a combination of CLI grammar and a long tail of use cases which are unique yet frequent enough to memorize commands. It's not too late to make Alexa an offline-first, developer friendly voice platform for ... everything, not just whitelisted partner devices and interfaces.
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yewenjie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shagie|3 years ago|reply
How do you make "play my favorite songs" to "play some music that I like" to do similar (if not identical) things? What infrastructure behind the voice assistant will need to be made accessible and how do you hook that up?
This is where Siri and Alexa work well. They've got operating system level access to the rest of their eco system. Alexa has access to all your Amazon stuff. Siri has access to all your apple stuff.
[+] [-] pliftkl|3 years ago|reply
I get that Amazon doesn't make money on those things, but those are the things that I value. I might be willing to pay them to stop saying "Did you know that I can also <thing I don't care about>? Would you like to try that now?".
[+] [-] diceout|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgladiator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp_account_32|3 years ago|reply
I only registered the phrase 'do you want me to add this to your basket?' at the end. No idea what it was, but she was trying to randomly sell me stuff while I'm chilling at home.
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
The key is that you basically need to get the exact wizard incantation right.
That's not useless for a fairly low $$ device. But it's certainly not going off and booking my travel to San Francisco for me. Or even ordering from Amazon given I probably want to check prices.
I don't actually have an issue with using Alexa etc. in general. The same data is going to be in a search engine or somewhere in any case.
There's just not much it's good for and therefore it's really hard to see thousands of highly paid engineers working on this stuff. For my uses, Alexa hasn't improved one iota for the past n years. How much money has been pissed away on salaries and other expenses in that time?
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33679791
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680327
they link to the same url.
My experience is that posting something that was posted before, even sometimes within days, will link to the same post. Or get's, sometimes within seconds, noted as a "[dupe]" . Even if not the same page, but might be the same subject or event.
Why was that not the case here?
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
There is an alternate strategy, which is to create a family of app-layer and system software that fits Google's OEM model, and become an Android OEM, more like what Samsung did (though that isn't the best example because a lot of Samsung's software is terrible). Maybe this would be a viable backstop for Amazon.
Google can throw more money at the problem because Google's upside is everything from phones (a notable Amazon fail) to TVs to cars, in addition to smart home devices.
[+] [-] pyb|3 years ago|reply