[robbiemitchell]

It wasn't even set up for success at selling.

After years of raising 3 kids, you would think if I ask to add diapers to the cart, it would know something. But no, it would just go with whatever is the top recommended, or first in a search, or something like that. Nothing using the brand or most recent sizes we purchased.

There was no serious attempt to drive real commerce. Instead, Alexa became full of recommendation slots that PMs would battle over. "I set that timer for you. Do you want to try the Yoga skill?"

On the other hand, they have taken on messy problems and solved them well, but not using technology, and for no real financial gain. For example, if you ask for the score of the Tigers game, Alexa has to reconcile which "Tigers" sports team you mean among both your own geography and the worldwide teams, at all levels from worldwide to local, across all sports, might have had games of interest. People worked behind the scenes to manage this manually, tracking teams of interest and filling intent slots daily.

[ClassyJacket]

The insane lack of basic heuristics in every day apps to do very obvious things like you mentioned baffles me. They can come up with huge scale fuzzy vector search AI suggestion systems for a billion users, but can't think to do stuff like, only suggest things available in your size?

I'm actually working on an app that solves this for a specific use case, tho it isn't in the retail space.

Voice assistants are particularly egregious - they've done all that work to correctly recognise the words I said - i.e. the hard part - but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

[treflop]

My impression with a lot of products is that no one that is substantially involved in making them actually substantially uses them themselves.

[ghaff]

They're hard in different ways (and ML helped with voice recognition to a degree that PhD linguists struggled to do for years.

But to your example. OK. Set and create probably mean the same thing in the context of a reminder. Probably add and a few other things too. Should this go on some running ToDo list app I use? Should it ask me for a due date? Should it go on my calendar? And that's a very simple example.

[TeMPOraL]

> Voice assistants are particularly egregious - they've done all that work to correctly recognise the words I said - i.e. the hard part - but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

They hardly even managed the hard part. What's surprising for me is that for a year now, ChatGPT app has been miles ahead of SOTA in voice assistants in terms of speech-to-text with whatever the thing is they're using, and somehow none of the voice assistants managed to improve. OpenAI could blow them all out of the water today, if they delegated a couple of engineers to spend a week integrating their app deeper into Android intent system - and 90% of that wouldn't be because GPT-4, but because of speech-to-text model that doesn't suck donkey balls.

[phatskat]

> but then it breaks because I said "set reminder" instead of "create reminder"??

Which is wild to me. If my Google home barely mishears “lights on”, I get random Spotify. But “cut the lights”? Works every time to turn them off

[shortrounddev2]

Buying the promoted products is the point; they get advertising revenue that way

[shortrounddev2]

If they rebuy your most recent purchase instead of the promoted brand, they don't get advertising revenue

[m463]

step 1: remove three sponsored diaper brands from the top of your cart...