101–110 of 410 posts
When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?
The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. Looking at screens to get key information distracts me from my surroundings and seems archaic. My wife is a sound designer who has opened my eyes to the importance of sounds both in film and in the world. It's not that I was unaware of sounds, but I didn't realize how important they are to centering me in this world and the made up w…
CLI has the same issue, but at least you can man-xxx, which I imagine works a lot better in text than it does in audio.
When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?
Don't forget the harried parent of a child with low impulse control. These things would be a lot less "Big Brother" for me if I had a mic key in my pocket that would only turn the mic on when I squeezed it.
I would not be surprised if it turns out that Alexa is the biggest thing they've ever done, including AWS.
AWS will likely be a $100-$150 billion market value business in five years, with $6-$8 billion in operating income. They're tracking to $3.x billion in operating income in the next four quarters. It'll be valued as highly as Intel and Oracle.
A device that tells you the weather, orders an Uber, or orders more low margin merchandise off of Amazon, is not going to generate that kind of massive financial return. You can look at every lucrative business Echo could touch, and there's no scenario under which it could extract a large amount of monetary value. Ads? Not a chance. Sales referrals? No, the high margin stuff people want to visually browse for. Services? It could be 50 times larger than Angie's List and still not match AWS. Ordering Ubers? Ordering food? Ordering movie tickets? Relatively small sales, small percentage cut businesses.
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I'm not so sure about that. Check this out. One of the toughest fights in one of the toughest games performed with only voice commands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m2a2dLdZ0M Now, granted, this is a specific use case, but, you know... "explore the space" and all that. (more cowbell!)
The "play some good 60s rock" example isn't a VUI breakdown, it's a functionality gap in the backend. One that will probably be fixed pretty quickly, given the way things are headed. A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.
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I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing. Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".
Almost. More specifically, we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with a corporation that wants our info to make (more) money. The government option doesn't sound any better, either. I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.
If Amazon can somehow monetize my primary use of Echo as a glorified kitchen timer I will be impressed.
Still too expensive, imo. I've read a lot about "Alexa" and Echo... and beside the privacy issues, in many cases the Echo quickly becomes an expensive speaker (after the kids and everyone else gets tired of asking "Alexa" questions). $89 is not in my compulsion buy price range. I may be in the minority on that though...
I sorta agree. I got the original Echo for $100 when they had a special deal for Prime members. The timer is handy. The shopping list is handy. It's occasionally vaguely useful to ask it questions about the weather or other things--though it's not like my phone is that far away. I do use it for Amazon Music when I can't be bothered finding something to play on my stereo. Potentially, the ability to interface with hom…
So, at the moment it's feels like a redundant device that one has to purchase in order to do the same thing I can do with the phone and/or computer that I already own.
I mean, I find it kind of cool (except for the creepy "I'm listening to what you say", which applies to all assistants anyway), but I find it hard to find its place in the world as things are right now. Perhaps is that I do live in a small studio and my laptop or phone or tablet are always at hand.
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I sorta agree. I got the original Echo for $100 when they had a special deal for Prime members. The timer is handy. The shopping list is handy. It's occasionally vaguely useful to ask it questions about the weather or other things--though it's not like my phone is that far away. I do use it for Amazon Music when I can't be bothered finding something to play on my stereo. Potentially, the ability to interface with hom…
The single greatest feature of Echo that I use, (and too few others use) is turning on my Phillips Hue lights. You can give each individual light a name, as well as groups of lights their own name. Very convenient to turn on / off lights from anywhere in range of the mic. I use it everyday multiple times a day. If anyone finds network connected lights useful, then they'll find controlling them through Echo doubly use…
Light bulbs are literally the last thing on earth that I want to research for security exploits before I purchase.
"If you have more than one Echo or Echo Dot, you can set a different wake word for each". This is something I've been thinking is becoming more problematic as well as an opportunity for real ubiquity. I have 3 separate devices nearby that are Google Now voice activated (the newer devices support this even if the screen is off), and they will sometimes trigger at the same time accidentally. Since the processing is clo…
The echo and noise reduction software that I'm aware of can't really do that in a reasonable fashion.
With current solutions, you've got one DSP that's receiving all the audio streams simultaneously, and they need to be exactly synchronized in time. Then, using basically pattern-matching, it figures out what direction the user's voice is coming from, and combines some/all of the audio streams together to eliminate environmental noise and make the speech as clear as possible.
To do this with separate devices, you'd want extremely precise time synchronization. Which is possible, but I wouldn't want to implement it.
The extra processing and synchronization would take longer, and delay input to the speech recognition engine. I don't think it would enhance the user experience.
Edit: spelling.
When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?
So now this cool audio controlled personal assistant is just another gadget to buy more stuff from Amazon, instead of something you control.