181–190 of 410 posts
I would not be surprised if it turns out that Alexa is the biggest thing they've ever done, including AWS.
Alexa requires AWS to run. It's a symbiotic relationship, and Alexa is the consumer-facing AI extension. They've marketed it better than Watson and Siri so far, giving it new hardware to live in and opening it up to developers. But without AWS, there is no Alexa.
really?
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While indeed creepy, I ordered the original Echo as soon as it was made available, but I'm probably a special case. I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. If Amazon can somehow monetize my primary use of Echo as a glorified kitchen timer I will be impressed.
> I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. It occurs to me that the background noise in your home actually reveals a whole lot about the self: - What you're listening to and when - What you're watching and when - What type of gentleman's material you enjoy and when - When you leave home and get home - When you wake up, when you go to bed Some of these can be limited by the size of your house, but the…
The tech insanity has really gone far ..
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My dream is to have some kind of android TV box that performs this.
For voice activated solutions the hard part is the front end, i.e. voice recognition, which is what Alexa is strong at. Once this is covered, it's relatively easy to cover the rest. Really the core competency of Alexa is its excellent voice recognition performance, which is still hard to find elsewhere these days.
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My dream is to have some kind of android TV box that performs this.
For voice activated solutions the hard part is the front end, i.e. voice recognition, which is what Alexa is strong at. Once this is covered, it's relatively easy to cover the rest. Really the core competency of Alexa is its excellent voice recognition performance, which is still hard to find elsewhere these days.
There are a few open source alternative, Kaldi is new to me
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The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated. The Echo has pretty solid voice recognition--far better than anything else I've ever used--but it's still hard to get it to do anything useful once you get beyond a pretty narrow script. (e.g. what's the weather forecast, play this artist, etc.)
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!)
After 111 failed attempts :)
Still, it's a hell of an achievement.
EDIT: to be fair, Ornstein & Smough is a very tough fight even with normal controls.
Also notice the voice recognition fails to recognise some words like "item" even though they are spoken clearly. Almost gets the guy killed at one point.
My problem with Alexa is, I don't want to invest in a new ecosystem. I'm fine with Amazon being the hub that connects all of my services, but I don't want to use Amazon To-Do List, Amazon Prime Radio, Amazon Traffic, Amazon Sports, Amazon Calendar, Amazon Weather. That being said, they announce partnerships with more and more services every month. Things are looking up.
It's not perfect, but it is linked now with Spotify, ESPN and other publishers, Google Calendar... More importantly, they have done a good job (leagues better than the competing voice services) of opening their service to developers thru Alexa Skills, which has enabled hundreds of added features including things like ordering an Uber.
E.g. Alexa, Ask recipes how do I make an omelet? instead of: Alexa, how do I make an omelet?
I imagine it's to prevent conflicts but I'd like the option to put some services in the default namespace as it were.
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…
I really liked how this was done in the movie 'Her.' There's something especially nice about only having your attention distracted audibly and not visually, especially in public. I wonder if the smartphone age will go away as quickly as it came. I picture a world where we just have smart wearables like a watch which has a tiny visual interface, but a powerful audio one (speaker, earpiece, put watch up to ear, etc). I…
Not to say that content can't shift for the medium, just as it always does. What would an audio Facebook sound like?
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…
> The transition from primarily visual UX towards an auditorial UX is really powerful. It's also less accessible. I'm sure auditory UI is useful in many cases, but it also seems to be more cumbersome in others. In any case, I hope that pervasive auditory UI doesn't become any sort of standard without an accompanying visual/physical interface. > Try watching a scary movie with the sound turned off, it turns into a com…
Well, I think blind people would disagree with you.
> I hope that pervasive auditory UI doesn't become any sort of standard without an accompanying visual/physical interface.
Any speech interface could be trivially translated to a text interface, right?