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?
We'll be dead soon. Enjoy the little things.
Nice try NSA.
Amazon Echo Dot
331–340 of 410 posts
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#332When 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?
I love "smart" devices, but hate "devices that needlessly insist on connecting to the Internet". One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home n…
If you don't care about recording video or video recognition features, the cheapo chinese cams on amazon actually perform pretty well. For $80 you can get 720p video with IR lights, speakers, microphone & it can move around. Usually it doesn't zoom like a dropcam can.
If you willing configure a NAS server somewhere, you can even record the video locally.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#333My 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.
If it was working with Google Music, I would have bought it in a heartbeat.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#334The 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…
"computer lights on" "dimmer" no thank you.. i will use my hand
And if you're on the couch watching a movie and the light switch is on the other side of the room? Or you want to switch on the porch light for guests. Or switch off outside lights?
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated I've done a fair bit of interface engineering for the web. Between that and using so much software over the course of my life, I'd say that this applies to GUIs just as much as voice interfaces.
Yes, but GUIs have two or three dimensions available (up/down, left/right, time) whereas voice just has the one (time). We humans can also full-duplex GUIs much more easily than voice-based interface. And GUIs at least can be hooked up to full-powered grammar-based interfaces whereas voice, somewhat ironically considering the nature of human communication, has more trouble with it. (I'd suggest this is actually a com…
And copy and paste. People seem to always forget the power of it. It's the GUI equivalent of "Search for that on Google" or "Now, SSH to this IP I found digging through AWS." Copy and pasting of text from application to application is the clunky Unix Pipe. It's universal and deeply important.
Taking sections of the last response, or hell, even having every response essentially be wrapped up in some sort of object you can reference in your next query to the interface is what all of these lack.
Even Androids "Search this artist" doesn't quite get there. The lack of context between queries is what murders Siri for me. That and her seemingly random selection of what goes to Google and what goes to Wolphram Alpha. Sometimes even the "wolfram" verb prepended to a query just doesn't go to wolfram no matter what.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that cuts both ways. If the computer can be trained to understand the user's intent, that seems like a better solution than forcing the user to think a different way. Which would you rather do? Be forced to state your lighting preferences in candlepower, or have the computer learn that when you say "subdued lighting", you mean "12"?
Very true, but this is one simple example. Look at what Wolfram Alpha tries to do for even more complicated examples. If I put in "if I am traveling at 60 miles per hour how many hours does it take to go one hundred miles" it gives me an answer of 6000 seconds (1.66 hours). Very intuitive, and it actually ruined my example because I did not expect the site to understand what I was saying. But if I type in "how fast d…
Wolfram is, and has always been, much more inclined to understand you if you work out what exactly you are trying to calculate before hand.
Some phrases exist as a "wow, 1 million people phrase this problem this way, let's throw that in." The fact it can take an easily dictated, albeit strictly phrased problem, and get you your answer is really what I love about it. Now if Siri would just stop sending stuff to Google. -_-
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found that the voice recognition on Android phones works well enough to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Navigating, getting directions, setting alarms, taking notes, sending text messages, sending emails, searching for things, and many more. When I was still using my Moto X I did the majority of every-day tasks with voice recognition. The iPhone is catching up fast too...my wife's taken to sending…
Being overheard isn't the only privacy concern. Most of these solutions offload the speech recognition and language parsing functions to corporate servers. I like texting with Siri but I'm not exactly keen on having Apple record everything. It also seems limiting in that I can't use voice commands without a network. It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data…
I think the processing requirements for handling on-device Siri would destroy battery life.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#338When 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?
I love "smart" devices, but hate "devices that needlessly insist on connecting to the Internet". One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home n…
Alexa probably uses forms of machine learning and also queries lots of services to find the answers you need. Also it learns from every user and gets better for every user this way. That would be really hard to do with an offline device.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are connecting more and more services, you can train your own "skills" and i am pretty sure they will open the platform up at some point. Could be huge. Remember, the first iPhone was totally locked down as well.
The iPhone is still locked down, and it still sucks.
My point is that the first iphone did not have any 3rd party apps at all and id argue it did change the world of computing in the years after that. If you do not acknowledge that you are blind of hate for apple.
Re: Amazon Echo Dot
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA: Includes a built-in speaker so it can work on its own
The speaker is for voice feedback only. Doesn't actually support music, news, audiobooks etc.
Do you have a source for that? I have an Echo in my living room, but I was thinking of picking up one of these for my bedroom. I don't really care about sound quality as I would just be using it for Philips Hue, weather, and news.