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The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#41
post #31
post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

Bloomberg has really gone off the deep end of the design pool. It seemed to start with those somewhat janky, but pretty nice zero-padded headline overlays on the pics, and culminated in this: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-design/ which...well.

CHRIST

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#42
post #6
post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

Holy crap that is annoying. Is there a way to pause all animated gifs in chrome? Congratulations, Bloomberg, you captured the essence of a Geocities site. This has to be a not so subtle graphic design joke.

There are several extensions, I use Gif Jam, which only plays animated gifs on demand.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bclnijbemellankmoa...

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#43
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap that is annoying. Is there a way to pause all animated gifs in chrome? Congratulations, Bloomberg, you captured the essence of a Geocities site. This has to be a not so subtle graphic design joke.

I opened up Chrome Developer tools and added img { display: none } which hides everything but the top banner, which you can scroll past ;)

I have uBlock Origin, and it was as simple as right-click>Block Element and selecting the suggestion of amazon_echo_animation_.gif

The filter for the curious:

    ||www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-amazon-echo/amazon_echo_animation_*.gif

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, however I did enjoy opening up the developer console in Firefox and deleting all of the obnoxious background.

Thank you! That works for chrome too. Right-click => inspect, then on the highlighted line the inspection window right-click => delete element.

Even quicker - right click->block element in Ad block Plus. Done. I too found them extremely distracting to a point where I couldn't read the text.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#47
The story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all those managers from both echo and phone project. Better kick some more engineers off the life raft.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hardware-division-layo...

They have a real 'slaughter the goose that layed the golden egg because holy shit! there is a huge expensive golden egg and it's mine all mine, die, die, die..." culture. Bezos probably has an employee purge button built into his desk.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#48
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, however I did enjoy opening up the developer console in Firefox and deleting all of the obnoxious background.

Thank you! That works for chrome too. Right-click => inspect, then on the highlighted line the inspection window right-click => delete element.

This works on Pinterest, too, for their obnoxious sign up black screen.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#49
post #25

I was looking for a fair comparison between Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa and I stumbled across this [0]. I find it interesting because it seems you would need all of them to answer all your questions. Do you have also some personal experince comparing with Now , Siri or Cortana? What went really bad or amazed in terms of speech recognition and speech comprehension? [0] http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-prod…

I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri.

There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me.

Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE.

Alexa also has a very wide range of behaviors (especially with the Skills), but I do occasionally run into things I feel like it should do that it doesn't (yet). To be fair, I also use her the most, so it could be that I push her further than the others. The voice recognition is quite good; I would say it misunderstands me less than 5 times in 100.

Siri is by far the worst. Her abilities are limited, but worse, she has a tendency to funnel commands that she can't do into things she can. For example, asking for the hours of a restaurant will instead show you a Bing search (!) for the restaurant's name, sans hours. This is not useful. It would be better to just inform me that she can't do that yet, file that in a log at Apple, and then add that behavior some time down the road.

She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#50
I have the remote as an early adopter. It's fun to hide in another room and say into the remote "Simon says, hey kids, Kraft no longer makes Mac and cheese and now just makes carrots and ranch dressing."

A moment passes.

"Dad, Alexa just told us...!"

My geek dad game is strong.

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