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The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

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Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#81

Post by derefr »

delecti wrote: post #26
amelius wrote: post #16

> You can use Alexa to turn off the lights, ask it how much gas is left in your car, or order a pizza. I'm getting a bit tired of these examples. Is there a comprehensive list of things Alexa can do?

Such a list doesn't exist for the Echo any more than it does for your cell phone. The Echo is integrated into IFTTT, so any of the actions here [1] are available, and there are also an ever expanding list of actions called 'Skills' [2] that you can add to your particular Echo's list of available integrations (like installing a phone app). That's all in addition to the basic things it can do out of the box, like set t…

You could, in theory, list every verb my phone can natively perform. That list is the set of view controllers in the phone's onboard OS apps, plus the set of view controllers in every app in the app store (which is growing, but finite and still easily enumerated.)

The only assumption you need to make is that actions on all server-delivered forms are collapsed into a single "make a network request" verb; otherwise you do get the infinite expanse of actions that is the web.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#82

Post by lelandbatey »

gervase wrote: post #49
ccozan wrote: 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…

Interesting that you rate Google Now as high as you do. I've had somewhat counter experiences.

Specifically, both me and a friend decided to upgrade to Nexus 5X's this past month, he from an iPhone 4S, and I from a Moto G.

Since I'm the one who's been using Android for longer, I've been his go to source for questions about the user experience, woe's about inconsistencies, and investigations on getting things done.

What immediately became apparent is that apparently, the voice integration of Google Now seems quite terrible compared to Apple's Siri. I never use the voice features, but it turns out he is highly dependent on them, using Siri to transcribe most of his casual text interaction, control music, set timers, make quick appointments, and look up facts.

However, when he moved to Google Now he found that while Google Now could in theory do all those same things, that it did so quite inconsistently (failing at minimum 5% of the time, up to 25% of the time). I tried and found the same problems.

For example, I'd unlock my screen, swipe from the lower left to activate Google Now and then say "set an alarm for 10 minutes". Sometimes the little jiggling colored stripes would just never start moving, indicating that it didn't even engage the microphone. Other times it would catch what I say and correctly parse it, even responding "Ok, setting your alarm" and display the alarm card. However, it would never actually set the alarm.

There are plenty of other inconsistencies encountered, this is just one that I experience frequently. My friend can go on for quite a while though about the issues he faces with Google Now.

Anyway, has anyone else experienced issues like this one?

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#83

Post by manaus10 »

shostack wrote: post #76
kuschku wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > 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…

"You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?

I hope not. That would be very creepy

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#84

Post by delecti »

extra88 wrote: post #77
delecti wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full echo happens to be on sale today, and the Echo Dot (which doesn't include the full speaker, only a smaller one, and you can plug it into your own) is about half the price, and does still have the always-on listening mode.

The Echo Dot is ~$90 but my understanding is to buy it you must A) be an Amazon Prime member and B) use the voice interface on an existing Amazon product to place the order (the Echo itself being an obvious example but I guess also the Fire Stick).

I don't remember the specifics, but I was able to buy my Dot without an existing Amazon voice product, they seem to have "fixed" that "problem" though.

I have Prime, so I can't comment to that other issue.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#86

Post by runT1ME »

pyb wrote: post #65
amzn-336495 wrote: post #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 tho…

This startling quote is in the article : "Many of the people who helped create the Echo no longer work for Amazon..." As you say, it sounds like success gets punished at Amazon.

Isn't it more likely that after shipping a 'named' consumer product, many of those engineers rose in value a tremendous amount and rather than negotiate a raise they took a huge salary bump working for Apple/Google?

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#87

Post by brndn »

shostack wrote: post #76
kuschku wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > 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…

"You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did." Didn't they use Google Voice as well?

I know they used 1-800-goog-411 [0], their discontinued free call directory service to train their speech recognition, which was a pretty great idea.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOG-411

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#88

Post by brndn »

When is Google going to build a Google Now for the living room to compete with Echo? I want an Echo, but I think a Google product with access to the whole Google ecosystem would be more useful to me.

We know Echo will never play nice with Google (you can't buy Chromecast on Amazon is evidence). If Google built this product, the only feature they probably couldn't match would be buying products on Amazon, which I don't know if I would use anyway.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#89

Post by kuschku »

lgas wrote: post #71
kuschku wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. > 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…

Well, until then, Google's speech recognition API is available ( https://cloud.google.com/speech/ ) so it seems like it should be possible to at least compete at Google levels of SR without even having to understand what training data is.

And how exactly am I supposed to do that without transferring userdata to a third party (like Google)?

Privacy laws – which I personally like – prevent using that.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#90

Post by mgrennan »

amzn-336495 wrote: post #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 tho…

This is just life at lots of "Heartless" companies. DELL for example, Cuts the bottom X% of staff based on "Performance". Sic, getting a divorce, new children, ask/forced to work odd shifts, working in some managers experimental project...

Your CUT.

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