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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

#91

Post by Touche »

kuschku wrote: post #54
gervase wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Wait. So Google recognizes a long time ago that machine learning would be important to their business and so invests in a variety of projects to aid with that; Google 411, Google Books, etc. But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less?

throws up hands

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#92

Post by serge2k »

> Generally, the engineers and product managers at Lab126 quelled their own dissent before it reached Bezos, instead concentrating on giving the boss what they thought he wanted. “We spent so much time trying to anticipate what Jeff would do or say, and read into little words he would say in meetings,” said one former employee. “It would lead to so much additional work.”

That sounds like a questionable at best policy.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#93

Post by kuschku »

Touche wrote: post #91
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…

Wait. So Google recognizes a long time ago that machine learning would be important to their business and so invests in a variety of projects to aid with that; Google 411, Google Books, etc. But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less? throws up hands

> But because Apple either didn't have the foresight or chose not to invest in these technologies, Google should be forced to donate their data sets? To one of the richest companies in the world no less?

No, I’m not arguing for Apple. I don’t care – they can afford it. I, as a student, can’t afford it. You, if you wish to start such a startup, can’t afford it.

And you know what? Google couldn’t do any of this on its own. Instead, they tricked people into working for Google for free.

And now they try to make others pay for the work of volunteers that transcribed YouTube videos, that solved Captchas, etc.

headdesk

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#94

Post by dharma1 »

kuschku wrote: post #54
gervase wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I don't think it will take billions. LSTM+CTC speech recognition implementations are coming to OSS and I think we have large enough available data sets for training without needing Google size resources. Audio books are a good resource for training and it's not hard to amass hundreds or thousands of hours of training material that way. I think we will have 95%+ accuracy ASR as open source trained networks very soon.

In the case of Amazon Echo/Dot they benefit greatly from the far field array mic for isolating a clean speech signal in noisy/far field environments, would be nice to see generic USB array mics with Linux drivers

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#95

Post by pyb »

runT1ME wrote: post #86
pyb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In my experience, companies are not that great at recognizing and rewarding achievement. So unfortunately, I'll stick to my cynical interpretation. Also, we're talking about dozens or even hundred of people moving on from Amazon here...

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#96

Post by blacksmith_tb »

grillvogel wrote: post #80

Maybe I'm old but i still really don't understand the appeal of a device that monitors and datamines all the communication in your home so you can buy products more easily.

Not sure just how seriously this is meant to be taken, but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" (and recognition of that is handled in the hardware, locally - if you're worried about devices with net access and microphones, you'll need to keep your phone turned off at home, too). It's fair to assume that once you are interacting with it Amazon mines at least some data, however.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#97

Post by kuschku »

dharma1 wrote: post #94
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…

I don't think it will take billions. LSTM+CTC speech recognition implementations are coming to OSS and I think we have large enough available data sets for training without needing Google size resources. Audio books are a good resource for training and it's not hard to amass hundreds or thousands of hours of training material that way. I think we will have 95%+ accuracy ASR as open source trained networks very soon.…

That’s indeed a good thing. With audiobooks – maybe rented from the local library? – and public TV we could have quality voice recognition tools.

Hopefully also ones in German, French, etc. Currently only English is well supported by the non-cloud ones, which is quite annoying.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#98

Post by grillvogel »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #96
grillvogel wrote: post #80

Maybe I'm old but i still really don't understand the appeal of a device that monitors and datamines all the communication in your home so you can buy products more easily.

Not sure just how seriously this is meant to be taken, but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" (and recognition of that is handled in the hardware, locally - if you're worried about devices with net access and microphones, you'll need to keep your phone turned off at home, too). It's fair to assume that once you are interacting with it Amazon mines at least some data, however.

>but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa"

then how does it know when you say Alexa?

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#99

Post by dbbk »

grillvogel wrote: post #98
blacksmith_tb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure just how seriously this is meant to be taken, but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" (and recognition of that is handled in the hardware, locally - if you're worried about devices with net access and microphones, you'll need to keep your phone turned off at home, too). It's fair to assume that once you are interacting with it Amazon mines at least some data, however.

>but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" then how does it know when you say Alexa?

Because the code that understands 'Alexa' is hardcoded into the device. Once it hears that word, that's when audio starts getting sent over the Internet to Amazon's servers.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#100

Post by nksjndfdf »

bunnymancer wrote: post #62
amzn-336495 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how it works at all. The company took in $107,000,000,000 dollars in 2015 but were just forced to layoff off engineers. Right, no despotic dictatorship banana republic stuff going on there.

It's okay to just say Billion instead of trying to enhance the statement. Also that's revenue and not income, which was $596 million. Quite a difference.

You don't know how bogus income numbers are? They are literally made up in advance.
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