What exactly is a "speech request" in Amazon Lex parlance though? Their pricing is missing a specific timeframe isn't it?
Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
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Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#12Are all these Amazon stories from re:Invent? Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today?
Yes, they are all from re:Invent.
In past years, some people on HN have wanted to combine them all, but it's never happened.
I think it makes sense to leave them separate. They are all different products, and if they were released weeks apart they would warrant their own story.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#13Are all these Amazon stories from re:Invent? Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today?
> Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today?
No. You'd have two thousand comments about totally disparate systems to filter though.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#14>you know how simple, useful, and powerful the Alexa-powered interaction model can be. This is so comical. Alexa is phenomenally bad at conversation, it is so bad that there are almost no successful "apps" built around it despite having an API and app platform. Alexa is decent at single command/action model nothing more than that.
What are the best alternatives?
The "Ok Google/Google Now" voice interactivity (or whatever the official name is) on Android phones is much better than Amazon's Alexa/Echo. It actually remembers context from sentence to sentence so you can say "What is the population of Chicago" and it will answer. Then you can say, "How long would it take me to drive there?" And it understands that you are still talking about Chicago.
Every interaction with Alexa is command, response, and that really limits what you can do with it.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#15>you know how simple, useful, and powerful the Alexa-powered interaction model can be. This is so comical. Alexa is phenomenally bad at conversation, it is so bad that there are almost no successful "apps" built around it despite having an API and app platform. Alexa is decent at single command/action model nothing more than that.
In a way, this is a good step toward people writing applications that are good conversationally. Alexa does a good job of voice recognition but I agree that "conversations" are mostly about remembering the right wizard's incantation to make Alexa do something useful. Watching the (very simplified) demo, it's easy to see the seed of writing a useful digital assistant/Star Trek computer there but obviously someone(s) have a whole lot of work to do before we get anywhere near there.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the best alternatives?
something that doesn't make me say this really long sentence to access the app 'Alexa tell app X to start my car' Something that supports actual conversation which means not having the user respond immediately . For example its impossible to build a cooking app that walks me through the recipe because 'conversation' is over within X seconds. Of course you could do weird hacks like maintaining conversation on the serv…
I think that's a product vs platform issue, especially having to prefix everything with the application. since you are building your own product, you get to avoid the routing problem entirely.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#17My daughter, a 6th grader, wants to create a robot that can take voice input and act on it. I think this could be a great place to start.
In intro to comp sci we had an open project using an irobot bot (roomba without vaccum) so my group of some of the more experienced students pieced together a robot dog using a laptop and xbox kinect on top. You could say commands and it would obey such as sit (moves back and stops), rollover (spins), bark (sound from speakers), etc. It would also track a primary user and if you said follow it would stay a certain distance near you and follow. This functionality was "easy" with the kinect sdk capabilities as it was just a matter of connecting events from kinect code to commands to send to the robot. If given more time we could have done stuff like hand movements or throwing motions with the kinect skeletal tracking and vectors.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#18It's great to see so much competition in this space. This initial offering looks limited in its ability to handle more complex branching and context building but hopefully it will evolve. I'm also a little surprised at the pricing given that Google and Facebook offer comparable services for free.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#19Are all these Amazon stories from re:Invent? Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today?
> Would it make sense to combine them into a single index today? No. You'd have two thousand comments about totally disparate systems to filter though.
Yeah, you're right, that would be confusing.
Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces
#20Great presentation by Matt Wood. I've been working with him for years (until 2014) and I think he's a great presenter (among other things).