41–50 of 66 posts
Any info on the pricing? Amazon always has its pricing info along with any announcements. and yes I like this chatboot API from google, to compete with amazon lex/polly. Competition will bring out the best for developers.
It's free.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with protocol activation is that there are a million different endpoints and you either * Keep a list of every single one that apps can opt into. This is how you end up with "midsized_sedan_carwashing" in an enum list. It's a developer drain for Google/Microsoft/Amazon and creates "wait for the next release for 'largetruck_carwashing' so you can release your app". * Let apps run wild and claim any protoco…
Maybe Assistant could somehow monitor what kind of things users are asking a particular app to do and use that to determine defaults for specific actions in future interactions. Imagine: "Okay Google, get me movie tickets for Rogue One on Tuesday" "I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that yet. Try telling me to ask another service like Fandango or MovieTickets.com." "Ask Fandango" "Okay. [Switches to Fandango.] What th…
When I used to say to call a particular person, it would ask "which number, home or mobile?", for example. Over time, I usually always ask for the same number for a particular contact (mobile), and it learned that when I ask for the first name of the contact, it usually always means a specific contact.
So whereas initially I had to say the full name and pick a number, now all I say is "Call " and it starts dialing the exact contact I wanted. It also knows that this first name is my wife... so I can even say "call my wife" and it also works.
This lends credence to the model you're describing, and maybe that's exactly how it will work in the future. I think machine learning sorts this out quite well.
API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX. From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural. You want bus times: Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]" Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] when is the next bus?" Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care…
API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX. From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural. You want bus times: Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]" Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] when is the next bus?" Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care…
IIRC, the perfect examples where you neither say "Alexa" or "Hey Google" aren't going to happen any time soon - those recognition phrases are hard-coded for performance reasons, and adding custom ones will be difficult.
API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX. From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural. You want bus times: Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]" Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] when is the next bus?" Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care…
IIRC, the perfect examples where you neither say "Alexa" or "Hey Google" aren't going to happen any time soon - those recognition phrases are hard-coded for performance reasons, and adding custom ones will be difficult.
API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX. From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural. You want bus times: Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]" Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] when is the next bus?" Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care…
Some Google services I wouldn't want to live without: Play Music, Play Movies, Google Cloud Platform, and their neat One a Day charity platform. Otherwise, I am doing a 180 degree flip and getting all Apple gear after many years of mostly using Linux.
I like the competition between Google/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon because even though I would like to more than four major players, four is enough to drive feature and price competition.
Why isn't open-source catching up in this field?
Besides that, a voice assistant is never just a voice assistant. It's only useful if it already has a big range of services to integrate. Apple, Amazon and Google already had market-dominating services they could integrate to provide a decent starting point.
You could see it in how each assistant evolved. Siri was always very much aimed at interacting with your phone. Messaging, playing music, local things. Things Apple already did well without a voice assistant. Alexa's main selling point at the start was it's integration with Amazon for shopping. It's still very important and probably the main reason I don't expect to get Alexa in Belgium any time soon since we don't even have an Amazon store. Google Now then couldn't really do much for you, but it's incredible at providing you with the right information, because it's powered by the world's biggest search engine (by quite a margin). Cortana for example doesn't really have any killer features, because Microsoft still doesn't have any market dominating services besides Windows (which doesn't really benefit from a voice assistant interface).
So, in short, it's not about the voice assistant. It's about the ecosystem. And those are incredibly hard to build and probably impossible to open source.
Why won't they release Assistant for all Android phones? Nobody uses Allo, and Pixel is a small minority of the market.
> Pixel is a small minority of the market Exactly that. They're trying to promote Pixel phones by making Assistant an exclusive feature.