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The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

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Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#31

Post by lozenge »

onion2k wrote: post #18
justboxing wrote: post #7

> “We had to think outside the box of just understanding English. We had to train Alexa to understand the proper noun in Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi, Malayalam, among others,” says Kumar Alexa India's true test will be on how it handles ____glish (where ____ = the base language) that's very common in everyday spoken interactions, esp. in the South. Ex: Tanglish = Tamil + English mixed-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Could Amazon just treat those as new, separate languages with a corpus of words that includes the main language plus English? It'd mean the dictionary is much bigger but that shouldn't make a big difference (as far as I know, which isn't very far...)

Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word will always be followed by another English word.

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#32

Post by lozenge »

derefr wrote: post #13
BoorishBears wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, does “Play something else” work? That’s one step removed from expecting Alexa to understand human emotions but still a rather natural interaction

If phone trees can jump straight to a representative when you swear at them, Alexa should be able to treat an angry tone of voice as a generic undo.

"Alexa, play I'm going crazy"

"Sorry. Turning off".

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#33

Post by sreejithr »

amingilani wrote: post #25
rurban wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, about the same crazyness as in India. Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, English, Saraiki, lasi, Kutchi, Thari, Balochi, Brahui, Hazaragi, Chitrali, Kohistani, Hindko, Kashmiri, Shina and Balti are the main languages and dialects spoken in Pakistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_languages_of_Pakist...

Yeah, but the emphasis on Urdu as our national language means almost everyone everywhere is comfortable speaking Urdu!

Does everyone there in Pakistan accept and use Urdu as the de-factor language? Here in India, that's unfortunately not the case.

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#34

Post by kaybe »

lozenge wrote: post #31
onion2k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could Amazon just treat those as new, separate languages with a corpus of words that includes the main language plus English? It'd mean the dictionary is much bigger but that shouldn't make a big difference (as far as I know, which isn't very far...)

Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word will always be followed by another English word.

I'm not sure this is true anywhere, and it's changing constantly.

Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad:

'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women.

(A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.)

This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these things.

(Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking people what they thought the marketing slogans meant - it was hilarious.)

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#35

Post by DiabloD3 »

sreejithr wrote: post #33
amingilani wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the emphasis on Urdu as our national language means almost everyone everywhere is comfortable speaking Urdu!

Does everyone there in Pakistan accept and use Urdu as the de-factor language? Here in India, that's unfortunately not the case.

*defacto

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#36

Post by briandear »

naturalgradient wrote: post #22

Now this is a very negative opinion in a general anti-consumerist sense but: Why does one buy items like an Alexa? I get that it performs some features, it slightly increases convenience but it does not enable anything new or different. Something I do not understand about hackernews: There are a lot of people on here who, on average, care about the environment. By the same token, there are many users here who have an…

Alexa/Siri et al aren’t about “consumerism” — that’s the naïve interpretation— that’s just a surface look. These devices represent the future of how man interacts with machine. Right now, they are mostly toys used for “consumer” purposes, but look at the internet itself — during the early days one could have asked “why should we be building networks for the military? Dismissing Alexa/etc. as mere vehicles for consumption is missing the greater possibilities. This tech has to start (and be financed) somewhere: thus Amazon using this as a tool to buy things is fine — because it ultimately will push the future forward despite your worries about slave labor. If we stopped buying everything tomorrow, there would still be slave labor and bad things in the world as there always has been. People need to eat, clothe themselves and make shelters. Stopping weapon production doesn’t end wars nor would stopping AI personal assistants reduce some poorer people working for some less poor people to fill an economic need. That’s reality.

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#37

Post by megaman22 »

briandear wrote: post #36
naturalgradient wrote: post #22

Now this is a very negative opinion in a general anti-consumerist sense but: Why does one buy items like an Alexa? I get that it performs some features, it slightly increases convenience but it does not enable anything new or different. Something I do not understand about hackernews: There are a lot of people on here who, on average, care about the environment. By the same token, there are many users here who have an…

Alexa/Siri et al aren’t about “consumerism” — that’s the naïve interpretation— that’s just a surface look. These devices represent the future of how man interacts with machine. Right now, they are mostly toys used for “consumer” purposes, but look at the internet itself — during the early days one could have asked “why should we be building networks for the military? Dismissing Alexa/etc. as mere vehicles for consump…

I really hope that we never have to control our computers with something as ambigous and fuzzy as speech. It's going to happen, because people think Star Trek is cool, but, gah, I'm not interested in it. Interfaces are getting progressively less useful, as far as I'm concerned; people try to displace mouse and keyboard, but it's always worse, and drags down the standard for everything.

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#38

Post by TeMPOraL »

kaybe wrote: post #34
lozenge wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a corpus, the training will "teach" the computer that an English word will always be followed by another English word.

I'm not sure this is true anywhere, and it's changing constantly. Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad: 'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women. (A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.) This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these things. (Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking people what they thought th…

Hopefully there will be more work done in mixing languages. That's a particular issue for me with Google Now - it will recognize sentences in Polish, or sentences in English, but... that's not how think in my head. Most of the time I do a free-form mix of those two languages, often at the level of an individual sentence.

(To be clear: I'm not whining. Speech recognition is getting absurdly good as it is. It's just that being able to mix languages in a free-form way would be... perfection :).)

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#39

Post by arkades »

nmstoker wrote: post #8
kraig911 wrote: post #6

I just got an Echo for black friday. I can't get how dumb the thing is with all this press? Alexa play some ambient music... "I think you'll like this... playing Selena Gomez"... Alexa I hate Selena Gomez... "Shuffling Selena Gomez..." Alexa Stop "Playing Stop & Erase by Selena Gomez" Literally happened here just now.

I don't want to come across as an Alexa fanboy and defend it, but it would help to understand which parts of your interaction you think of as dumb. I agree Alexa Stop was clearly a mistake (albeit, not one I've ever observed) but for the rest, it's understanding what you said, you simply have different expectations of what the best response is. Were it a human, one wouldn't say they were dumb, just that they had diff…

> Have you seen any other music player that handles that kind of ambiguous "command"?

Siri does sorta; I just tested it now. I said “I hate this song,” and I got the feedback “I’ll remember you hate that song,” and a different song from another artist immediately began. “I hate this artist” immediately transitioned to a song by a different artist.

“I hate (artist name)” didn’t work, but the framework is clearly there.

This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable functionality to expect at all. It’s already mostly there. In Siri.

Re: The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover

#40

Post by freeone3000 »

justinjlynn wrote: post #28
nindalf wrote: post #21

I bought an Alexa yesterday and the second thing I asked it to do was “play the Desi playlist from my Spotify”. I tried 5 different variants of this, and also in different accents but it was unable to understand it. It’s cool that they’re doing work to improve understanding in Desi contexts, which makes it that much stranger that it couldn’t understand “Desi”.

Idea... "Alexa, how do I (get you to do/ask for)..." "Sorry, I'll have to think about that for a few minutes" In that time, a support tech reviews the question, perhaps with some machine leaning assistance, and then gets back to you with the answer. "(first name), about your request, you can (insert instruction or apology)." Amazon already has mechanical turk... no reason why Alexa shouldn't take advantage.

Because mechanical turk MUST be supervised. The reward is disassociated from performance - it's the agent problem, writ large, since workers are effectively anonymous and paid piecework. In any paper using mechanical turk, half or more is trying to get the humans to do what they're told correctly. (They behave more like mischevious djinn than computers if allowed to act freely.) Just dropping in mechanical turk without a feedback system would lead to arbitrary responses, unhandled queries, and unsolvable inconsistencies.
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