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Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

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Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#21

Post by IanCal »

Nursie wrote: post #11
king_magic wrote: post #2

Alexa is a glorified lighting management system for me. Given it’s current capabilities, that’s all it’s going to be for the foreseeable future. Oh, I’ll ask it the weather sometimes, but come on - what can Alexa really do that’s all that compelling, that already isn’t a capability of Siri/Google?

"Alexa set a timer for 15 minutes." (She's a cooking timer) "Alexa what time is it" (She's a clock) "Alexa switch the tv off" (She can't switch it on) "Alexa, meow meow/Pika/fart" (Novelty nonsense) "Alexa, turn the heating up in the living room" (Nest integration) Yeah that's about it. The only really useful thing she does for us is music control on our sonos system - "Alexa, play the album X by Y in the kitchen". T…

Calling between rooms has been the main reason I got a second device (first one for tinkering). Got a young baby so being able to wake up the partner across the other side of the house without needing hands when there's been an ... explosion is useful.

Adding things to a shopping list is the other one that works nicely.

That music integration with sonos sounds really nice.

Nothing groundbreaking though.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#22

Post by michaelt »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #15
steeve wrote: post #12

I have several, along with Google Home too. They all suffer from the same issue: it's awkward to use with third party skills. Unless they are the highly integrated ones (Spotify, Logitech Harmony) in which case it's great. It's the same for Siri, the API is so restrictive. The whole "tell XX to YY" isn't convenient. One workaround on Google Home is to use IFTTT, and in that case you can customize the whole phrase and…

Absolutely. Until the voice assistants become a bit more intelligent with the language used to activate them, it feels so rigid and un-natural communicating with them. I don't see a great future for voice assistants in the near future, until we truly solve the problem of intent (in a natural way) and accordingly can respond.

I'm not sure if it's a question of intelligence, or a question of business.

I can't imagine Amazon would hand the "Alexa, order more bread" keyword over to Instacart/Wal-Mart/whoever without a fight.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#23

Post by k__ »

gtsteve wrote: post #6

I bought an Echo speaker when they first came out. The sound quality is impressive (to my untrained ear), but the development experience is not. The first thing I wanted to do was to add a feature so I could add a task to my to-do list software which is not supported by Alexa. It turns out that you cannot construct a sentence along the lines of "Tell Asana to add a task: ". You can't actually have a 'slot' which cont…

"You can't actually have a 'slot' which contains a freeform piece of text"

What about AMAZON.SearchQuery?

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#26

Post by cglace »

michaelt wrote: post #22
deanclatworthy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Until the voice assistants become a bit more intelligent with the language used to activate them, it feels so rigid and un-natural communicating with them. I don't see a great future for voice assistants in the near future, until we truly solve the problem of intent (in a natural way) and accordingly can respond.

I'm not sure if it's a question of intelligence, or a question of business. I can't imagine Amazon would hand the "Alexa, order more bread" keyword over to Instacart/Wal-Mart/whoever without a fight.

Hopefully google or apple might.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#27

Post by k__ »

gdne wrote: post #20

The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing. The opportunity is to figure out how t…

I think you're right, but on the other hand, a skill is faster created than a complex 2D UI.

Sure, I won't use a conversational interface to build the next Photoshop.

I could tell it stuff like, what I ate and it calculates my kcals or macros and tells me how much I have left to eat this day or what other stuff I should eat to hit my macros etc.

I could tell it what I bought and it would categorize the bills.

Some things are just too bothersome to do with my hands.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#28

Post by jessriedel »

gdne wrote: post #20

The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing. The opportunity is to figure out how t…

The medium of voice is very rich and capable when talking to a human, so this is something limited by the intelligence of the system you're interacting with.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#29

Post by nostrebored »

k__ wrote: post #23
gtsteve wrote: post #6

I bought an Echo speaker when they first came out. The sound quality is impressive (to my untrained ear), but the development experience is not. The first thing I wanted to do was to add a feature so I could add a task to my to-do list software which is not supported by Alexa. It turns out that you cannot construct a sentence along the lines of "Tell Asana to add a task: ". You can't actually have a 'slot' which cont…

"You can't actually have a 'slot' which contains a freeform piece of text " What about AMAZON.SearchQuery?

This is the correct solution. The Alexa Skills Kit contains the Amazon.SearchQuery slot which meets your needs, but Lex doesn't. This is one of the two missing slots from Alexa in Lex. If you read articles regarding Lex slots you might get inaccurate info as they are slightly differing products.

Re: Amazon’s Alexa Has 80k Apps and No Runaway Hit

#30

Post by hanoz »

Despite often seeming like a thin veneer of natural language processing on top of a search engine, I'm sure most users think of their voice assistants, or are willing them to be, a general AI agent. They don't want to have to care what app/skill/web-scrape is involved in enabling a response.

The whole skills ecosystem feels like an awkward stopgap on the path to AI. The language required to invoke them feels particularly clunky - "Alexa, ask ThingFinder about a thing" - and then, is the user supposed to be talking to ThingFinder now, or Alexa? She still sounds like Alexa, but she doesn't seem quite herself.

As developer choosing an invocation name is fraught with difficulty. There are only so many natural sounding names for something which does a particular thing, without incongruously inserting some invented branding word onto it - "Alexa open Tidy Tide Tables". If someone's already using the most natural name you are free to use exactly the same, but then who knows whose skill will be launched? And you'd better make sure your skill's name doesn't clash with anything else in the world at large, like the entire history of music for example, "Alexa play Wicked Game". It's all a bit of a mess.

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