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Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.
It’s really annoying.
What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff. Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulf…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, did you actually verify that "it's listening all the time to what goes on"? The Echo devices are supposed to only turn on full power and start listening when they detect the activation word ("Alexa" by default).
How do they ‘detect’ the activation word without listening? Seems to me that is tautologically impossible. The definition of detect and listen are identical here. How do you detect sound waves without listening to them?
"Echo devices use on-device keyword spotting designed to detect when a customer says the wake word. This technology inspects acoustic patterns in the room to detect when the wake word has been spoken using a short, on-device buffer that is continuously overwritten. This on-device buffer exists in temporary memory (RAM); audio is not recorded to any on-device storage. The device does not stream audio to the cloud until the wake word is detected or the action button on the device is pressed. If it does not detect the wake word or if the action button is not pressed, no audio is sent to the cloud."
https://d1.awsstatic.com/product-marketing/A4B/White%20Paper...
What bothers me isn't just the wasted money and time. It's the opportunity cost of all of those devs not working on other stuff. Alexa pulled talent from everywhere throughout Amazon. It took up a huge portion of the hiring funnel for new devs. All of those people could have been doing useful, money-making, cost-cutting things instead. I can think of at least a dozen really brilliant devs I worked with in Amazon Fulf…
> “As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.”
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2018-letter-to...
Clearly, the answer is to have Alexa read a random unprompted ad every 5 minutes.
It already does a form of this. You might ask it the time, and it will reply with the time and some ad telling you about other things that it can do. It’s really annoying.
Having worked at startups that wanted to take Alexa into the enterprise space, I'll say that Amazon has been absolutely opposed to the idea, which feels like a missed opportunity. Up to a point, I can admire the product discipline that Amazon and Apple (Alexa and Siri) have shown in keeping their voice products focused on consumers. But after so many years, when do we finally get voice for the enterprise? At one time…
Generally in BigCo land you need a value prop that will allow your buyer to do 1 or 2 things (or a combo) - take out massive cost, or drive large incremental revenue. Most of the voice solutions I've seen kind of nibble around the edges of this, don't get traction, and slowly die a slow death somewhere deep in the middle of the RFP or evaluation process.
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I asked him to run me through the pitch, and John gave a practiced recital:
Most salespeople are human-centered and enjoy talking with other individuals — but they hate dealing with computers. If a salesperson is selling shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, the best part of their day will be talking to the customer; the worst part will be when they have to go back to the office and deal with their company's reporting software. More likely than not, this will be Salesforce, the most widely used software for tracking sales.
Salesforce is ugly. Their interface is clunky. The poor salesperson has to sit down, bring up the website, click on a bunch of buttons, and navigate through a bunch of forms. The worst day of high school math was probably more fun for them.
Celelot aimed to change that. Instead of dealing with Salesforce, the salesperson would simply pull out their phone and send a text message to the Celelot system. For example, "Spoke to Carol. I just sold 1 million bottles of shampoo to Sheraton Hotels, rev 500,000. Contract August 1. Delivery September 1." We would use a set of computer techniques known as Natural Language Processing, or NLP, to take a message like that and pull out all the fields that were significant to Salesforce:
Contact: Carol Harrington
Customer: Sheraton Hotels
Product: Shampoo
Quantity: 1,000,000
Revenue: $500,000
Close Date: August 1
Delivery Date: September 1
Celelot would automatically identify who sent the message, connect it with their Salesforce account, and log the information in the system. Salespeople would never have to interact with Salesforce directly.
Apart from streamlining the reporting process for Salesforce specifically, Celelot could potentially become the default interface for all sales-reporting software (a category officially known as Customer Relationship Managers, or CRMs, of which Salesforce and Pipedrive are two well-known examples). That would be game changing.
I use my Alexa all the time, but 99% of it is: Alexa, time! Alexa, set an alarm for 5 minutes! Alexa how many minutes left? Alexa, turn off/on all the lights! That’s basically it. I wrote some apps for it a long time ago to do custom stuff like read me some Reddit pages, but the SDK changed or something and eventually they just died and it wasn’t obvious to me how to recreate it/not worth the effort. I really wish th…
Doesn't https://mycroft.ai fit this purpose?
Looks like you can ssh in: https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/mark-ii/advanced/ssh-access
and has python running on it:
https://mycroft-ai.gitbook.io/docs/skill-development/introdu...
Has anyone got one though?
Voice isn't the thing, it's a mode of interacting with the thing.
The thing is: the digital home.
Amazon is comically dropping the ball here. They have the tablets. They have the TVs. They have the reach. They have the home security division. Integrate, integrate, integrate.
Alexa is just a mode of communicating with the digital home. It's a feature of the digital home, not a monster profit product by itself.
It's like thinking a stylus is where you'll make money on a business tablet. No, it's a way to input.
I have a Mycroft device that I'm playing with, but for the life of me, after years of using these devices, I cannot imagine getting a lot of utility in my home life.
I do think voice activation is great in certain circumstances, like when I'm driving, or riding my bike, but the rest of it does not offer much to me.
This is wonderful news. My gf has one in her living room. It is only used to play music, set a timer (usually watch is used) and adding things to a (third party) grocery list. Plus it's listening all the time to what goes on. I had one alexa device: a scanner that would read a barcode and add it to a shopping list (or you could talk to it -- ugh, had to keep it in a drawer). It was handy as I ran out of milk to just…
I'm curious, did you actually verify that "it's listening all the time to what goes on"? The Echo devices are supposed to only turn on full power and start listening when they detect the activation word ("Alexa" by default).
The speaker also starts recording a few seconds before a command is issued, meaning there’s likely more private information in the recordings than customers are aware of. from https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/12/18089090/amazon-ech...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/business/amazon-echo-murd...
Those two links are from two different murder cases for which Alexa/Amazon data was subpoenaed. There are probably others.