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Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

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Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#2

Post by dominotw »

>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.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#3

Post by chishaku »

dominotw wrote: post #2

>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?

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#4

Post by eva1984 »

chishaku wrote: post #3
dominotw wrote: post #2

>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?

This is an open question

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#6

Post by dominotw »

chishaku wrote: post #3
dominotw wrote: post #2

>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?

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 server side based on sessionid, but that still requires user to constantly prefix their conversations with 'tell app X ..'

These basic UX limitations make it impossible to build any serious application that can do more than 'joke of the day' type of stuff. All the apps in alexa app store are totally useless 'fart noise of the day' type of garbage.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#8

Post by danso »

Very nice! With all the great things they've announced today that apply to my work (Lightsail, Rekognition, Athena), I'm crossing my fingers that their next announcement is making speech recognition available as a separate API. And Python 3 support for Lambda.

Re: Amazon Lex – Build Conversational Voice and Text Interfaces

#9

Post by mtrn »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #5

Making the backend of Alexa and offering it to users is a killer feature. I have toyed with the idea of making an app with a voice interface. I was able to make an alexa app and looking at the preview pictures it looks similar.

> Making the backend of Alexa and offering it to users is a killer feature.

Same scheme that started AWS.

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