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Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#12With privacy legislation getting strengthened every year it was probably becoming a huge liability.
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#13This makes sense based on my experiences with Alexa. Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines. Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
What I want from Alexa: “Alexa, do this” Done. What I get from Alexa: “Hi there, let’s have a conversation where I pester you about products and ask questions about other things I can do, etc.”
Wonder if Alexa could predictively suggest ordering from uber eats? Like
- "You had a long day, shall I order pad thai for you?"
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#14Meta and Amazon missed out on smartphones as a platform but both succeeded in other areas (VR headsets and Alexa). I guess it's apparent now that they both overpaid to get there. I use my Google Nest hub to watch YouTube which shows me ads. I think Amazon should've doubled down on the Echo Show and video content delivery (they do own twitch after all). The real money for platforms like Alexa/echo is content delivery,…
Replacing the phone sounds like a very difficult task.
I use Apple TVs with the phone as a remote, but I wonder what kind of utility an Amazon device would have to provide for me to consider it over an Apple TV. And similarly for an Android user to consider an Amazon device over a Chromecast.
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I want from Alexa: “Alexa, do this” Done. What I get from Alexa: “Hi there, let’s have a conversation where I pester you about products and ask questions about other things I can do, etc.”
Wonder if Alexa could predictively suggest ordering from uber eats? Like - "You had a long day, shall I order pad thai for you?"
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Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#16No post body was provided.
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#17If anything, it makes me hopeful a surveillance device wasn’t able to get traction with most folks.
Indeed. I turned mine off as soon as I saw Alexa transcripts being used in court cases. If one can't conspire to commit crimes in one's own home, where can you?
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#18[deleted]
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#19I think the real problem was that the product just wasn't what people imagined it would be.
When Alexa was first announced in 2014, I thought, "OK, right now it can only do simple things like play a song on Spotify or tell you the weather. But they're going to iterate rapidly, and in 10 years we'll be talking to it like a computer from Star Trek."
The rapid progress of GPT-3 and friends seemed to confirm this.
But here we are in 2022 and... we're nowhere near Star Trek, nor even GPT-3-ish levels of conversation. There seemed to be a failure of imagination: you wanted some cool sci-fi stuff, maybe shared storytelling like AI Dungeon[0]. But you got triggers for home automation, which 90% of people don't care about.
Re: Business Insider: Amazon is gutting its voice-assistant Alexa
#20This makes sense based on my experiences with Alexa. Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines. Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
What I want from Alexa: “Alexa, do this” Done. What I get from Alexa: “Hi there, let’s have a conversation where I pester you about products and ask questions about other things I can do, etc.”
> What I want from Alexa: “Alexa, do this” Done.
For what it's worth, this is largely how the Google Assistant works from my "smart" speakers.