then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.
This is what’s happening to us.
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce " - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.
If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?
Before using LLMs, you had to list every single variation that someone might say to trigger a command - “utterances” in every language.
Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?
I don't know about Alexa specifically, but I've seen stories where the police requested Ring videos from a neighbor's house, including cameras inside the neighbor's house that they could not have known of without Amazon's assistance, that were not pointed outside, and even, if I remember correctly, one that was in the neighbor's business in a completely different location, where the justification pointedly identified…
How is that weird of the police to ask tho?
I would say it would be standard practice to go check all neighbors with sightline for any kind of recording. Local or cloud based.
The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.
it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway.
i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that w…
Google has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini. I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting t…
I'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.
I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer.
I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".
>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a…
Imagine being on the support team trying to troubleshoot when something goes wrong for a customer. Maybe that's the catch ... there is no support.
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that w…
I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that w…
I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
I don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.
>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale. I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials. On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpo…
"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience. Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneab…
> "On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.