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

Post by xauronx » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #47

lbacaj wrote: post #32

Anecdotally a developer friend of mine strongly suspects, most people, are like him and not actually using these home speakers very much. I’ve been working on a an Audio App that reads any articles to you for iOS/Android and planned to bring it to the Echo and he seems to suggest my efforts are totally wasted. Although their market reach seems to be massive, likely related to their cheap price, not surprised by this…

Pretty much same, the Wink integration lets us turn on/off lights and do other things like “Turn on Movie Theater” which dims certain lights and turns off all others. We use Alexa to play music when we just want something going in the background as well. Additionally we use timers and the grocery list. Wife uses the daily news rundown. Kids ask Alexa questions (what’s the fastest bird), have it make fart sounds, and…

Post by xauronx » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 12:32 AM UTC

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…

Post by Proven » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 12:51 AM UTC

Post by AlphaSite » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 1:09 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #152

abakker wrote: post #87

The problem is that Alexa is just a consumer voice command line. UI discoverability is impossible, and everything that you can do is just a utility that does something else. There are no native apps because everything that it can do is just an IO to something else. If they actually get conversational, this will change, but until then, it’s just a command line with no man page.

> The problem is that Alexa is just a consumer voice command line. UI discoverability is impossible, and everything that you can do is just a utility that does something else This is a really important point, and both a strength and a weakness. The iPhone began as essentially a front end to existing services (with visual discovery, which a voice interface inherently lacks). I used to name mine "FEP" (as in Front End…

Post by ionised » Wed, Mar 13, 2019, 12:34 PM UTC

melling wrote: post #130

tomc1985 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, which is how much of the world still lives. Spotty internet access at best

That’s why you don’t see rapid iteration in the rest of the world. Google, Apple, Amazon can update their voice devices continuously without a local software release. If the next generation voice algorithms needs twice as much hardware, your $30 device will still work because the processing is in the cloud. Video games, for example, have been trying to move to the cloud. Put all the code in the cloud and just send th…