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The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

bloomberg.com

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Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#51

Post by GCA10 »

bvm wrote: post #31
zoidb wrote: post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

Bloomberg has really gone off the deep end of the design pool. It seemed to start with those somewhat janky, but pretty nice zero-padded headline overlays on the pics, and culminated in this: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-design/ which...well.

Big budget syndrome. If you've got $200 million to make a movie, the bridges MUST blow up.

Bloomberg stands alone among U.S. media companies as a place with lots of available cash for whatever projects catch the top folks' fancy.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#52

Post by eclipxe »

amzn-336495 wrote: post #47

The story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all tho…

Yeah, that's not how it works at all. Not sure how you're making that conclusion?

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#53

Post by jonknee »

paulcole wrote: post #5

"An e-commerce company wouldn’t seem like an obvious leader in [augmented reality]." Amazing that even today articles are still calling Amazon an e-commerce company. I wonder if this is an image Amazon actively cultivates or if it's just consistently lazy reporting?

E-commerces makes up the vast majority of their revenue and employees... I've read a lot worse descriptions of a company.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#54

Post by kuschku »

gervase wrote: post #49
ccozan wrote: post #25

I was looking for a fair comparison between Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa and I stumbled across this [0]. I find it interesting because it seems you would need all of them to answer all your questions. Do you have also some personal experince comparing with Now , Siri or Cortana? What went really bad or amazed in terms of speech recognition and speech comprehension? [0] http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-prod…

I can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri. There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me. Google Now has a pretty wide range…

> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE.

> She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.

And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech.

You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did.

Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training.

Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#55

Post by amzn-336495 »

eclipxe wrote: post #52
amzn-336495 wrote: post #47

The story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all tho…

Yeah, that's not how it works at all. Not sure how you're making that conclusion?

That is how it works at all. The company took in $107,000,000,000 dollars in 2015 but were just forced to layoff off engineers. Right, no despotic dictatorship banana republic stuff going on there.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#56

Post by coldpie »

daveguy wrote: post #6
zoidb wrote: post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

Holy crap that is annoying. Is there a way to pause all animated gifs in chrome? Congratulations, Bloomberg, you captured the essence of a Geocities site. This has to be a not so subtle graphic design joke.

For Firefox users, I recommend the Toggle Animated GIFs add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat...

Other useful config settings: image.animation_mode, media.autoplay.enabled

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#57

Post by madelinecameron »

zoidb wrote: post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

I got yelled at and downvoted on Reddit because I said their "What is Code" article was a horrific disaster of design

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod...

CW: REALLY BRIGHT COLORS, LARGE TEXT AND ANNOYING GIFS.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#58

Post by legitster »

nxzero wrote: post #46
zoidb wrote: post #2

I wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..

If you like that gif, checkout Bloomberg's 404 gif... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11527578

This made my day.

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#59

Post by goshx »

I am waiting for the day when someone will sneak in those magic words into a TV commercial to wake up Echo, Siri, etc. Imagine like a DDoS caused by a TV commercial on Super Bowl.

I have the Echo and sometimes it scares the * out of me when something on my TV sounds similar to "Alexa", like "a lexus".

Re: The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

#60

Post by TheDong »

amzn-336495 wrote: post #55
eclipxe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's not how it works at all. Not sure how you're making that conclusion?

That is how it works at all. The company took in $107,000,000,000 dollars in 2015 but were just forced to layoff off engineers. Right, no despotic dictatorship banana republic stuff going on there.

It didn't "layoff off [sic]" engineers; they quit.

It could be argued with that much revenue they could afford a better work environment for their employees, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

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