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

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

#91

Post by jxdxbx »

Voice is mostly inconvenient and slow unless you have certain disabilities, at times when your hands are otherwise occupied (driving, doing the dishes, maybe when out-and-about via Siri or Google Assistant) and for the basic in-home stuff that people have already discovered (music, home automation, news, weather, timers, random fact from wikipedia).

At this stage I'd be very surprised if there was some new amazing use case. There are always going to be niche uses that some people really like. I create notes in Drafts on iOS via Siri all the time, for instance.

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

#92

Post by Eridrus »

steeve wrote: post #12

I have several, along with Google Home too. They all suffer from the same issue: it's awkward to use with third party skills. Unless they are the highly integrated ones (Spotify, Logitech Harmony) in which case it's great. It's the same for Siri, the API is so restrictive. The whole "tell XX to YY" isn't convenient. One workaround on Google Home is to use IFTTT, and in that case you can customize the whole phrase and…

You don't really need ifttt for this, both platforms have some form of "shortcuts"

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

#93

Post by mikob »

I think voice is underutilized as a 3rd, powerful complimentary interface; mouse and keyboard being the first and second. A smart speaker doesn't enable me to be more productive on the tool I use most, my computer.

I'm building something that I think is much more powerful than smart speakers for the following reasons.

1. It's software and lives on the hardware that you already have... your computer. It's not a standalone hardware device silo'd from the existing tooling you use daily.

2. It provides visual feedback (live transcription, with colors indicating what's understood), because it can. Smart speakers can't.

3. It's a browser extension, so it easily integrates with all the webapps that you use daily: gmail, google docs, hacker news... any webapp you want it to.

4. Plugins are intuitive to develop and open-source so anyone can build off and improve them (https://github.com/lipsurf/plugins)

It's a work in progress, but in case anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lipsurf-voice-cont...

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

#95

Post by CharlesW »

908087 wrote: post #68
ppierald wrote: post #63

We use it to "set a timer for 10 minutes" when cooking something and "what's the weather for tomorrow" to know whether to bring a coat or not.

Either of which could be done just as quickly by setting a timer on your oven/microwave or pulling out your phone.

Using Alexa for tasks like this is a qualitatively different experience. Hands-free/voice control can be very useful in that your hands can be busy, and you don't need to find or walk to and manipulate a device or remote.

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

#96

Post by ravenstine »

A lot of people don't even realize the Alexa mobile app even exists, despite the fact they must have installed it at one point in order to set up their Echo device. Hence, discoverability is pretty low. I don't know why Amazon still hasn't attempted to address this issue. If all they want is for people to buy shit from Amazon through it, why bother with all these custom "skills"?

Generally, however, I think we've overestimated the utility of a voice command line with no actual intelligence behind it. Unless you are using Alexa to control actual devices like lights or a Roobma vacuum, most of the apps for it are either useless or better suited for a visual interface.

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

#97

Post by wtmt »

* Setting a timer or an alarm

* Asking for the weather

* Play some (desired) music

Are there other things that these devices ("smart speakers") are really useful for?

A voice activated browser or computer, on the other hand, is extremely useful for those who don't know to type or to use a browser (or a computer). It could be people who are not privileged enough to learn or people who find these very difficult to learn or even small kids. These systems allow the user to accomplish what they want (like searching or opening a website or a game, for example).

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

#98

Post by ravenstine »

k__ wrote: post #23
gtsteve wrote: post #6

I bought an Echo speaker when they first came out. The sound quality is impressive (to my untrained ear), but the development experience is not. The first thing I wanted to do was to add a feature so I could add a task to my to-do list software which is not supported by Alexa. It turns out that you cannot construct a sentence along the lines of "Tell Asana to add a task: ". You can't actually have a 'slot' which cont…

"You can't actually have a 'slot' which contains a freeform piece of text " What about AMAZON.SearchQuery?

That's a relatively new slot type.

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

#99

Post by ajford »

lbacaj wrote: post #49
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem with your app on Alexa is the interaction model - if your app could push to my Alexa so I can open an article on my phone and then say "Alexa read this article", or use the iOS share menu and share to your app on my Alexa that'd be pretty nice. But I don't see myself saying "Alexa, tell Articulu to read ...." if that's the interaction model it'd force.

Makes sense thanks for that feedback.

Totally agreed with GP. Needing to somehow uniquely identify an article over voice assistant will be painful. However, something like Pocket, where you can push articles/pages into the record and call them back by voice or tag would be cool, especially with the ability to queue articles in a desired order.

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

#100

Post by wvenable »

StevePerkins wrote: post #18

My Echo was an interesting novelty at first. But a couple years in now, it is essentially (in order of usefulness): 1. An alarm clock / kitchen timer 2. A thing that tells me the weather report during morning coffee, so I know what to wear 3. A DJ that my kids yell at to play pop music If it died tomorrow, I'd probably just go back to using my phone for these 3 things rather than buy a new one. I can't imagine gettin…

For me add:

4. Shopping List.

And that's a killer feature for me; it's so damn convenient to use a voice interface to add items to the shopping list as you run out of item that I'd probably replace it just for that.

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