
Amazon Unveils New Alexa Dialog Modeling for Natural, Cross-Skill Conversations - georgecarlyle76
https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/9615b190-9c95-452c-b04d-0a29f6a96dd1/amazon-unveils-novel-alexa-dialog-modeling-for-natural-cross-skill-conversations
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sambroner
My own thinking about conversational AI changed recently after a coworker of
mine pointed out that most dictative conversations only require 2 or 3 pieces
of carried context. That’s a level of depth that does not require a massive
technical breakthrough, but could be semi reasonably solved with tremendous
effort (exists), and current technologies.

It’s true that a good PA brings much earlier context, and “out of band”
context to the table, but a customer support service (e.g. delta) really does
not.

With this in mind, I think these conversational agents are going to be much
more performant than expected in the fairly near future.

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meowface
Some chatbots have been pretty passable at holding simple conversations for a
while. Cleverbot's initial version started in 1986, and seems to have been
okay at conversations even then. I remember using it in the early 2000s and
being fairly impressed. I don't even think it's using any ML currently, and
it's still giving me pretty decent results when I tried using it again just
now.

Alexa has more complex requirements (it's funny when Cleverbot gives an
occasional nonsensical response, but not so funny when Alexa unexpectedly
orders you a $2,000 lawn gnome - okay, still kind of funny), but I definitely
agree with you. I don't think this is a challenge that requires anything close
to AGI, unless you want to start having truly insightful and philosophical
conversations with a computer.

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camjohnson26
The existing implementations still have a long way to go. Here’s the chat I
just had with cleverbot, the first thing it gave me after going to the site:

> Good afternoon. Do you know any good places to get dinner?

> Mot really.

> What about dessert?

> That's if you're a good bot.

> Not for you, for me.

> Okay..

Completely useless. I asked Alexa to find me the article on hacker news from
today that talks about chat bots, she said “Sorry, I don’t know that one”

As a random, unscientific test it’s not very useful yet.

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cududa
...dude. The point never had anything to do with being the modern “PA” you’re
imagining. It’s a chat bot designed 30+ years. It’s a neat (and at the time,
breakthrough) for having conversations. It’s not intended to go find
information for you..

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camjohnson26
That’s the point. It might sound vaguely human but without the context to find
and deliver information it’s completely useless

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hammock
I'm interested in someone's POV on Amazon's skill-forward approach - relying
on third parties to create skills that are actually good, and then helping
them talk to each other - compared to Google Assistant's approach, which seems
to be focused on first-party capabilities as the Actions on Google ecosystem
is not so developed.

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jedberg
I think both have their merits and it surprises me that both of them don’t do
more of what the other one is doing. First party skills are a great way to
make the platform more integrated and useful for the user but third-party is a
great way to expand an ecosystem of skills they’ve never thought Of.

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devoply
With their moves with Nest I don't think Google's play is to be a platform...
But rather they want to own all of that stuff and tell you what to do with it.
They want to be an agent and not a platform.

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jedberg
They do, but that move surprises me. You would think they’d want to be a
platform so they could collect data that they didn’t even think about
collecting. They could still own the data even if they were a platform they
would just have to share little chunks of it with different third-parties.

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menacingly
I think using Alexa conversation style is just awful. I wish it would move
toward a more explicit list of items -> descend -> new list of items approach.

The area where Alexa is most likely to show its warts is when you fall for the
trap of trying to engage in a normal dialog with it.

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krisroadruck
Agreed. I also wouldn't mind a lot less verbosity when giving it a command
rather than a query. Turn off the lights, or set a timer for 15 minutes could
probably be confirmed with an "Ok" or even just a pleasant chirp/beep sound.
"Ok Turning 15 light off" "You got it, timer set for 15 minutes" is
unnecessary.

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inlined
Alexa has had this feature for a while. You can set it to do a quick beep on
success.

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jedberg
I’ve noticed that my Alexa no longer requires me to ask a request of certain
skills in a lot of cases so it seems to be getting smarter about choosing
skills automatically. This seems like a natural next step.

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ravenstine
They might not have had to do that in the first place(not that it's
necessarily a _bad_ feature) if they didn't shoot themselves in the foot by
making skill discoverability exceptionally difficult. The fact that the Alexa
mobile app continues to slower and slower, and was a slow and clunky piece of
junk right out of the gate, certainly doesn't help.

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Causality1
Sometimes I worry that there are certain computational tasks which
simultaneously require one human mind to encompass a large portion of their
structure while that structure is too large to fit into a human mind, or too
large to work with on a practical basis. You know, a "kernel of functionality"
that can't be compartmentalized between multiple developers but still has to
scale to a truly massive size to perform the desired task.

I worry strong AI is such a task. I also worry there's a barrier somewhere in
conversational computing that will stop us from achieving much past a certain
threshold before the framework becomes unworkable. I often run into painful
reminders that our voice assistants are just Chinese rooms when it turns out
they're missing basic functionality like "take me to the McDonald's near the
Walmart".

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netwanderer3
Not a fan of Alexa at the moment, but I can totally picture it's going to be
absolutely massive and everywhere once 5G network is launched and more IoT
devices will flood the market. Amazon is pushing hard to make it more
ubiquitous and it just seems inevitable. Might be a good time to learn some
Alexa skills now.

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dajohnson89
I can see it now: job openings for Senior Alexa Engineer

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FigmentEngine
[https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/802455/senior-software-
engin...](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/802455/senior-software-engineer-
alexa-ai)

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dajohnson89
joke's on me.

