
Voice interfaces beginning to find their way into business - camurban
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/31/voice-interfaces-beginning-to-find-their-way-into-business/
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m0ngr31
I wrote an internal Alexa skill for [large cola company] a few years back. It
allowed them to ask for sales figures based on certain criteria (time frame,
category, vendor, ect.)

They never told me explicitly what it was for, but I assumed it was for
meetings where it was just easier to ask Alexa than look it up manually. Like
the article says, I imagine this will be more popular going forward.

Some of the intents that were part of the skill they requested were just too
long to say conformably. I'm guessing it was approved by someone just trying
to impress their boss by busting it out during a meeting.

~~~
sologoub
A lot of requests to BI teams are simply “what’s the <metric> for <some set of
dimensions> for the last/next <timeframe>”. Literally, thousands of analysts
just answer these one liners day in and day out.

More diligent/experienced people will know to ask the “whys”, and recommend
better insights, but generally it’s not much more than that and Alex can
handle a lot of these provided there is a robust enough dataset/reporting API
behind it.

~~~
sgt101
Not convinced, these kind of asks can get mopped up with a web app if there is
a robust dataset/API available.

BI teams get used / needed when the data needs fixing and also when the
question appears to be of the form above but in fact is of the form "I have a
new metric I want to explore across dimensions that are not in the data set"

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yeukhon
Wonder if this has been considered: mixing English and “insert your langauage
here”.

Also, perhaps not so relevant in 10-20 years, but some folks like my grandma
cannot speak mandarin. She can only speak local dialect, which is not covered
in any speech recongition package anywhere in the world. The best I can do is
make the program to understand a couple simple commands in her dialect, and
collect words spoken in her dialect to construct a response.

~~~
pmlnr
Hungarian here. I'm pretty certain our language recognition is not coming any
time soon, though I might see it in my lifetime.

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sgt101
Home : private space, known speaker.

Business : shared space, diverse multiple unknown speakers.

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perseiden
might be pretty cool for lab technicians to do routine calculations and
documentation, so they have their hands free.

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melling
Hopefully, voice as a user interface is almost here for everyone. I wrote this
little blog a couple weeks ago:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/voice-as-a-user-
inte...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/12/13/voice-as-a-user-interface-is-
almost-here/)

The Amazon and Google devices should get us to usability and usefulness.

