
Amazon’s roadmap for Alexa is scarier than anything Facebook or Twitter is doing - notkaiho
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/11/08/amazons-roadmap-for-alexa-is-scarier-than-anything-facebook-or-twitter-is-doing/
======
merricksb
Original article discussed earlier:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501341)

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hombre_fatal
Now this article is marked as [dupe] and won't appear in HN's pagination.
Shouldn't the comments be merged into the original then?

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helen___keller
Meh. I've owned an Alexa for a few years and I've been pretty underwhelmed.

Most of its functionality was pretty useless once the novelty factor wore off.
I don't have a smarthome or anything crazy like that, so the extent of useful
functionality remaining is setting timers by speaking while i'm cooking, and
asking about weather when I'm in a rush in the morning.

Even that it performs poorly. Sometimes it just starts talking when I didn't
address it, which is annoying. Often it cant hear me from the next room over,
which is annoying. It has difficulty understanding accents which is annoying.

I've certainly never found it would be more convenient to use for making
amazon purchases as opposed to using my computer or phone, and I don't
subscribe to _any_ music service, which alexa bugs me about every time I tried
using it for playing music, so I just don't do that anymore.

Even the most simple novelty commands ("alexa bark") have managed to find ads
attached to them in recent months (really. She advertises some advanced bark
skill to me).

If Alexa started summoning me it would be unplugged that day.

~~~
AgloeDreams
I do have a bunch of smart home gadgets (most rooms in the house have Philips
hue, some smart plugs for things like a christmas tree, a smart Air
Conditioner, plus the xbox control skill) I also have 2 Echos and 2 Google
home (nest home?!) products.

In my experience Alexa sucks at voice recognition in creatively bad ways. Most
importantly, if I want to turn on lights for a room, it has taken to making a
very subtle variant of the room I asked for and then goes into a lengthy 'I
could not find the room 'living rooms' what device did you mean?' (or my
personal favorite, turning off the Xbox instead which turns off the tv, while
you sit there dumbfounded staring at the off TV now[It sometimes turns our tv
on if I turn on the bedroom lights too!]) But she says it rather slow and it's
really annoying as you wait the extra 10 seconds. In most cases it would be
faster to get up and actually use the light switch.

To think this is actually much better than it used to be, back at 1.0 it was
very bad, finding things very far off or responding to 'turn on living room'
with 'According to webster's, a living room is a room where..' Obviously the
only response as a human is: 'I KNOW WHAT A LIVING ROOM IS, I'M IN A DARK ONE,
I WANT IT TO BE BRIGHTER.'

The Google(NEST?!) home works great and is generally right, but saying 'okay
google' is pretty dumb. (also creepy)

~~~
Moru
I prefer muscle memory before voice battle any day of the week.

------
gambiting
"If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never
interacted with Alexa"

I love when people live in a bubble. I know exactly one person who has a voice
assistant, and it's not even Alexa.

~~~
BurritoAlPastor
You know exactly one person who owns an iPhone?

~~~
gambiting
Well, two, but neither one of them uses Siri.

~~~
pojzon
I find it weird people cannot understand, some dont see a point in using an
assistant. Most productive people i know actually completely negate those
"fancy" techs and stick to known old stuff. And those are not grandpas but
30-35yr olds.

~~~
melling
I'm over 50. I use Alexa and Siri every day. Of course, I've always been this
way. I've heard that the old thing "does everything I want it do it" for
decades.

There are plenty of people on the Internet, for example, explaining why
electric cars won't work for them today because they need to drive 500 miles
every Monday...

People think we'll have self-driving cars within a decade but voice assistants
will remain primitive?

Now that there's a financial incentive to improve voice user interfaces (VUI),
they will improve rapidly. Hopefully, there will be a great open source option
(like Linux), but I'm not waiting... After watching Star Trek and HAL as a
child, I thought we'd be talking with computers decades ago.

~~~
pojzon
Comparing voice assistant to an electric car is like comparing ebook to a
private jet..

~~~
melling
Do you think the technology in a voice assistant is in the hardware device on
your counter?

The Deep Learning in natural language processing is probably more difficult
than in self-driving cars.

~~~
dmortin
Language processing can compare inputs to stored voice samples.

It is simpler than self driving cars which have to navigate a completely
dynamic environment with many autonomous actors and make good decisions very
quickly.

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crazygringo
Of most tech privacy concerns, this one seems like the least of my worries.

Because after 5 years, Alexa _still_ doesn't work well enough for most people
except to set a kitchen timer, play music, or check the outdoor temperature.

So a more "proactive" Alexa will realistically mean... what? Probably nothing
more than the kind of notifications you might get on your phone already, only
spoken. At best, "Leave early for your commute because traffic is bad." or
"You might be running out of toilet paper, should I order more?"

If even that. Google knows a lot about me -- it can infer events from my
e-mail, commutes from my Maps usage, etc. All Amazon knows is what I shop for
and maybe occasionally watch on TV. Not a whole lot to be proactive about
there.

~~~
shantly
> Because after 5 years, Alexa still doesn't work well enough for most people
> except to set a kitchen timer, play music, or check the outdoor temperature.

Same with the others. Google's seems to be the best, but it's still not great.
Given where we were with custom-trained (to your own voice) locally-processed
speech-to-text almost 20 friggin' years ago, it's hard to imagine that
wouldn't be at least as good as the spying cloud AI mumbo-jumbo by now, had
those being available and "free" not taken all the money, interest, and talent
away from that.

~~~
dawg-
I got a free Google home mini last year for buying some other thing...I was
blown away by how truly bad it is compared to what the marketing leads people
to believe. It's honestly useless for most of the tasks they advertise it
being able to do. Most of the calendar functions only work 50% of the time. It
can set timers pretty consistently. Sometimes I can get it to change the
thermostat. It usually plays the music I ask for. More often than not it takes
2-3 different tries before I can word my request in a way that it will
understand.

Honestly if I had paid for it I would have probably wanted my money back.
Maybe that's why they are giving them out for free.

~~~
shantly
Yeah, kitchen timers & alarms are about the only thing Siri gets right often
enough that it's not less work, on average, to just go do what you need to do
with tappy-tappies instead.

------
EL_Loco
> "If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never
> interacted with Alexa"

What?? Replace "planet" with "United States". I doubt outside Europe and North
America Alexa is that pervasive. I only know one person who has it in their
home, and I know a bunch of rich people who shop at Amazon. It's just nowhere
near common in my large, very populated country.

~~~
xibalba
> Replace "planet" with "United States".

Not even. Replace United States with... some very small subset of the United
States.

I guess the bubble is very real.

~~~
dleslie
The Valley Effect is real.

------
imgabe
I have Alexa via the Fire TV stick. I like it because you have to physically
push a button to activate the microphone. It's nice to search for a movie
without having to deal with the onscreen keyboard, but that's about it.

The article is very vague about what exactly Amazon is going to do. It doesn't
sound like it would be anything more than Google Assistant is already doing by
reading your email and automatically adding flights and hotel reservations to
your calendar. I've even had Google automatically suggest a gas station on the
way to return a rental car based on the reservation info, which was a little
creepy, but I have to admit, convenient.

------
tristor
I take extraordinary measures to thwart, disable, or otherwise interfere with
"voice assistants" within my home. One of the trends that's very upsetting for
me is the injection of connectivity with voice assistants and IOT into
EVERYTHING. It's impossible to buy a decently rated / high-end washer and
dryer that doesn't want to connect to WiFi to sync to Google/Amazon for Alexa
and Works with Google Assistant, and until you connect it somewhere they leave
open a Bluetooth endpoint. This is commonplace with many household items.

Good news is, at least for now, it's easy to thwart Internet connectivity.
Simply create a new SSID, connect them to it, and then delete the SSID. Make
sure you set up WPA2 as part of it, so that if someone in the future creates
the same SSID as a rogue/spoof, that it'll fail to connect. Once most devices
connect to WiFi they internally disable Bluetooth automatically as it's used
for IOT setup.

I look at what Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others are doing with
voice assistants and IOT and I just stare in abject horror. We're setting
ourselves up for a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare of a future and everybody
just seems to be okay with it. These roadmaps don't give me much hope for the
future.

~~~
notkaiho
Thank you for this "workaround", I'm definitely going to look at doing this
when, inevitably, all devices I replace when they fail will come with IoT
nonsense.

Also, I'd argue that the "Alexa is so dumb, it doesn't understand half of what
I tell it" crowd here are missing the point, and the point is what you said

------
SavageBeast
I'll be more concerned about this when my Alexas can turn my lights off an on
consistently, without issue, day over day for a period of weeks.

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intellent
I really like the sound quality of Amazon’s newest Echo Dot generation
compared to it size and price.

However, in my experience Alexa is still pretty stupid. The only things it
does well, is to play music, switch lights and read Wikipedia articles.

The one thing I'm scared of is Alexa sending everything it hears to Amazon,
and not only things I said after the trigger word. I know for a fact, Alexa
constantly records even today, because it can filter "trigger word in the
middle of a sentence" scenarios, when no actual request is intended. I really
do hope, that only actual requests (or false-positives) are currently sent to
the AWS cloud.

If that won’t be the case anymore in the future, I’ll be out.

~~~
SavageBeast
I spent some time taking apart how Alexa must work myself. My thinking on this
is guided by the fact that there are only a handful of Wake Words available.
Given that there are only 4, I'm thinking the ability to recognize those Wake
Words is in firmware on the device (such tech was commercially available back
in 1995 when I played with a demo piece of hardware that did just that).
Decoding a wake word from a stream of audio locally on the device without
making a persistent recording of it or sending a recording off-device is fine
with me.

However the more complex parsing of what ever comes after the Wake Word needs
to be sent off as an audio stream to some cloud operation for parsing where
more horsepower is available. This also seems quite reasonable to me. Sure, it
could be done on the device but this would mean a hotter CPU on the device and
a generally more expensive Alexa. Certainly no more $29 Echo Dots.

Is Alexa listening all the time? Hell yes it is! Is Alexa recording everything
you say, everything you watch on TV, every time the dog barks and sending it
back to Amazon for archival? Its possible but consider the economics of
storing that much data as audio. Storage is cheap but thats quite a burden. Is
AMZN keeping a parsed version of everything it hears from your device and
dumping the raw audio version? Its technically possible but again, consider
the economics of such a thing.

Not to mention, how many Alexas are going to be sold after someone here posts
smoking gun proof Alexa is constantly or even at some batched interval sending
off large chunks of data which are in fact full voice recordings?

I'm not going to waste my time on this experiment but anybody who is good with
Wireshark could perform an analysis to quickly disprove this whole notion.

------
dmortin
" If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never
interacted with Alexa."

Really? Alexa is not available everywhere and it supports a limited number of
languages, so if their language is not supported then people may not buy it,
because not everyone wants to converse with Alexa via a foreign language.
(Also, pronunication issues can cause speech recognition problems if one
speaks, e.g. English or Spanish with a heavy accent.)

~~~
Lio
I wouldn't have a voice assistant in the house myself but even so I've still
interacted with one. Mostly in the form of "Hey Alexa play Rick Astley as loud
as you can" at the end of video calls with one of my colleagues...

(before hanging up obviously. I mean I don't want to have to hear that. :P )

------
AJ007
I think the CCPA is going to scare the shit out of people when they realize it
isn’t just a subpoena for a murder investigation that will get your Alexa
history dumped, but some random dude who has a photocopy of your drivers
license can now get a massive dump of every single thing Amazon recorded
through your Alexa. That’s scary.

------
deegles
I think the author hasn't looked deeply at what Facebook and Twitter are
doing.

~~~
shantly
Facebook, sure, but what's Twitter up to? Muddling along until they get cheap
enough that Microsoft decides to buy them?

------
sly010
If only there was a way to avoid having an Amazon smart speaker in my home...

~~~
joshuaheard
I've refused to buy one, but my daughter has one that she uses as a voice-
activated radio and alarm clock. I think most people want the voice activated
features and are unaware of the data collection capabilities of the device.
There must be some balance between them. This might be a role for government.

------
jmuguy
Oof that header image. Good indicator that the article doesn't have much going
on - other than the author cooking up yet another dystopian future where
robots steal our medicine, or whatever.

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rsync
"Simply put: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all trillion dollar companies
because data is the most valuable resource in the world, and Alexa is among
the world’s greatest data collectors."

... the value of which is a massive bubble due to the (mistaken) notion that
if we _just pile up enough garbage_ we can somehow wring gold from it. The
gold, of course, being the ability to manipulate people into buying _a
different type of garbage_.

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chatmasta
The difference is that Amazon's core business is not built around extracting
private data and packaging it into an ad targeting platform.

~~~
pwagland
What do you think Amazon do? Their entire store is an ad targeting platform.

~~~
samatman
I almost wish this were true, Amazon's recommendation algorithm is terrible.

I'm always reminded that Amazon started with books, when I buy a vacuum
cleaner and the site concludes I must want to buy a whole bunch more vacuum
cleaners.

------
kirykl
I've never had a voice assistant ask "Was that answer correct?" or say "Ohh
that's what you meant" [Edit: I've only used Siri]

The idea of voice assistant predicting what the user wants seems impossible
without that feedback.

If companies can convince the user that their assistant knows what they want,
then it can actually just push out what it wants and users will comply.

~~~
cmonfeat
For what it's worth, Alexa does ask for feedback about the accuracy and
helpfulness of it's answers now.

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rawoke083600
Biggest issue I found with Alexa is... Amazon doesn't know enough about me.
Specially here in South Africa, where most stuff is still Google Dominated.

Alexa, doesn't know: -Where I live

-My Music Preferences

-That I have YouTube Premier

-That I listen to afrikaans artist

-My Search history, and what I expect whey I ask/search for general stuff.

-Can't talk to my ChromeCast(sic ?)

-Didn't know where i drove to yesterday.

Basically I need to get a Google-Home

------
debt
None of that is scary. Moreso invasive and annoying. Perfecting Alexa in any
meaningful way will take decades unless business interest shift away from it
completely.

This is jus another hack some suit is probably pitching Bezos on but has no
real roadmap for actually achieving it.

Propping the product up with more crap.

------
dmortin
Do most people in the US use some smart speaker at home and give commands via
voice?

I'm not in the US, so I'm curious how pervasive it is. Is it the minority who
doesn't use Alexa and co.?

~~~
shantly
No, far, far from most. Most people in certain tech-heavy cities, maybe.

Now, if you count voice assistants on phones, tablets, and laptops/desktops,
most probably _have access_ to at least one of those and maybe even most have
tried it at least once. I doubt most (as in, over 50%) use them on a regular
basis, though. Probably way under half.

------
njacobs5074
"If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never
interacted with Alexa, you’re both missing out and not really missing out."

First world arrogance. First world problem.

~~~
thedaemon
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World)
First World is a term used for countries that are aligned with NATO. It has no
basis in what you think it means.

