
Amazon’s Echo Brims with Groundbreaking Promise - ilamont
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/technology/the-echo-from-amazon-brims-with-groundbreaking-promise.html
======
sisk
Writing a bit about the Echo has been on my todo list but this article touches
on a lot of points I was thinking about. I got it thinking it would be a bit
of a gimmick—and to an extent, it still is at times. But, as the author found,
it has snuck into facets of my life. Shopping lists, weather, home automation,
etc.

The thing is, it's a natural interface with a decent interaction model.
Keyboards, mice, etc, have all become second nature to most of us but they're
still not truly natural. The Echo feels like one of the first voice-based
interfaces that isn't a complete gimmick. And the hardware does an amazing job
of perking up when I say the wake word and picking me out of a room full of
noise.

What really convinced me of it's value was when I started digging in to
writing a skill for it. My grandfather passed recently and my grandmother has
horrible eyesight. I wrote a skill that enables my grandmother to ask to start
a phone call. She is then asked who she would like to call. Once she says a
name, she receives a call on her landline, is greeted, and the call is
forwarded to the intended recipient. There was a small learning curve ("you
can't just say, 'call John,' you have to ask her to 'start a phone call'") but
it has worked and has provided an often confused elderly woman with poor
eyesight a straightforward way of connecting with her loved ones.

~~~
peteretep

        > Shopping lists, weather, home automation
    

Funny, I felt the article gave unusually short shrift to Siri, which I use for
all of those things, in addition to "What time is it in X?", alarms, and so
on.

Siri is not working so well when music plays, and I wish I could easily add
skills to it, so if they've cracked that then it's something.

~~~
Touche
I haven't used an iPhone in a while, does Siri have a wake word? Does it work
when the phone is in standby? Android has "Ok Google" but it doesn't work when
in standby and doesn't work from the distance that Echo does.

I think that's really its killer feature. You are in the pantry and notice
you're out of basil, you say "Alexa, add basil to my shopping list" and it's
done. No pulling out your phone, no unlock screens, you just say what you want
to happen and it works.

~~~
yoda_sl
As of the latest iPhone 6, you don't even need to have the iPhone plugged. You
trained Siri a few times by saying a few sentences and later you can say "hey
Siri" and it will start listening. Apple added some new chip which will be
listening for that key sentence and will only react to your voice, not someone
else. So no more funny joke from co-worker nor Podcast and in addition low
battery impact.

~~~
el_benhameen
As much as I want to like this feature, I've found it less than impressive. It
rarely picks me up on the first try, so I find myself shouting a very clearly-
enunciated "HEY SIRI" a few times, which kind of kills the magic. About 50% of
the time I just end up walking over to the phone and using my hands to
accomplish whatever I was trying to do. I'm not trying this from far away or
in a noisy environment, either. Admittedly an anecdote, but still frustrating.

------
VincentEvans
Surprised that no one in this thread brought up any concern about putting an
always-listening internet-connected device into their home... That is
connected to other things, like phones and even electrical devices, like
garage openers.

My wife likes to glue a sticky-note over the camera on my iMac.

~~~
chrisamiller
This is my concern as well.

My privacy threshold is pretty low (my username across most of the web is my
real name, for example). This, though, is an always-listening device in your
home, that connects directly to a company who's stated goal is to sell you
more things. That, combined with the potential for abuse/hacks/subpoenas,
crosses a line for me.

It feels a lot like the GPS trackers that insurance companies want to put in
your car, which I also think is a bridge too far.

~~~
pwython
Echo only transmits the audio command to Amazon after you invoke the wake word
"Alexa." It's "always-listening" but not "always-recording/transmitting." You
can easily verify this by looking at your network activity.

~~~
VincentEvans
... and there's absolutely no way it could ever be changed without your
knowledge or consent to do anything other than described!

Right?

~~~
lsaferite
Couldn't the same be said about the phone in your pocket as well?

~~~
VincentEvans
It could, yes. Perhaps everyone could be a little more suspicious of phones as
well.

------
sdabdoub
> the F.B.I.’s battle with Apple over encryption should prompt deep questions
> about a future of Internet-connected devices spread around our homes. Amazon
> has strong privacy protections in the Echo. It doesn’t stream anything
> without the wake word and it has a physical mute button that electrically
> disconnects the microphone but, as with all groundbreaking technology, there
> is no doubt we are entering new territory here.

At least there's minimal thought given to this issue...even if it is at the
end of an article claiming the Echo is the next best thing since anything.

------
pwython
I bought an Echo a couple of weeks ago, and I love controlling my Philips Hue
lights with it. If I'm on the couch watching a movie, I can just tell Alexa in
the kitchen to dim or turn off the living room lights. Setting a timer and
having the lights blink when it goes off is neat too. My kids love asking it
questions and playing music.

Right now that's pretty much all I use it for... I always forget the specific
commands to order an Uber, pizza, etc. Especially the IFTTT recipes (that
require you to say "trigger" first), or any of the downloadable "skills" \--
there's a specific syntax you have to use. I wish there were multiple, more
natural phrases for these actions.

"Alexa, where's my phone?" would be much more memorable than "Alexa, trigger:
find my phone."

~~~
ghaff
That's sort of the problem with voice interfaces. Unless it's smart enough to
actually have a degree of "understanding" about what you're trying to do--as
opposed to largely responding to a scripted command--there's a real issue
around discoverability and feedback that makes it less useful than one might
hope.

As was being discussed last week or so in some thread, it's a lot more like a
CLI (without any man pages or help available) than a GUI.

~~~
icebraining
Maybe it was mostly smoke and mirrors (I never actually used it), but for some
reason I feel like we still have reached the level of SHRDLU, which was
written in the 60s on a PDP-6! Just this excerpt sounds miles ahead of Siri et
all:

    
    
        Person: DOES A STEEPLE 
        Computer (interrupting): SORRY, I DON'T KNOW THE WORD "STEEPLE". 
        Person: A "STEEPLE" IS A STACK WHICH CONTAINS TWO GREEN CUBES AND A PYRAMID. 
        Computer: I UNDERSTAND. 
        Person: ARE THERE ANY STEEPLES NOW? 
        Computer: NO. 
        Person: BUILD ONE. 
        Computer: OK. (does it) 
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)

[http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/](http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/)

~~~
ghaff
I assume there was also some connection between this and the parser in the
Infocom games (which was written in MDL, essentially a variant of LISP and
also came out of the MIT AI lab a decade+ later).

They're all pretty constrained environments though. I used to play the Infocom
games quite a bit (and was even a tester at one point) and they were great but
you'd also frequently run into situations where you went through a lot of
trial and error to hit the right magical incantation.

This was around the same period that Lotus unveiled Hal to great fanfare. It
was an add-on to Lotus 1-2-3 that was supposed to let you interact with 1-2-3
more naturally. It was actually good for some things but it wasn't any kind of
breakthrough. I think because of GUIs among other things, a lot of the focus
on interacting with computers in natural language went away. It's only with
raw speech recognition finally becoming generally usable that it seems to be
getting some real attention again.

------
jonahx
The single funniest post I've ever read on HN was this response to the
original Echo promo video:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569219)

Original promo video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc)

That aside, I like the _idea_ of the Echo, just not the idea of giving Amazon
permanent eavesdropping rights in my home. Any home automation enthusiasts
know if there's open source software that provides similar services, but which
I could run myself?

~~~
gnulnx
Short answer: no. Long anwer: You can cobble something together, using either
[https://wit.ai](https://wit.ai) (sending your voice to the cloud) or CMU
Sphinx a.k.a. PocketSphinx
([https://wolfpaulus.com/journal/embedded/raspberrypi2-sr/](https://wolfpaulus.com/journal/embedded/raspberrypi2-sr/))
(keeping it all in-house)

------
david927
_“Early on in the product, to play music took eight or nine seconds, and it’s
just unusable when it’s like that,” Mr. Limp said. “Now it’s often 1,000
milliseconds_

If only there was another way to say 1,000 milliseconds...

~~~
narsil
10e6 microseconds? ;)

The quote came from Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices. I
feel that people in senior positions such as the person quoted are far more
focused on metrics and tangible results (e.g. "reduced Q4 defect ppm by X%")
so it probably becomes second nature to alter the phrases used favorably. To a
passive listener or someone skimming the article, milliseconds can seem far
better.

Besides, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people need to think for a second
before realizing 1000 milliseconds = 1 second.

~~~
loco5niner
aka, marketing-speak

------
chuckgreenman
Echo is set apart from other voice platforms in that voice is the only way you
are supposed to interact with it. The vast majority of things that Siri or
Google Now can do, can also be done through the touch screen, and it often
seems strange to talk to your phone.

Echo doesn't have a screen so you have to talk to it. It responds quickly and
more naturally. Part of its contribution may be making it more acceptable to
have conversations with machines.

------
noja
and here is the open-source version:
[https://mycroft.ai/projects/](https://mycroft.ai/projects/) with kickstarter
project:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-a...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-
an-open-source-artificial-intelligence-for)

~~~
dharma1
What open source ASR do they use? Kaldi? Do they have recommendations for far
field mic arrays?

------
danvoell
How much does it cost to buy a New York Times article these days?

~~~
zzzzzxxxxx
Probably less than the entire Washington Post.

~~~
billiam
It's even less to buy/coopt/promise a Blue Origin ride to a single tech
columnist who is lightly edited.

------
atirip
Well, if you are blind, you can use any computer. If you are mute, dont speak
fluent English or lets say have bad accent or like, how you use Echo, Siri, et
al? What is the alternative?

~~~
lsaferite
Why wouldn't you just use your native language?

~~~
atirip
Not supported. Probably never will.

------
kardos
So where do you put it... in your bedroom? Or kitchen? One per room?

It seems like a smartphone app with a host of "skills" plugins would render
this obsolete.

~~~
ghaff
Mine is in my kitchen/eating area and I imagine that's a common location. I
could certainly imagine having one in my bedroom as well.

Smartphones are certainly a significant competition to this. One difference is
that, today, Alexa's voice recognition is a lot better--especially at a
distance in a noisy environment. I don't always have my smartphone at hand
especially when I'm doing things like cooking.

It also works as a music source to play over internal or external speakers in
a way that your smartphone doesn't. Of course, that assumes you're using
Amazon Music.

Of course, there's nothing that says it has to be either/or.

~~~
anonymousDan
How does it work if you have multiple people in the same house with different
Amazon accounts? Is there any sort of voice authentication?

~~~
ghaff
You can apparently have multiple profiles but they're all connected to a
single Amazon account. (So you can have different playlists etc. but they're
all connected to a single credit card.)

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201628040)

------
_of
Echo is a great utility. I had mine for just a week, and I already feel
attached. However, I feel it needs more AI. For example, I can ask it "What is
the temperature today?", and I get a straight forward answer. But I cannot ask
"How is the temperature today compared to yesterday?".

------
pwython
_“It’s an unusual thing for Amazon to be out of something, but for the Echo,
it’s usually in stock just for a couple weeks before it goes out of stock for
a few days — so it feels like they’re having trouble making enough of the
devices.” Mr. Wingo noted the Echo, which Amazon sells for $180 only through
its own site, was selling for $200 to $300 on eBay._

FYI, for anyone that does want to buy one right now (Amazon says it will be in
stock March 20), I bought mine from Home Depot. You can also supposedly get
them at Sears, Staples, and a few other stores. No reason to spend $200+.

------
rs999gti
I just don't like that the Echo is always listening and waiting for you to
address it.

Maybe is there was a smart phone app or a clicker I could press to bring it to
attention then I'd be more interested.

~~~
tass
You can mute the microphone and use the echo remote control instead.

------
tlrobinson
I can definitely see voice being the most common way of interacting with
computers at home. I think it was pretty smart of Amazon to focus their
attention there first.

I rarely use Siri because:

1) If I'm in public it's awkward. I don't want to disturb others, and don't
want strangers to hear even my boring interactions with Siri. Plus it still
has "the Segway problem".

2) If I'm at home I often leave my phone in another room.

I don't have an Echo yet, but I ordered a Dot (already have plenty of speakers
at home) and I'm excited.

------
lpsz
Especially for home automation, I still find it so much easier to press a
button inside an app than speak words. Just like pressing 1, 2, 3 within an
automated 1-800 prompt is heaps easier than trying to enunciate out phrases
like "customer support." And so I could never warm up to Siri, Echo, etc. They
take way too much effort, even if voice recognition was perfect.

Am I alone?

~~~
ryandrake
You're not alone. I simply don't like talking to computers, and don't have
time or interest in figuring out how to coax them into doing what I want.
Whenever I get one of those customer support lines that demand me to "Tell me
what you want!" I just jam on the "0" button over and over until a real person
shows up.

------
simonebrunozzi
"Amazon’s open-platform strategy for the Echo" \- what a lie.

As much as I admire Amazon, please don't call things what they aren't. AWS is
not an open platform. Echo is not either.

------
jimmaswell
Why does this ridiculous ptoduct exist? Why is anybody buying it for ~$200?
Why can't it be replaced with a phone app?

~~~
dharma1
You could, with an app like Autovoice.

Often you don't want to whip your phone out though to speak to it, and the
phone mics are bad at capturing far field speech - so need a far field always-
on mic.

Haven't seen any bluetooth array mics so far - seems like a market opportunity

------
jeena
As long as it doesn't run free software it will be almost impossible for me to
trust such a device.

