
Amazon has 10k employees dedicated to Alexa - rainhacker
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-amazons-10000-employees-working-on-alexa-are-doing-2019-1
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satya71
It's probably mostly people involved in tagging and transcribing. It's super
labor intensive to get decent results when your AI is not as good as you
advertise it as.

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blandflakes
Definitely is transcribers and annotators. It's weird how much slight of hand
companies due to make it look like some kind of flexible, general AI when it's
really machine learning and man does that mean piles of data.

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Lorin
10,000 employees and they still haven't figured to use the built-in microphone
to adjust the response volume based on ambient baseline noise.

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OldHand2018
My parents have an Alexa Show and it is incapable of showing more than 3
digits of the current DJIA, with the rest being covered with an ellipsis. And
yes, there is plenty of margin on both sides; they could show the entire thing
with two digits after the decimal point.

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pixelface
it's hard not to see this as the wasted potential of 10,000 human minds that
could otherwise be solving real problems and needs. i'm curious to hear how
alexa (and google assistant, et al) can be justified beyond small novelties
that would be completely adequately serviced by non-cloud and/or non-voice
means. i'm aware of the trickiness one can accomplish with a rube-goldberg-
esque system of custom triggers, custom hardware, and carefully spoken
phrases. i remain unimpressed by the segment and coupled with the significant
privacy issues it feels like such a net-negative.

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ponker
I am a big fan of Alexa. It helps me keep track of things like timers, to-dos,
grocery lists, etc. while taking care of a toddler and an infant. Is it World
Peace or the Cure for Cancer? No but it's pretty cool.

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perryizgr8
And yet I've seen zero improvements in my echo since I bought it 2 years ago.
It's a glorified Bluetooth speaker (it's hopeless at playing songs i ask so I
just play with my phone) and a light switch.

It feels literally like a big list of string matching and if conditions and
not like a true NLP system.

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jasonv
I use mine to listen to Radio Paradise and to have it tell me when my packages
arrive at the Hub. Which is usually a couple of hours late these days, so I
just rely on the email it sends earlier. So I use it just for the Radio
Paradise.

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vsskanth
And yet, "Alexa, play Cocomelon radio on Spotify" doesn't work

