I worked in the Amazon Alexa division. The level of incompetence coupled with arrogance was astounding. Many of the people running Alexa had been there since 2012. Its was tyranny by those who started in that organization first. Backstabbing, politics, bad engineering, nepotistic promotions. The scientists were so far behind, almost all models were off the shelf implementations pulled from Github. Huge amounts of capital flushed down the drain.
The flip side might be that Alexa was ahead of its time, and that the ML capabilities werent there. But I bet Alexa spent more than OpenAI by a huge margin. Amazon's fundamental flaw is trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This only works in operations heavy businesses, like retail and AWS. AWS is really just extremely competent operations on top of server management.
The whole company is a meat grinder, poor technical implementations with an army of SDEs keeping it running. It definitely works, they ship product, but the company is underperforming the S&P for five+ years now. Walmart has higher shareholder returns. They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.
I was thinking about the number of technologies that came out (essentially) fully baked and haven't seemingly improved since.
I had the thought while grumping at my Alexa. I say the same phrase every day, and every day there's a 50% failure rate. I keep looking for phrases that it can understand better than the ones I've cycled through, but they all suck.
But Alexa, as shipped, was pretty great. The fact that it hasn't seemed to improve at all since confounds me. The reports of the high body counts in the division surely attest to the lack of focus or interest in core Alexa skills. All those product and integration priorities were on the wrong product stack layer.
Same with: iPhone typing, Siri, Tesla software (and beyond FSD -- the only thing that seems have happened in the 2 years I've owned my vehicle is the addition of Apple Music), Apple Watch, etc.
It was fully-baked in the sense that it was novel and could recognize fairly basic voice commands including simple questions of fact. Once the novelty wore off, a lot of people concluded that wasn't actually that useful given they had a computer in their pocket anyway.
Voice is still just an implementation detail. I'd argue that we still aren't at the point where general purpose computer assistants are all that useful relative to humans. It's the same 10% (or whatever) problem as self-driving has.
I don't think it's true that the Echo was only a novelty, it was and still is an extremely effective way to do a couple of tasks that people find very useful - mainly playing music of course. The hardware and processing required to recognize its wake word very reliably and arbitrary voice commands somewhat reliably in an open space was an incredible leap forward for consumer products at the time. But it has managed to add essentially zero value to the initial offering in the decade since then.
YMMV of course. I maybe use it to play music in my bedroom a couple times a month. Usually I play it from either my Apple TV or my computer.
It's useful for a few other things. A weather forecast if I haven't gotten out of bed yet, setting an alarm, turning my bedroom lights on. The occasional quantity conversion in the kitchen.
But all those add up to something closer to "novelty" than whatever investment Amazon put into the technology.
> Tesla software (and beyond FSD -- the only thing that seems have happened in the 2 years I've owned my vehicle is the addition of Apple Music)
If you want changelogs you can look at this fan-run site. A lot of small iteration and a few big splashes (depending on if you like the feature or not)
Fwiw, I've had good luck creating routines to cover wordings that should work but don't. One of the available actions is a (single) custom command, so you can use a one-action routine as a map from this wording to that wording.
So, for example, on my system “start my car” actually maps to “tell blue link to start my Ioniq and set the temperature to 72” because the skill is godawful picky about getting all of that.
I'm convinced that the feedback I send using the Alexa app goes nowhere. It definitely isn't used to improve Alexa's ability to understand the simple phrase: "play NPR".
Edit: I almost forgot. There was also the time it stopped understanding "stop". It properly parsed the word but didn't know what to do with it. IIRC I had to use the mobile app to stop playback that day.
This is true, now. It is the case that Video, Music, and SmartHome teams took over much of Alexa support in middle of 2022/2023 (many other teams were fired), and the result is basic functionality such as "stop" doesn't work (music, timers, alarms), "play" goes to some random incorrect cache of Music or Video, not News. What happened to the data (including your feedback)? It disappears, of course. Nothing but SMILES (a program designed to only report positive trends and feedback) for Amazon leadership.
Alexa devices are spyware; they listen in on you, and if your device has a camera the camera can be accessed without your knowledge too.
I think it's hard for a company to sponsor a product like Alexa if the monetization is near impossible. It's basically a vanity, money draining product.
Make good speakers, improve language detection, improve music playback, simplify that stupid-complicated-always-rearranging Alexa app, decrease my curse-at-Alexa rate, make Alexa part of Amazon Prime or charge me an additional $20-30/year for simple audio processing services.
This might not be popular here, but in my opinion, the H-1B visa program has been a disaster for tech companies. It oversaturates the tech labor market with career-seeking individuals, drowning out the hackers who immerse themselves in technology (and may be on paper "less qualified"), and recruiting/HR teams have virtually no idea how distinguish between these types of candidates.
This is a very touchy topic because it's very hard to talk about honestly without accusations of race / xenophobia / prejudice / envy / whatever. I'll say: I've worked with tons of H-1Bs who were "immersed" in tech. I've worked with tons that weren't. Individuals are individuals.
The problem is that collections of people behave wildly different from individuals. The culture of an org that's mostly H-1Bs is wildly and starkly different than ones with different ratios. This problem, at least when I initially joined Amazon many, many years ago, was actively warned against. The onboarding had a little speech about cultural differences and how it's OK to push back here. We aren't here to be task takers.
Fast forward to today and the culture is wildly different. Many of the practices of offshore teams have leaked into local ones, because the same culture that bred them over there are now in leadership positions here. There's no shortage of teams operating like unquestioning ticket jockeys these days. Your job isn't to produce value, it's to close tickets as fast as possible. Do what management says. Don't ask questions.
This comment is not reflective of ground reality. Most of current workers (90% easily) at big tech, both US Citizens and Visa holders are far too removed from the hacker ethic and can't do more than using the company RPC framework to write boilerplate stuff. People act shocked when told about basic insights of computer science. Mind you I am talking about both low and high level engineers and management.
Lol is this the "best of the best" that FAANG supposedly hires? Here on the east coast, everyone is expected to have a sound CS foundation or equivalent skills and experience, our second tier state college has a fantastic CS degree, and the half of my team that is in India has no problems with everyday usage of CS concepts and the worst I can say about them is a lack of initiative or creativity but like, same.
Is FAANG just sniffing it's own farts about their "ability"?
When you are hiring at those high rates quality goes out of the window. The companies were so big and growing fast that all external leaders would hire their loyalists. The hiring quality was dropping steadily and then dropped sharply. There were some well intentioned special hiring initiatives which were in theory supposed to preserve the same quality of hires, but in private the HR leaders responsible for the initiative would send everyone a private message saying "Wink wink, this hiring is for special initiative, please please keep that in mind". The thing is if you don't have immediate customer feedback and the company is not in survival mode, empire building just takes over. I have worked at multiple of big tech comapnies and all just daily remind of "Yes Minister"
> drowning out the hackers who immerse themselves in technology (and may be on paper "less qualified"), and recruiting/HR teams have virtually no idea how distinguish between these types of candidates
Interesting thought ... could be a kernel of truth there.
I believe this is true. But FAANGs are really software factories, not places for innovation. The product requirements rain down from high up above, and they expect a shoddy implementation as fast as possible. The model largely works
Immigrants are now responsible for the lost hacker spirit? Seriously?
I think you might be confusing correlation with causation. Software engineering becoming a well paid job for the masses is the reason for both decline of exclusive hacker culture and amount of career-seekers (both domestic and international) willing to join the industry.
"Many of the people running Alexa had been there since 2012. Its was tyranny by those who started in that organization first. Backstabbing, politics, bad engineering, nepotistic promotions. The scientists were so far behind, almost all models were off the shelf implementations pulled from Github. Huge amounts of capital flushed down the drain."
Wholeheartedly agree. Any time a team or individual had a good implementation that deviated from that core Alexa group, they stole it and fired the people who designed and implemented it. Nevermind the amount of personal customer data they leaked in the process. Embarrassing.
People who left Alexa to go to places like Meta actually showed return on investment. The people who ran them off? They're still at Alexa, they probably aren't the ones being fired, and you can easily recognize their work in projects like Amazon Music and Prime Video. Some of them even have the nerve to boast working on "AGI," as if the echo of their Titan flop was not loud enough.
This is extremely correct and captures all the problems quite well. I will add that the Amazon 2 pizza team model is inherently unsuitable to building a whole class of products. I remember all kinds of small 2 pizza teams having multiple "scientists", even if they did nothing other than running models from Github.
Almost all big tech companies face the same problem in slightly different ways, and further increased due to the sloppy hiring in recent years. In Google they hired tons of extremely incompetent folks, and now those folks band up together and try to closely guard information, as that is the only way they can ensure their performance is not very bad compared to others. People who are both technically and politically incompetent get pushed out, while the politically savvy and technically incompetent ones manage to create moats for their survival.
Ha! I was there for 6 years. The "data" at Amazon is really just "whatever the management chain wants" for their empire building purposes. If you help them in this goal, you go up, if you get in their way, you go out.
Arguably voice assistants are still ahead of their time. My Alexa is handy for a few things like setting an alarm--though I still want to set a backup for something like an early morning airport pickup.
But for an interaction in the car to see some available podcasts and play an episode? It's just not "smart" enough. And you go through a few rounds of frustration trying to get an assistant to do something and you just stop trying.
There are specific use cases. E.g. my dentist uses one as a timer especially when he's gloved up. But generally they're pretty optional.
> They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.
Good luck. Hungry young workers will leave and go elsewhere once they see how things are run. Speaking as such a worker who's now dealing with incompetent middle management, Amazon is where dreamers and hungry engineers become cynical and disenfranchised.
> trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement.
This describes pretty much every AI startup I know, both good and bad.
I suspect the places where AI will really succeed will be places that entirely change existing workflows and user experiences. This requires a fair bit of research and experimentation, but most startups don't have the appetite for that, and VCs are putting on the pressure to do AI stuff fast.
A lot of AI potential is being squandered now due to a simple lack of patience and planning in the rush to market.
Amazon couldn't care less about research imo. They know they'll be able to quickly get into next bandwagon with scrappy engineering even if they aren't the ones inventing it
> flush out legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers
Super ageist attitude, my observation is many experienced engineers are the ones who would like to improve things. The "hungry" people you refer to are just as likely to be ladder climbing, job hopping, cutting corners for quick wins, and playing politics.
Does that happen also within the AI groups? For example, I've tried CodeWhisperer and it's hot garbage. But the same prompts I give it work reasonably well in Bedrock (though not as well as ChatGPT/CoPilot/etc).
Bedrock is an AWS product, and is relatively simple. Its AWS's strength, infrastructure provisioning and compute operations. I'm sure it works very well. I'm not saying all of Amazon is bad, the scale and reliability of AWS is an engineering marvel
Not to mention AWS products get strong customer feedback all the time and it is treated vitally important. If you are maintaining an internal product in Retail you will just treat your customers like captives.
It doesn't do this very well for me. It only knows things like "a package arrived", or "a package is coming tomorrow". It doesn't say what the package is, etc.
That's about all I need as well. Then they take those basic functions which they are very good at and started trying to push other usages. "By the way, did you know dogs are blah blah blah."
Fortunately, they seemed to have backed off on that a bit. It was a good reminder for me though - they control all the dials and can take something I bought and enjoyed using and enshittify it at the drop of a hat.
You can say "stop by the way" and it'll stop for some inderterminent amount of time then come back. I've heard that some people set up a Routine at 3am every day to turn the volume to zero, say "Alexa stop by the way", then turn the volume back up. I haven't tried it but I heard it works.
This is next level at big tech where at one point the money seemed near infinite so nobody cared what was done. I remember seeing presentations from VPs and Directors which were totally misleading and just plain lying if you had any clue about the subject matter.
I went all in on Google home, with the little pucks and also screens littered around my house. My wife and I have both noticed over the last couple of years that their usefulness seems to have diminished a lot. They used to seem much "smarter." Now, basically, they can tell me the time, set a timer, play music with like 65% accuracy in playing what I want, and tell me the weather outside. It's possible that they were always this bad and the novelty wore off, but it seems like the service just degraded.
I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.
Now it looks like both companies are hoping that Generative AI is going to make them more valuable [0]
A friend of mine has one that he mostly uses for music. I've noticed that every time I visit his commands have had to get slightly longer.
2016 - "Hey Google, play Gorillaz"
2018 - "Hey Google, play music by Gorillaz"
2020 - "Hey Google, play music by Gorillaz on Google Play Music"
2023 - "Hey Google, play album Demon Days by Gorillaz on Google Play Music"
One day the previous command will suddenly stop working with a "I don't understand" error, so he has to figure out the new incantation to get it to do anything remotely close to what he wants.
It's almost like ambiguous voice commands are garbage for controlling things. Humans understand each other only most of the time and we've had 200k years of evolution and practice and now even education to improve that system.
Anything to get more user traffic to Amazon Music, even when you the customer have specified your personal preferences as non-Amazon Music. Pretty lame.
> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.
For years I've been questioning the usefulness of voice assistants and have been mostly ridiculed for it. Beyond a few edge cases, like setting a timer when cooking or use in cars, I still don't see people actually using them all that much. So I'd agree that the potential revenue was vastly overestimate, nor are the lack of a powerful voice assistant going to hurt sales of devices such as phones. The devices which can only be used as a voice assistant is going to go away obviously.
The issue is really in the "assistant" term. Their voice recognition is good enough for English speaking people without heavy accents. But they're terrible actual assistants beyond some rote command relative to all but the most dim-witted human.
This has been my experience too, and it has reached the point that my (young-ish) children have commented on how poorly they understand and respond to things. I suppose it doesn't help that the Home devices used to be able to tell stories from Frozen, but the license expired and now they no longer can.
I have found them consistently useful as broadcast devices from Home Assistant, however -- sending media from plex, etc. I haven't yet tried to utilize them for interacting with Home Assistant directly.
Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.
> Anecdotally, I also found the music selection accuracy went down considerably once Google Play Music was merged into Youtube Music.
Going from the search corpus containing only the actual song/artist name to an uploader-provided title aimed at gaming the recommendation algorithm made this a foregone conclusion. It's incredibly frustrating.
Some other things I've noticed-
- the "nearest device" feature almost never works now. I'll quietly speak in one room only to have a device at the other end of the house activate either instead of or in addition to.
- "play white noise" has a 50% chance of playing death metal
- there is still a huge amount of functionality that's only available to free google accounts and not gsuite users. Generally this is discovered by trying to do something like add a reminder and having the device crash/restart.
What you've described is how most people use their home devices. Alarm, weather, music, maybe lights, that's pretty much it. Given the billions companies have lost on what is functionally a clock radio suggests a short future for these devices. It's a great example of how tech doesn't always "get better/smarter/more useful" with time. Much of the hype of the AI space doesn't account for basic economics. In what is likely many years of a high interest rates, companies no longer have the resources to wait for the future. Whether it's self-driving cars or voice assistants, it has to follow the same rules as a humble pizza place. It doesn't matter if your tech works, or is impressive or even useful. Investment<Profit or your futuristic tech has no future.
I used to ask it a lot more nuanced questions. Like if I was watching TV and they referred to some historical event, I might have asked it about that historical event and gotten a useful response. Now it says something like, "I don't know how to answer that."
> I assumed that both Amazon and Google were underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services.
Every one of my "all in on home assistants" friends, no matter which ecosystem, all generally feel the same way that the assistants are strangely worse today than a few years back and the only trajectory seems "subtly worse" but it is hard for almost everyone to explain how/why they are worse than before. It's an interesting phenomenon, anecdotally at least.
It doesn't seem to be explainable purely economically either, perhaps. Most software you leave it alone and stop paying for maintenance work and it doesn't just slowly lose features or get worse. I wonder how much there is some sort of entropy effect we are seeing on these "AI assistants". It's fun to bring out the Marathon/Halo term "rampancy" for this, and Microsoft invited us to directly do that by even calling theirs Cortana for a while (Copilot as a current name has such less interesting personality). I think there is something of a rampancy problem we're seeing across all players (Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft) and I wonder how inherent a problem it is to all of our current ML approaches. I don't directly know why it is happening or what it means, but it has been an interesting thing to observe anecdotally because it seems consistent despite some very different models/approaches/corporate overlords.
Relatedly, Discord's Clyde has been on slower but consistent path to rampancy in a "Tay way" (thanks Microsoft for that example in the chat, too) and Discord just admitted they will be shutting it down in early December.
I think voice assistants are one of those things where what they could do when they first appeared was sufficiently cool that many of us were willing to overlook the many shortcomings. Now, quite a few years in, it's probably a matter of "Yes, yes, you can set a timer but what have you done for me recently?"
I wonder if its because at first we were excited, it was novel, and as time went on, our expectations increased as to what they should be able to do, and now with ChatGPT 4 (and successive iterations) taking the scene, our expectations of AI are increasing further, and therefore these services seem underwhelming or broken by comparison.
I also wonder, in some respects, if the pandemic and everyone being home more often, lead to people using these products more often and/or intensely, and were finding their flaws faster than perhaps pre pandemic.
I'm using it for exactly the same things I used it to back then (99% kitchen stuff: timers, conversions and playing music, 1% setting the lights and asking for the weather), it's not as if I expect more now. But she has more issues understanding me.
Luckily I'll get my first rPi zero on Monday to experiment with replacing her.
Related to that and that feeling that we aren't doing much more than the same features and these are just getting worse at those features, I think it is an easy question how much of this has been a "law of diminishing returns" and that so many new features come at the cost of the understanding and recognition of the old features. Maybe we didn't really want all that many new features and developers and product managers trying to justify their budgets' existence has been part of the problem (spending too much money developing new stuff is not a problem often expected here on HN).
I know that I sometimes lament the loss of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360-era voice recognition (proto-Cortana). It was absolutely stupid, had very few features, but it ran entirely on the device itself and was rock solid at recognizing the features it did support. You could just about whisper "Xbox pause" to a Kinect in the middle of an action scene of a loud movie with surround sound and expect it to respond immediately on a dime. But also it never seemed to accidentally trigger.
>Most software you leave it alone and stop paying for maintenance work and it doesn't just slowly lose features or get worse
This might have been true for client software. It has never been true for services, and is especially not true for services with diverse dependencies on other teams and products.
GenAI absolutely will make them more useful. Even just for normal Q&A functions. I installed a shortcut to Bard on my phone and several times have compared the results when I ask the Google Assistant a question (on a Google Home) with what I get from Bard. The sooner they can get Bard responding to Google Assistant queries, the better.
About 2 years ago I spent a weekend completely re-doing my wifi environment because the reliability of the Google Minis plummeted. Long response times, multiple rooms answering/clobbering each other so nothing answers, etc. I should have just checked /r/googlehome because the sentiment of "it used to be great, it's total shit now" is posted every week or two. And it continues to get worse. Losing the multi-room streaming over the Sonos patent was bad enough, but the least they could have done is actually remove the functionality outright instead of just silently neutering it - to this day it'll happily say it's playing on "upstairs" or "all speakers" but nothing plays.
> underwhelmed by how much actual revenue these kinds of devices produced, so they were starving the backend services
Absolutely. I got all of my minis for either 30CAD or for free through promotions. These devices were always sold at a loss on the hope they'll make it up on the other end.
ChatGPT's voice chat feature in the iOS app is incredible. It's easily 2-3 orders of magnitude better than Google Home when it was operating at it's peak. I'd happily pay a (potentially steep) monthly fee for voice assistants that aren't neutered and have similar capabilities. They really are fantastic when they work.
If Apple is smart, they will just integrate LLMs into Siri and across the iOS, macOS, speakers and TV and own everybody in "personal assistant" space. We already have very powerful devices in our hand (iPhone), on our desks (macs), around the house (speakers/tv), just integrate the latest AI tech into them in a smart and thoughtful way and it can be epic.
I’m sure the big tech companies are working on exactly this and trimming resources from other areas, both from a simple logistics standpoint and from conversations I’ve had with folks who work (or worked) for these places doing AI.
I personally don’t think LLMs are anywhere near ready for this type of rollout, so it will be a while before we see results. The cost of something like GPT 3.5 deployed at scale is tremendous. The censoring of responses will make it an obstreperous assistant, unless this has gotten considerably better in the last few months. And are we all just going to accept hallucinated results over something that is either vetted or clearly misunderstood?
I don’t even know how far away we are from sufficiently powerful TPUs that fit a mobile case and power profile. But I do think this is likely to be the next big mobile advancement, however far off it may be.
The Ultra 2 watch has a GPU (neural engine) that can run on-device Siri. Works great, I've been able to run basic commands like setting timers and local shortcuts in areas with no cell reception.
I hear lots of people saying this, but I’m not sure why we assume that Apple is the best positioned to take advantage of this.
They have had powerful devices with best-in-class integration for many years now, and Siri is still a frustrating experience and lags significantly behind competing voice assistants.
Competitors also have access to LLMs, and competing ecosystems are maturing (e.g. Samsung, Google). I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple makes waves with AI, but I also wouldn’t say they’re particularly more likely to do it than anybody else.
Apple already made the smart “move” by moving very slowly in the “smart home” game, even though tech bloggers ripped them all the time whenever a new Echo or Google Assistant device was released.
Now rather than deal with all this cruft, or deal with competing assistants (e.g. why the fuck does Google Assistant still exist if you have Bard???) Apple has the runway and the capital to make this type of LLM upgrade to Siri and the well-maintained ecosystem.
> why the fuck does Google Assistant still exist if you have Bard???
Because an integrated smart home assistant is a different problem domain than a general purpose chatbot.
ChatGPT was a revolutionary technology that released less than a year ago and surprised the world with its capabilities. It’s going to take some time to integrate that technology into an ever-present integrated assistant that leverages your personal knowledge graph to take actions on your behalf, but they’re working on it.
And Assistant imo has a huge leg up because of the investment in software integrations made in the pre-LLM world. Meanwhile when I ask Siri to show me photos of myself, it does an image search of the web and returns pictures of the word “myself”
The big benefit of LLMs is that speech to text isn't perfect, but Whisper is pretty good (still gets typos) but GPT 4 is able to understand what I meant to say even when they're multiple typos or completely the wrong word.
I’ve got about six Echo devices that I use basically as speakers, timers, grocery lists, weather radios, and some home control (lights and thermostats). I haven’t explored new features or asked it general questions in a while, but what I do use them for, I would miss.
It’s become second nature to say “Alexa, seven minute timer” while I’m cooking. Or “Alexa, add soy sauce to the shopping list” when I open the fridge and pull out an almost empty bottle.
Yup, exactly what we use it for and also to check the time. I always notice the lack of Alexa when I'm on vacation and have to get out of bed to turn on/off all the lights.
Yeah the issue is that you're never going to spend money through a voice interface, which is I think what they were hoping.
The other big issue is that it's not smart enough for any random request to work, so you just learn a few useful ones (timers, music, thermostat maybe...) and stick with those.
I think things might change when/if they hook up ChatGPT-level AI to them... but I still wouldn't spend money that way.
I have ordered dog treats through my Echo. “Alexa, reorder Charlie Bears” but you have to audibly enter a PIN, if I recall correctly. Eh, I might do it again, but it never occurs to me.
But you’re spot on about learning commands instead of it understanding randomly phrased requests.
They must have tried hooking Alexa up to LLMs with Whisper-like speech recognition. I can only imagine the cost projections of rolling that out were astronomical. Plus, everyone that uses Alexa daily counts on it acting in the same dumb ways it always does.
Wouldn't be surprised to see them roll out a new optional Alexa OS upgrade that you can opt into which has a subscription fee attached and provides AI coolness.
Alexa may not be the most capable voice assistant, but it is the most reliable. I use it and a few others daily for different things, and have never once got a random "I'm sorry, I can't do that right now" or "something went wrong try again in a few seconds". Also, it's the only one that I know of that can text reminders to me. I hope they don't ruin it.
We have both a Google thingy and an Alexa in the bedroom, used almost solely as alarm clocks. I use Alexa, my partner uses Google.
Alexa works just about perfectly, setting, unsetting and snoozing alarms as needed. But Google is almost comically incompetent. "Hey google, set an alarm for 4:20 am" -- "Alarm set for 8 pm".
When Alexa starts ringing, I can quietly say "stop" or "snooze". To get Google's attention when it is making noise, both of us have to scream at it more ofte than not.
I own a few Alexa devices, and I like them more or less, but doesn't seem like they(amazon) have invested much in making them truly useful devices anymore - the first few times you could talk to them were cool - but after that novelty wore off, the products seem to have stagnated quite a bit - seems the market agrees.
Alexa (and the google equivalent) were an over-exuberant experiment. Speech is an interaction mode, not an all-encompassing one, and also a low-bandwidth one, so a device centered on it can't ever be a general computing device. Amazon tried to think a bit more broadly by having other on-keybaord interaction modes (buttons, which were really just clutter because their use was infrequent, and their wand, which was actually pretty handy) but again, didn't integrate it deeply into the rest of their world, so died due to lack of imagination.
Google's thing is even more stark because it had no primary raison d'etre so I only ever saw one in the wild and it was at a google employee's home!
Apple went the other way, making a speaker that you could also talk to. Of course Siri is such crap that it's fundamentally "un-sirious" too.
But speech is not a terrible adjunct. I often use speech to control my watch (start a workout, set a timer, what's the weather outside) bc the screen is so tiny and the controls so few. It sometimes tells me things if I am wearing airpods. But I have the watch cranked down to only provide me with a few things, mostly by glancing at it after it taps me. And who would design a tap-only interface?
It's not really specific to Amazon. Voice assistants are a novelty and mildly useful thing but I mostly use them for a few very specific and non-critical things. In something like my car where they could be very useful, they mostly can't handle the more complicated queries that would actually be valuable to do completely hands-free. If I had to give up voice assistants tomorrow, I'd pretty much shrug and move on.
Honestly, Kindles aren't that different. I like them (and my iPad) for traveling but I'm not sure ebooks have been the revolution that some thought they would be.
Our big thing we used them for at my place is vision assistance items. My gf is vision impaired, and it's much easier for it to read things to her, turn on lights etc. It sounds stupid and small, but it really helps her.
I tried to replace my Amazon Echo devices with Apple Homepod devices - but my wife wasn't having it. We just wanted whoever was in the room - even if it didn't recognize the voice - to add things to the shopping list. But nope. You have to have an apple device that's been trained on your voice to add things to the shopping list.
I'm still looking for another solution so I can get out of the hell of maintaining Alexa's random new notification setting of the day. I really hate all the new "suggestions" and new crap they keep shoving down your throat with no option to turn it off. I would pay a subscription to turn that it off the annoyance, but there is no option for it.
I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).
I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.
My notes:
- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.
- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.
- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.
- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.
- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.
- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.
- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!
- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.
- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.
- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.
There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
I’m assuming that this represents a massive pivot into LLM assistants and these jobs were in support of the legacy system which will be deprecated soon.
The legacy system is the system. Amazon fired a bunch of people this time last year because it was supposed to have Titan. Titan is completely underwhelming, and so they had to wait. Hence the PR around "democratizing LLMs." Unless Amazon is using Llama2 (because Titan utterly failed), there is no alternative. GPT-3.5 (the free version) can easily out perform anything Amazon has, and anything Alexa can do.
I stayed in the Circa hotel recently. They have an Amazon Show on the nightstand. It does nothing in terms of automation. It’s just there to replace the in room phone, show weather and nothing else. Can’t recall as it was very limited when I tried interacting with the voice assistant.
I haven’t seen Alexa evolve that much but maybe someone who worked at Amazon can give more on what’s evolved.
To be honest I really liked Alexa with Ring. I know there's controversy with Ring, but it's just amazing how I can setup some cameras outside my home and then buy cheap alexa monitors to place around the house which show a camera preview whenever there's movement detected. In the past this would have required much more hardware that would have cost thousands.
And then people can hack into it (because it isn't that difficult), and you don't know your data/service is compromised because Amazon nor Ring discloses that to you.
with things like chatgpt all of these assistant techs were immediately outdated.. I wouldn't have expected anything less that dumping whole old departments and starting over.
The flip side might be that Alexa was ahead of its time, and that the ML capabilities werent there. But I bet Alexa spent more than OpenAI by a huge margin. Amazon's fundamental flaw is trying to solve innovative business problems with incremental improvement. This only works in operations heavy businesses, like retail and AWS. AWS is really just extremely competent operations on top of server management.
The whole company is a meat grinder, poor technical implementations with an army of SDEs keeping it running. It definitely works, they ship product, but the company is underperforming the S&P for five+ years now. Walmart has higher shareholder returns. They need to flush out the legacy employees and make room for hungry young workers.