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Comment by pwython | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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.

Totally agree. I just think a possible way around this would be to have multiple phrases for an action.

"Alexa, ask Uber to request a ride." is the current phrase for Uber. But if you haven't ordered an Uber via Alexa in a while, the ability to guess an alternative command would be handy.

"Alexa, order an Uber." "Alexa, request an Uber." "Alexa, UBER!"

The big reason behind the "ask X for Y" is namespacing. Otherwise it's who gets there first for a lot of things. This also allows them to sell "namespace free" triggers to corporate sponsors (I don't know if they do, but it makes sense).

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

http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/

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.

> 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.

Every time I hear about the Echo I can't help but think it's a solution looking for a problem. A light switch costs $0 and really isn't any effort to use. If I'm sitting on the cough, I'll... get up, turn the lights off, and sit back down. I can't imagine spending $180 on a glorified light switch, weather app, and a kitchen timer. To each their own, I suppose.

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