The backstory of Alexa’s Indian makeover
factordaily.com
factordaily.com
Alexa India's true test will be on how it handles ____glish (where ____ = the base language) that's very common in everyday spoken interactions, esp. in the South.
Ex:
Tanglish = Tamil + English mixed-in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglish
Kanglish = Kannada + English mixed in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanglish
Even TV programs have this. For instance some of the Tamil Soap operas on youtube have this message at the beginning
"Marrakama Bell Symbol-la Press Pannunga, Subscribe Pannunga".
= 3 Tamil words, 4 english words. 1 Tamil+English word.
Translation. "Don't forget to press bell symbol and subscribe."
Here is my favorite sentence from a German ad:
'We' eröffnet einen neuen Store für Men und Women.
(A shopping chain called 'we' opens a new shop for men and women.)
This is by no means normal everyday language but marketing is full of these things.
(Not that all Germans understand it, I remember a TV show going around asking people what they thought the marketing slogans meant - it was hilarious.)
(To be clear: I'm not whining. Speech recognition is getting absurdly good as it is. It's just that being able to mix languages in a free-form way would be... perfection :).)
This is so true. The term number of languages is a bit inadequate when you talk about India. Another issue is the high amount of migration between states. People who moved a generation ago from Gujarat to Tamil Nadu speak Tamil with a few Gujarati mannerisms thrown in. I have seen examples of this in my friends and I have seen the vice versa too. A Tamil family living in Gujarat for a couple of decades. I think Alexa needs to learn the dialect and mannerisms per user. That will be revolutionary.
In practical terms this is essentially meaningless, because most of the time, people are speaking several languages at once. Last night I was in a supermarket in London, listening to the staff who were animatedly speaking what I think was a mashup of Bhojpuri (some of which I could understand) and Malayalam (no chance). Was totally baffling. Elsewhere I've seen Salman Rushdie describe the language of Bombay as "HUG-ME": "Hindi Urdu Gujarati Marathi English", with the apparent objective being to cram words from all five languages into every sentence. He's not wrong.
This will be one hell of an ML challenge.
Why does one buy items like an Alexa? I get that it performs some features, it slightly increases convenience but it does not enable anything new or different.
Something I do not understand about hackernews: There are a lot of people on here who, on average, care about the environment. By the same token, there are many users here who have an interest in electronics and technology, and are just generally interested in new gadgets.
How do you square buying gadgets with being somewhat conscious of the mounting environmental problems? The amount of electronic waste, the almost literal slave labour to mine the resources, the energy necessary to transport and assemble the parts, and the final device.
All to not use one's smartphone's assistant but a home assistant.
The consumer does not ask himself 'why do I consume', every decision is in the framework of making consumerist choices (e.g. buy a Tesla instead of a Jeep), the option 'I do not need to consume most of these things at all' is barely present.
So I am honestly asking to people buying these things, what is the thought process? Is there a feeling of happiness or joy in having new gadgets? Does it last? Are environmental or more generally philosophical considerations on whether you need to buy new things part of your thought process?
I am sorry I do not buy this - where is the justification for the assumption that this is the only way we can advance tech? As an AI researcher, I strongly strongly disagree that I have to enable more consumption for tech to progress.
"Alexa buy me an Kenmore washing machine"
wtf.
Alexa play some ambient music...
"I think you'll like this... playing Selena Gomez"...
Alexa I hate Selena Gomez...
"Shuffling Selena Gomez..."
Alexa Stop
"Playing Stop & Erase by Selena Gomez"
Literally happened here just now.
I agree Alexa Stop was clearly a mistake (albeit, not one I've ever observed) but for the rest, it's understanding what you said, you simply have different expectations of what the best response is. Were it a human, one wouldn't say they were dumb, just that they had differing taste or ideas.
In particular what did you expect from "I hate Selena Gomez"? Have you seen any other music player that handles that kind of ambiguous "command"?
That’s one step removed from expecting Alexa to understand human emotions but still a rather natural interaction
And generic undo of playing a station is... playing a different station? Not stopping the music altogether? The concept of generic undo would be hard for people to come to a consensus on, let alone an NLP system.
"Sorry. Turning off".
https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/6s7tgp/play_somethin...
All of them were dumb. That's the problem with AI conversational interfaces. Once people talk to an "assistant" they intuitively expect the level of intelligence of a human. Because of that, mistakes are not tolerated much and conversation quickly goes from "ah this is so awesome we are living in the future" to "this is the dumbest thing ever, just give me a search box and I'll type what I need or I'll click with the mouse".
Usually irritation gets amplified because with each mistake, the AI forces the human to repeat or explain things, which just makes it worse.
> Have you seen any other music player that handles that kind of ambiguous "command"?
Other music players are not anthropomorphized AI assistants. So people don't expect that from them. Once it has a human sounding name, and you are addressing it by that name, the expectation is that it would act and perform like a human.
> Were it a human, one wouldn't say they were dumb, just that they had differing taste or ideas.
That's interesting solution perhaps, what if it responded with "I don't know much about music, so I can't decide or pick what to play". I think some people would have preferred that instead of Selena Gomez. Even further maybe start a dialog about "can you give me some example of the artists or songs you like, I'll find some similar ones". That might be less irritating than simply playing Selena Gomez.
> In particular what did you expect from "I hate Selena Gomez"?
No OP, but I would expect it to never pick or play Selena Gomez again, unless explicitly asked.
Siri does sorta; I just tested it now. I said “I hate this song,” and I got the feedback “I’ll remember you hate that song,” and a different song from another artist immediately began. “I hate this artist” immediately transitioned to a song by a different artist.
“I hate (artist name)” didn’t work, but the framework is clearly there.
This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable functionality to expect at all. It’s already mostly there. In Siri.
Amazon employees with more to lose than a few cents per hour.
Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi, English, Saraiki, lasi, Kutchi, Thari, Balochi, Brahui, Hazaragi, Chitrali, Kohistani, Hindko, Kashmiri, Shina and Balti are the main languages and dialects spoken in Pakistan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincial_languages_of_Pakist...
Urdu is fairly standard across the country with slightly different accents..
The regional languages are different though. Some (like Punjabi) are spoken in India too, and then there's Pashto (also spoken in Afghanistan) but then there are Sindhi and Seraiki which can be similar and different to other languages.
However, what excites me is the fact that Hindi is so similar to Urdu, the same tech could be repurposed for Urdu with much less work than a whole new language.