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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I bought an Alexa yesterday and the second thing I asked it to do was “play the Desi playlist from my Spotify”. I tried 5 different variants of this, and also in different accents but it was unable to understand it. It’s cool that they’re doing work to improve understanding in Desi contexts, which makes it that much stranger that it couldn’t understand “Desi”.

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Idea... "Alexa, how do I (get you to do/ask for)..." "Sorry, I'll have to think about that for a few minutes" In that time, a support tech reviews the question, perhaps with some machine leaning assistance, and then gets back to you with the answer. "(first name), about your request, you can (insert instruction or apology)." Amazon already has mechanical turk... no reason why Alexa shouldn't take advantage.

Because mechanical turk MUST be supervised. The reward is disassociated from performance - it's the agent problem, writ large, since workers are effectively anonymous and paid piecework. In any paper using mechanical turk, half or more is trying to get the humans to do what they're told correctly. (They behave more like mischevious djinn than computers if allowed to act freely.) Just dropping in mechanical turk without a feedback system would lead to arbitrary responses, unhandled queries, and unsolvable inconsistencies.

> support tech

Amazon employees with more to lose than a few cents per hour.

This. I really don't understand why companies are so allergic to human intervention.

I would imagine it's because, unlike with computerised services, the per-interaction costs aren't entirely consistent and have non-negligible cost. It's also much much harder to hire and retain people than it is to buy a million new blackbox computers.

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