What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its skills
cnet.com
cnet.com
I'm guessing we need special economic rules for platforms, or governments should own them.
As an example consider Apple Pay Cash. It grabs anything you send in the messages app with a dollar sign, and converts it to glittery text that prompts you to pay whoever you're talking to.
Aside from the question of whether that feature is useful to you, it's such a bullshit, cheating way to undercut Square Cash and Venmo.
They're exploiting their position to make an unfair playing ground. Feels so gross to me.
There's the problem of API access; you still can't make a mobile web app as good as a native mobile app and it may always be playing catch-up (both because of policies at Apple and Google and because of the nature of chasing new features from outside). But, at least it really is "our" platform (if we can keep it). With WebAssembly enabling development in any language (eventually) and easing porting from native to web, things are looking up, but it's still not an even playing field.
So...on optimistic days, I think the web will win (again), and will prevent the mobile OS walled gardens from owning our future. On pessimistic days, I read an article about a new platform for apps that is even worse for developers than the App Store or Play Store.
I guess my action plan is: Help the web win and hope the app stores die.
Note that the definition of platform is broader than OSes. For example, Uber and Booking.com are also platforms (and they have similar problems as OS platforms).
Not sure whether to just kill it or do something else with it, but it was a fun idea.
We have no idea why skill usage is low. It’s a really good skill. The major complaint seems to be having to use our app name to activate it but we have no control over that.
I use my Alexa's (3 of them around the house so far) many times a day, but the thing is, there are only so many things I want to speak out loud. It's exacerbated by having to go in "blind" - I'm not going to remember the incantations to get a response out of dozens of skills, so they - including the name - need to fall very close to something I'd naturally say.
Overall, I mostly rely on the smart home stuff, basic searches, music, and one extra skill for local travel.
I can't see myself opting to use skills over my phone, tablet or laptop for all that many other things. The above is enough to make me enjoy having them accessible everywhere in the house, so I'll probably augment my existing ones with a few Dot's.
It also doesn't help that there really is a lot of junk skills around. E.g. finding one that reliably provide bus times near me and that has a sufficiently good interface was a pain. There might very well be other skills out there that do a better job, but I simply don't have time to spend going through it. Good curated collections would help a lot.
Even better if I could connect Alexa to a Fire Stick and have it visually display results of a skill search to help me navigate and drill down.
It's very convenient to be wandering around and control music. It quickly becomes more frustrating if you have to go back to the laptop.
Pandora
Jeopardy (which I played often for a while, but then stopped)
Some Bed Time story skill, which is awesome and hilarious and I should know what it is so I can recommend it.
Nest, which never worked because I guess you have to use Heat/Cool mode on your thermostat which is dumb.
I think probably:
1) I installed more skills than the average user on initial setup (expected median: 0)
2) Most users open the app at a similar frequency to me.
3) The primary use of the device for most users is music.
4) Some people don't use them at all after the first week.
As far as development of skills, I know at some point they were offering "Amazon Swag (apparel)" in exchange for uploading your first Skill. Come on people, I've got mouths to feed here!
I have mine on "Heat" mode right now and it works fine. I think the problem is the name of your Nest. Mine was originally "Dining Room" (I only have one thermostat, so that was a dumb name, but recommended by Nest). I changed it to "Home" since I got the Echo, and it works fine.
I installed a couple goofy skills but rarely use them. I did set it up with a custom skill to control my Roku by voice, but I don't think I have used it since I got it working.
Most of my stuff was underutilized, i.e., Nest, Wemo, Harmony Hub. Since I got my Echos, I've accelerated my timeline to put more smart switches throughout the house.
My favorite routine with the dark winter mornings is to use a single voice command to turn on my main floor lights and tell me the temperature outside as I groggily take my dogs downstairs to go outside. The temperature announcement lets me know whether my dogs need their coats on. It was especially useful today, as it was -23C this morning.
1) Can have up to 3 individual switches in a single outlet. 2) Can work with just a single hot wire (no neutral). 3) Can be queried about it's status (on/off) back to the gateway.
There are a bunch of Chinese ones that meet 1 and 2. But I haven't found 3 so far.
I am planning to get some Z-wave light switches for my 3-ways (Zooz seems to make the switches that work the way I want).
1) Can you clarify this question - I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about. By outlet are you referring to a junction box or an electrical outlet (plug)?
2) Wemos require hot, neutral and ground. AFAIK, most smart switches at the very least want a neutral wire.
3) Wemos don't need a gateway (wifi), but they know their status.
If I could do it all over again, I probably would have skipped Wemo and went with Zwave instead.
The neutral wire requirement is really a killer for me, as I'm not going to rewire me entire house. There are some switches that only require the hot wire (they pass a very small load to the light, but not enough to lit up even very efficient leds).
As of the gateway I don't really care the interface. I'm prepared to write code myself or whatever is needed.
Are you sure you don't have a neutral wire in the junction box? In my junction boxes, the neutral wires weren't used for the old school switches but are capped in the back of the junction box.
Regarding the interface, the Wemos are not very reliable because they are wifi. I used to use X10 and they were way more robust than the Wemos. You might want to check X10 if you're going to code yourself. The hardware tends to be a lot cheaper than the newer switches.
She said, basically, "The Washington Ferry skill can probably help you answer that. Should I install it?" I replied "Yes" and she took a moment to load the skill and then also automatically answer my original question.
A minor sidenote: Picking a good appname is vastly more important for Alexa than it is for typical mobile apps. It needs to be something people are not ashamed to say out loud.
Full Disclosure - I work at this company! :)
Videos also show you how it works and how it's done. Books cannot do that by mere fact that they are static pages. They can describe and have screenshots.
Hopefully this gives you a better understanding why some people prefer video over text for everything.
I’m not even sure skills really need to exist for anything that only uses the Alexa UI. For IOT devices it makes sense . The big issue is that you cant purchase skills and to get to using a skill is time consuming.
I made a skill called history facts and I don’t even use it. I never use skills at all.
The bugbear I have (being a Canadian user) is the region lockouts. A lot of existing skills aren't ticked for English (Canada) support, so we're stuck waiting for skills to show up.
I contacted some product companies for some skills I was waiting for, and it didn't even seem like companies were notified of the region setting or the recent Canadian release.
It's not multiple choice, you just answer with whatever phrase makes sense and it mostly just _works_ (which still strikes me as fairly amazing).
Given that devices equivalent to Alexa or Google Home could pretty much be launched on Kickstarter, is the ecosystem large enough to allow an open-source or more public version of the AI assistant? Is it needed?
As to why they didn’t have Alexa-style voice skills, I’m not sure speech recognition is a core competency of the company.
Even though it has a glaring bug, it still gets more traffic than any of my other personal projects. And Amazon (usually once a year around December) offers $100 credit which I can apply to my AWS account for the traffic it incurs (which still costs me nothing).
Aren't reviews just the best?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409
It's also disappointing how much of this system remains vaporware:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-...
It's also disappointing that Amazon continues to resist the changes necessary to make the Alexa a good Enterprise eco-system:
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-pr...
On this last point, it is frustrating that we have not seen more competition. Most startups lack the resources to build their own voice system, so they want to build on the back of service being offered by Amazon or Apple or ...
Apple promised to open Siri, but so far you can't build Enterprise apps with Siri.
There is interest among managers. Among the ideas that business leaders have asked me about:
1. An Amazon Alexa in every hotel room, ready to answer guests questions
2. A salesperson leaves a meeting where they made a sale. They get in their car and drive home. They talk to their ______ device and all of the data is sent to Salesforce, the app creating a new Opportunity or new Tasks.
3. An Amazon Alexa skill that can reach into the companies Salesforce account and generate a report for high level executives
Of this last one, we had a working demo in early 2016, but we need some extra tools for specifying the phonetic sound of a company name, as Alexa mangles the names of companies such as IBM and CNET.
As to #2, we worked on a text interface for Salesforce in 2015. I wrote about that extensively here:
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
We then investigated how to do this with voice. At the moment, it seems the best option is to use voice-to-text on an iPhone or Android. It's an open question whether it is best to use IBM Watson's NLP tools or build a specialized tool just for dealing with Salesforce.
We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!