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Comment by vertis | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I haven't played with this since 2016, so may be out of date.

Having played with the Alexa and Google home. My take on why there are no hits is that it's very clunky to invoke apps, especially for one-off queries.

"Hey, Alexa/Google, Ask <keyword> to do <blah>" or some variation on that. Starting an app and then interacting with it works fine for some use cases but not all.

It really needs to be a flow of install app for given type of task, say searching for a hotel, and then like Android, there are defaults. So I say "hey alexa, find me a hotel room in blah" and it just knows to hand off to whatever my favourite is.

So long as all the core easy commands are only accessible to Google/Amazon, this is going to continue to be a problem.

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And it hasn't really changed since 2016 so that is still mostly spot on.

I think the real problem though is that people aren't good at remembering voice commands, either how to invoke the command or that the command even exists. Without visual cues it's easy to forget everything.

You're not going to have a runaway hit when it's predicated on everyone remembering that special thing to say. It's like trying to have a runaway hit that had to be based on a keyboard shortcut.

All of those services are great for the basics, e.g. How's the weather / set a timer / remind me in N minutes / order toilet paper ... Everything else is a bit tougher in my opinion.

Agreed, there needs to be a paradigm shift in registering intents. I should not create a skill that the user needs to remember a command for. Instead, my skill should be able to hook into intents and return structured data. For example:

"Me: Alexa, find me a hotel near the beach in Destin, Florida that is available next week"

"Alexa: Hotels.com has a three star hotel available for $987 for six nights, and Airbnb has a four bedroom condo available for the same dates. Would you like to book one of these, or hear more options?"

"Me: Book the first hotel."

...and so on...

In this instance, Amazon has to define the schema for user intention, and hotels.com and Airbnb must provide interfaces to that intent, responding with normalized/standardized data that Alexa can then reconfigure into an appropriate response. Amazon has to throw their weight around to get other companies to play the game, and it's on them to organize the returned data into an appropriate response. This is probably where a discussion about the semantic web would be useful :)

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