Amazon’s plan for Alexa

India is the world's fastest growing consumer of voice traffic. At this point 30% of all google searches in India are voice and growing.

The fact that we have over 20 mainstream languages contributes to this. a lot of people now write Indian vernacular in Latin script which is highly unstandardised in spelling.

Voice is far far superior.

[1] In spite of my concerns, somewhat hypocritically, I have a mini in my bathroom which I received as a gift. I find it quite useful for listening to podcasts/music/audiobooks and switching between them purely by voice.

[2] From both personal usage, and usage at my friends' places, I find Google Homes as accurate as standard Google search, which is to say, very accurate the vast majority of the time.

Edit: this made me invest time into figuring out the exact command to navigate so thanks :)

What is amazing is how Amazon made an ecosystem around it to hook people to it - my parents were given a free years worth of amazon prime along with their broadband connection but they did not use it much. Then somebody gifted them a firestick and suddenly the prime subscription made sense because of prime videos. Now, they have an echo show 5 which is justifying the prime subscription even more because of prime music.

I have Alexa's and one Google home at home.

We now have cheap and good enough multiroom audio, voice controlled. It's used daily

We use very regular the weather forecast and timer and control our lights with it as well.

The future is here but it will probably go more in direction of offline assistance.

The integration in Philips hue, with more av receiver etc. Will just become even better.

It took me a fair bit of trial and error to work out the exact magic words to say to get google maps to launch navigation to a given address by car without requiring me to use the touch screen at all.

My natural inclination was to say "Hey Google, give me directions to 123 fake street" but this would bring up a route (or if you're especially unlucky a list of different places for you to choose from) but require you to press a "start" button with your finger, and often also require you to switch the navigation type from bus/walk/cycle to car manually too.

"Give me directions to 123 fake street by car" would skip the navigation type selection, but still require you to manually press a "start" button (various variations of "ok google, begin" or "ok google, start" etc didn't seem to do anything")

After a long period (months) of having to press a tiny button manually while driving to start navigation I finally discovered that if you say "Navigate to" rather than "Give me directions to" it would skip past the start button screen and jump straight to giving you directions.

So now it works great, but I hope I don't have to go through tedious trial and error with everything voice activated to work out the exact phrasing it wants.

It is handy when cooking, you can set named timers, ask for conversions with your hands full.

It is also fun at parties, guests can play whatever songs they want (there is a discount because I have the Amazon music just on that one device).

I listen to the radio on it, and I also get my news from it (I have it programmed to play the NPR news update and then the Fox News update. They usually cover the same stuff, but it is interesting to see how they emphasize different things.)

Alexa seems smarter than Siri or the "hey google" character if you have random questions and don't want to get out your phone or you already have too many tabs open.

I've played around with some of the skills, but really only use the timers, alarms, news, weather, music, streaming radio, and sometimes ask it questions.

Playing music, getting directions, and sending texts while driving the car.

Controlling music in my house. Its a lot faster to just ask for something than fiddling with my phone. The kids use it for this too (they also do: "Ok google, tell me a story").

Setting timers in the kitchen while I'm cooking. We have some physical timers but inevitably they're hidden somewhere and/or my hands are dirty when I need them.

Asking random questions: "Ok google, what city has the longest name?", "how many cups is 9 tablespoons?" etc. It can answer a shocking fraction of the questions I throw at it.

A smartphone is an complex always on device with its own internet connection, microphone, GPS and camera.

We are not trading low risk UI with high risk UI. We switch or extend it to nodevice/voice control.

And I personally find it very impressive and subtile.

It just makes sense to use it in your kitchen, bedroom or on the Couch.

It is the same with Philips hue. Do I need it? No. Is it worth to me? Every penny. Why? Because it's a completely new level. Now you can combine lamps which had not one switch like your ceiling lights with a standlamp in the corner and you put your ligjtswitches where you actually are using them.

That was never possible before.and it's great for creating lightsettings. I'm using different lightsettings constantly.

For example our light is much less bright when I go to the toilet at night and it is motion detection based which I really love for our floor.

You'll need to define that if you want a proper response. I suspect you don't really want a proper response and are just looking for a way to shit on people who have bought these devices.

Btw like much gadgets these things are for convenience so an example is when cooking and your hands are covered in food instead of setting a timer with your hands you can do it with your voice. Of course you can always just look at a clock and do it in your head manually. Is this a "meaningful" improvement in my life ... That's up for debated. I'd say the same thing though about mobile phones.

My problem is that tech companies uttering those visions usually lie. Even in this case, there's set of business and technological decisions being made that go against the vision. As long as voice processing is done in the cloud vs. the device, as long as the device itself is tied to an account and a service (vs. just subscribing to services that provide actions which require those services), as long as it's done by amoral corporation with plenty of history of putting profit before humane behavior - Alexa will always come with privacy issues, will not be useful to everyone, and there will be business incentives to not make it a true productivity enhancer.

Should I ask if I visit, and how would you respond?

Heck you get it even if you don’t buy it. My headphones were software updated with Google Assistant, plus there was the infamous Nest smoke alarm.

You forget that those devices are always on, always listening.

I've often thought about what I would like a virtual assistant to do for me, and it's generally along the lines of "alert me if there's something I should know about", similar to how a real, live assistant might go about it. I don't want to know the weather parameters, only if they changed significantly from yesterday. And delivered at the correct moment for me to do something about it, not too early, not too late. Same for a commute, but for that, the assistant would have to know how I commute normally, what my schedule is for today, when I'm planning to leave. All of this would be a lot more accurate with omnipresence, as scary as that sounds. The value add is great enough that in the long run, implementation is almost guaranteed.

I don’t expect I’ll order items via Alexa anytime soon, but “she” gets probably 50 interactions a day. I’m fine with the trade off.

In capitalist society, if growth stalls, it leads to riots. The only way a capitalist society can present a face where some of the population feels like they are being taken care of is when the amount of wealth is increasing generally enough that the inequality isn't as sharply felt. Advertising, credit, and other behavioral nudges are accelerants of growth.

Of course, when things break down enough, Alexa will also be able to act as an arm of the state for gathering intelligence. I look forward with horror to the day when it is installed by default into housing.

https://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/

Using a microphone, even with an offline ML model, to do things like play music at the right times and (almost certainly) show you ads or ask if you want to buy Amazon product is pretty off-putting. Google Maps and Siri Suggestions uses your phone's behavioral data and location history to figure out when you usually leave for work, but if you said "i need to get to work an hour earlier tomorrow" to someone, it would be weird if your phone or Alexa instantly said "do you want me to remind you to leave earlier?" I don't think it's as off-putting as the article makes it out to be, but it's still pretty creepy; we're almost certainly going to have boomer facebook groups boycotting Alexa for "always listening".

I also missed all the bad things that happened because of Cambridge Analytica. Even if we take their extremely dubious claims about their effectiveness at face value them running amok resulted in politicians being better able to target ads. That's not exactly the stuff of nightmares.