Amazon’s roadmap for Alexa is scarier than anything Facebook or Twitter is doing

Now this article is marked as [dupe] and won't appear in HN's pagination. Shouldn't the comments be merged into the original then?

I do have a bunch of smart home gadgets (most rooms in the house have Philips hue, some smart plugs for things like a christmas tree, a smart Air Conditioner, plus the xbox control skill) I also have 2 Echos and 2 Google home (nest home?!) products.

In my experience Alexa sucks at voice recognition in creatively bad ways. Most importantly, if I want to turn on lights for a room, it has taken to making a very subtle variant of the room I asked for and then goes into a lengthy 'I could not find the room 'living rooms' what device did you mean?' (or my personal favorite, turning off the Xbox instead which turns off the tv, while you sit there dumbfounded staring at the off TV now[It sometimes turns our tv on if I turn on the bedroom lights too!]) But she says it rather slow and it's really annoying as you wait the extra 10 seconds. In most cases it would be faster to get up and actually use the light switch.

To think this is actually much better than it used to be, back at 1.0 it was very bad, finding things very far off or responding to 'turn on living room' with 'According to webster's, a living room is a room where..' Obviously the only response as a human is: 'I KNOW WHAT A LIVING ROOM IS, I'M IN A DARK ONE, I WANT IT TO BE BRIGHTER.'

The Google(NEST?!) home works great and is generally right, but saying 'okay google' is pretty dumb. (also creepy)

Agreed. We have three Alexa devices, our thermostat, the fridge magnet one, and a regular one. All are turned off or muted in the case of the thermostat. At best we don't find it useful and at worst it's annoying.

My Alexa performs really poorly. I converted my house into a smart home (with devices I made, as I don't trust the average vendor), and she's handy for turning devices on and off, but she even gets that wrong sometimes. My wife will be asleep and I'll say "Alexa, lights off" and she'll hear "lights on" and the house goes full brightness.

Don't get me started on playing music, she's useless for that. Yesterday I asked her to play a song fifteen times before I got angry and gave up at her inability to understand what I'm saying.

I find the Alexa pretty useful having small children. Being able to change the thermostat, turn on and off lights, start white noise for the baby, play music for the kids, all without having to have my hands free is nice.

I set up a nap routine for my baby's room where it turns off the lights and starts the white noise.

I've personally never used my voice to interact with any technology in any capacity. Whenever I see people try to talk to their phones it inevitably does something different than what they had wanted so they have to touch the device anyway. I've assumed it was a gimmick since its inception so I find it hard to believe that such a large percentage of people actually use it to make things easier.

And I feel the opposite. I don't use any voice assistants(I would like to try setting up my own open source one though), but more and more people around me are getting echos, or regularly use Siri or Google Assistant.

You know exactly one person who owns an iPhone?

> Because after 5 years, Alexa still doesn't work well enough for most people except to set a kitchen timer, play music, or check the outdoor temperature.

Same with the others. Google's seems to be the best, but it's still not great. Given where we were with custom-trained (to your own voice) locally-processed speech-to-text almost 20 friggin' years ago, it's hard to imagine that wouldn't be at least as good as the spying cloud AI mumbo-jumbo by now, had those being available and "free" not taken all the money, interest, and talent away from that.

> Replace "planet" with "United States".

Not even. Replace United States with... some very small subset of the United States.

I guess the bubble is very real.

That sentence struck me as odd too. Perhaps it's because most of my friends and I are all still broke-ish students, but I also only know one person who has an Alexa in their home.

It's not pervasive in Europe at all, aside from some countries where Amazon has a presence (germany, uk, etc.).

Largely due to extremely limited functionality if you're not using Amazon's services, and limited options for language.

I'm not sure about the latest generation, but the previous ones wouldn't even support a 24 hour clock format.

None of my friends here have Alexa. I've heard of its quirks as some of my US colleagues do but based on their stories I've consistently failed to gather why would I ever want one myself.

Not even! Most of my friends do NOT have an Alexa

Thank you for this "workaround", I'm definitely going to look at doing this when, inevitably, all devices I replace when they fail will come with IoT nonsense.

Also, I'd argue that the "Alexa is so dumb, it doesn't understand half of what I tell it" crowd here are missing the point, and the point is what you said

I spent some time taking apart how Alexa must work myself. My thinking on this is guided by the fact that there are only a handful of Wake Words available. Given that there are only 4, I'm thinking the ability to recognize those Wake Words is in firmware on the device (such tech was commercially available back in 1995 when I played with a demo piece of hardware that did just that). Decoding a wake word from a stream of audio locally on the device without making a persistent recording of it or sending a recording off-device is fine with me.

However the more complex parsing of what ever comes after the Wake Word needs to be sent off as an audio stream to some cloud operation for parsing where more horsepower is available. This also seems quite reasonable to me. Sure, it could be done on the device but this would mean a hotter CPU on the device and a generally more expensive Alexa. Certainly no more $29 Echo Dots.

Is Alexa listening all the time? Hell yes it is! Is Alexa recording everything you say, everything you watch on TV, every time the dog barks and sending it back to Amazon for archival? Its possible but consider the economics of storing that much data as audio. Storage is cheap but thats quite a burden. Is AMZN keeping a parsed version of everything it hears from your device and dumping the raw audio version? Its technically possible but again, consider the economics of such a thing.

Not to mention, how many Alexas are going to be sold after someone here posts smoking gun proof Alexa is constantly or even at some batched interval sending off large chunks of data which are in fact full voice recordings?

I'm not going to waste my time on this experiment but anybody who is good with Wireshark could perform an analysis to quickly disprove this whole notion.

You have to be careful not to conflate two things. It is immediately obvious that Alexa "is always listening" -- after all, how could it know you are about to utter the wake word? So, in a sense, the device is listening to you at all times.

That, however, is separate from a concern that the device is streaming your data back at all times. The implementation could easily locally listen for the wake word, record your utterance, and only stream/process that part of it. It can, in a sense, listen at all times but only tell Amazon what you actually want it to tell Amazon. Which, AFAIK, is how the device works. That doesn't, of course, mean that it works flawlessly or that things are captured which you don't intend it to capture, which is a fact that has also been covered extensively by the media reporting on Alexa.

Disclaimer: AWS employee, not remotely related to any Alexa work

From the public record you can actually be pretty certain that Alexa doesn't send anything back to Amazon other than actual requests (and false positives). There was a murder trial a few years ago where an Alexa may have grabbed some audio of the murder. A judge ordered Amazon to turn over anything they may have, and Amazon said they didn't receive any requests during that time period, and they don't get any recordings other than those requests. So Amazon has effectively stated, under threat of criminal prosecution, that they don't record anything other than those requests.

I wouldn't have a voice assistant in the house myself but even so I've still interacted with one. Mostly in the form of "Hey Alexa play Rick Astley as loud as you can" at the end of video calls with one of my colleagues...

(before hanging up obviously. I mean I don't want to have to hear that. :P )

Facebook, sure, but what's Twitter up to? Muddling along until they get cheap enough that Microsoft decides to buy them?

we live in a sensation world, articles like that are meant to have bold claims in the title, really nothing to see here.

As an early user of Alexa, unfortunately the technology is underwhelming. she does not understand names, she do not seem to improve while Google and Siri do actually, So yes Alexa Auto, or Alexa Show are good interesting devices, the reality is less rosy.

I've refused to buy one, but my daughter has one that she uses as a voice-activated radio and alarm clock. I think most people want the voice activated features and are unaware of the data collection capabilities of the device. There must be some balance between them. This might be a role for government.

What do you think Amazon do? Their entire store is an ad targeting platform.

For what it's worth, Alexa does ask for feedback about the accuracy and helpfulness of it's answers now.

No, far, far from most. Most people in certain tech-heavy cities, maybe.

Now, if you count voice assistants on phones, tablets, and laptops/desktops, most probably have access to at least one of those and maybe even most have tried it at least once. I doubt most (as in, over 50%) use them on a regular basis, though. Probably way under half.

I suppose that it depends upon what social group you're in. I'd say for people under 50 who life in modestly affluent parts of cities - yes, smart speakers are increasingly popular. Not sure if I'd use the word "most people", but it's a lot.

In my own small sample size of my family and wife's family, that is 8 households, only one has an amazon echo type of device.

Recently I visited the house of the one who does have it for four days. They used it to (a) set timers and (b) ask it odd questions for humor's sake to show it off to me. After an alarm sounded, 25% of the time they would have to request it to stop multiple times. I was unimpressed.

My immediate social circles do. It is definitely more common than I thought it would be ( I hoped the trend would go away the way 3d tv did ).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World First World is a term used for countries that are aligned with NATO. It has no basis in what you think it means.