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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone tell me how Alexa has evolved since its inception? To me it seems equally intellectually challenged since day one.

I can tell Alexa to "turn off my bedroom light", I can't tell it to "turn off my Livingroom light", but if I tell it to "turn off my bedroom AND my living room light", then it doesn't understand it. Alexa is as bad as the voice dialing systems from cars of 15 years ago.

What have all those researchers and developers at Alexa been doing all those years that the bloody thing can't understand basic command chaining?

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My biggest frustration here is that it can't understand simple responses to questions it asked me. I'll ask Alexa to turn off the lights in a certain room, sometimes she'll respond "a few things share that name, which one did you mean" and I cannot say "both" or even "all of them". The command equivilent of none-of-the-above or all-of-the-above feels table stakes for an assistant which can ask you for specific selections if it is confused about which you meant.

You can ask to "turn off all of the lights" - but "all of the lights" or "all of them" isn't a valid response once you're into the question-and-answer phase, at least not reliably for me.

In the 1970s I tried to create an Advent-like game (Advent was the predecessor of Zork). The user interface was plain English text commands.

I rapidly discovered there were so many common ways to express the same thing in English, that trying to enumerate them was impossible. At least impossible on a PDP-10.

Oh, come on. There's aren't that many common way to express basic things in English like telling it to turn of all the two lights on your house when it asks you "which one?".

"All of them" and "both" should be enough to cover most users and not put big pressure on Amazons datacenters and yet Alexa can't even get that right.

"all of them"

Works for me in response

I figured as soon as I shared my own anecdote a bunch of others contradicting would follow. This perhaps makes it even more frustrating - I promise I enunciate well and don't verbally abuse the voice assistant!

Alexa was supposed to be a revenue stream for Amazon that never really materialized. As a developer of a now deprecated Alexa Skill, they constantly badgered me into monetizing it.

All of those folks were trying to figure out how to have Alexa make money, and my interpretation of the layoffs is they never figured out how.

Maybe Alexa would have made money if the product wasn't so broken at understanding basic logic commands.

How can you expect to sell this device knowing how bad and limited it is?

Millions of people use it despite it being “broken”. They just don’t know a good place to charge for the ongoing server costs.

Hacker news keeps repeating that the product doesn’t work or is broken or whatever, but it’s a hit. Millions of people use it daily.

Millions of people actually use it? Or keep it as a paperweight who's sole job is to "Alexa turn off the lights" once a week?

If it's the latter then you probably don't need to keep thousands of highly paid engineers since that's what Alexa could also do 10 years ago and what vehicle voice commands could do 15 years ago without internet connection and expensive data centers. Drops mic

Well how do you define “uses it” because your paperweight story sure sounds like use to me. They probably don’t need all those engineers, but there’s a long-tail of features people use beyond weekly lights.

Also, Alexa works better than any car control ever has, and at a fraction of the price. You obviously need internet connectivity for the majority of features people care about. Like controlling devices over the network, getting weather, streaming music, etc

If it was a hit, a monthly subscription would solve the issue.

Considering they’ve slowly started moving features behind a subscription already, keep watching because I’ll bet Alexa becomes a subscription for most features beyond timers and weather and controlling your first 10 smarthome devices.

It’s just hard to charge for something that used to be free.

I feel like all of this is very solvable with current generation AI.

I can ask chatGPT right now "What would you do if asked to make a stop at a gas station on the current navigation route" and it gives a sensible answer (in this case "i can't add a stop to your navigation"). So it's clearly possible for modern AI to work with this sort of context. They just need to integrate modern AI with voice assistants and add appropriate application hooks the AI can act upon everywhere asap.

This also makes layoffs in voice chat departments stupid. They are on the verge of a revolution. Everything stated here as a weakness of voice assistants is about to be solved.

But to make a decent voice-driven assistant using Chat GPT, Whisper etc., you need a team of about 10 engineers, hence the downsizing.

I think there's still a huge amount of work to go through the codebase and add appropriate (and safe) hooks for the AI to act upon. That means a complete pivot in what the staff work on but i don't think layoffs make sense as since there's an urgent need to pivot to be first in this space.

The context recognition is there sure. But teams working on old models of context recognition (more hardcoded methods) are still engineers and there's a need to throw engineers at this to be first.

Imagine saying in winter "Make my living room feel like a summer beach party" leading to blinds up + lights on with yellow hue + heat + ambient beach music turning on. That needs hooks into every first and third party home automation system. It needs the ability to choose specific genres of music on a playlist. etc. There's so much work to do and it needs to be done before the competitors. Firing engineers, even when they would need to pivot to achieve this doesn't make sense to me as this is one of those winner takes all technology races. You really really want to be the first to set the standard for how third parties integrate these hooks.

It's an iPhone moment in the making and Amazon is firing staff.

I feel like it's gotten actively worse.

It might just be my expectations were always that it would get better, and it hasn't. Or that I know they laid people off, so knowing that I expect it to get worse.

I'd switch but everyone I know with a Google setup has trouble with theirs. And we have some Apple devices so we know Siri isn't great either.

Kids love it.. the "Alexa fart for me" is the best implemented part of it.

I just tested Alexa: "turn on the living room AND the den" and it worked fine.

However, further resting revealed that I need to stress the "and" and have a little of a pause before it so that Alexa understands that "and" means an additional command and isn't just part of "living room." However, even is situations where Alexa didn't recognize the "and" part of the command it still turned on the living room lights...

The system was redesigned so that ASR would handle the transcription and the "understanding." It never worked correctly, many many people complained, some people showed counter designs and data driven forecasts of catastrophic loss across multiple major areas. Those people were fired, the data was faked, and here we are today, with a broken Alexa. That said, it can "listen" and "see" quite well.

I guess it doesn't know what a "ling" is?

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