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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about the number of technologies that came out (essentially) fully baked and haven't seemingly improved since.

I had the thought while grumping at my Alexa. I say the same phrase every day, and every day there's a 50% failure rate. I keep looking for phrases that it can understand better than the ones I've cycled through, but they all suck.

But Alexa, as shipped, was pretty great. The fact that it hasn't seemed to improve at all since confounds me. The reports of the high body counts in the division surely attest to the lack of focus or interest in core Alexa skills. All those product and integration priorities were on the wrong product stack layer.

Same with: iPhone typing, Siri, Tesla software (and beyond FSD -- the only thing that seems have happened in the 2 years I've owned my vehicle is the addition of Apple Music), Apple Watch, etc.

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It was fully-baked in the sense that it was novel and could recognize fairly basic voice commands including simple questions of fact. Once the novelty wore off, a lot of people concluded that wasn't actually that useful given they had a computer in their pocket anyway.

Voice is still just an implementation detail. I'd argue that we still aren't at the point where general purpose computer assistants are all that useful relative to humans. It's the same 10% (or whatever) problem as self-driving has.

I don't think it's true that the Echo was only a novelty, it was and still is an extremely effective way to do a couple of tasks that people find very useful - mainly playing music of course. The hardware and processing required to recognize its wake word very reliably and arbitrary voice commands somewhat reliably in an open space was an incredible leap forward for consumer products at the time. But it has managed to add essentially zero value to the initial offering in the decade since then.

YMMV of course. I maybe use it to play music in my bedroom a couple times a month. Usually I play it from either my Apple TV or my computer.

It's useful for a few other things. A weather forecast if I haven't gotten out of bed yet, setting an alarm, turning my bedroom lights on. The occasional quantity conversion in the kitchen.

But all those add up to something closer to "novelty" than whatever investment Amazon put into the technology.

> Tesla software (and beyond FSD -- the only thing that seems have happened in the 2 years I've owned my vehicle is the addition of Apple Music)

If you want changelogs you can look at this fan-run site. A lot of small iteration and a few big splashes (depending on if you like the feature or not)

https://www.notateslaapp.com/software-updates/

Fwiw, I've had good luck creating routines to cover wordings that should work but don't. One of the available actions is a (single) custom command, so you can use a one-action routine as a map from this wording to that wording.

So, for example, on my system “start my car” actually maps to “tell blue link to start my Ioniq and set the temperature to 72” because the skill is godawful picky about getting all of that.

I'm convinced that the feedback I send using the Alexa app goes nowhere. It definitely isn't used to improve Alexa's ability to understand the simple phrase: "play NPR".

Edit: I almost forgot. There was also the time it stopped understanding "stop". It properly parsed the word but didn't know what to do with it. IIRC I had to use the mobile app to stop playback that day.

This is true, now. It is the case that Video, Music, and SmartHome teams took over much of Alexa support in middle of 2022/2023 (many other teams were fired), and the result is basic functionality such as "stop" doesn't work (music, timers, alarms), "play" goes to some random incorrect cache of Music or Video, not News. What happened to the data (including your feedback)? It disappears, of course. Nothing but SMILES (a program designed to only report positive trends and feedback) for Amazon leadership.

Alexa devices are spyware; they listen in on you, and if your device has a camera the camera can be accessed without your knowledge too.

Unplug this stuff already...

> I was thinking about the number of technologies that came out (essentially) fully baked and haven't seemingly improved since.

Google Maps (mobile). Horrible UX in so many ways.

I think it's hard for a company to sponsor a product like Alexa if the monetization is near impossible. It's basically a vanity, money draining product.

I deeply resent it when Alexa tries to upsell me something and I certainly would if it fed me an ad every time I asked it to do something.

And what's the alternative? A subscription?

Alexa certainly isn't useful enough to me to pay anything meaningful.

Agreed. I get angry. How dare you try and sell me garbage when I ask you about the weather?

Make good speakers, improve language detection, improve music playback, simplify that stupid-complicated-always-rearranging Alexa app, decrease my curse-at-Alexa rate, make Alexa part of Amazon Prime or charge me an additional $20-30/year for simple audio processing services.

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