Amazon plans to charge for Alexa in June–unless internal conflict delays revamp
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'd read a book on the inside story of the failure of this product. From cute, moderately useful novelty to glitchy, nagging revenue grab that takes it upon itself to come into your home with "offers". Eroding goodwill, missing the boat on AI you're naturally leveraged to integrate with your large installed base, it's shiny object middle management bingo.
Meanwhile with VoiceGPT, I can fill my instructions with awkward pauses, unclear language, and it still gets what I’m trying to say.
Now multiply by many languages, dialects, accents. Unless they had regional interpreters down to the accent level, why would it understand anything? Humans don’t understand each other with different accents even if the language is the same.
Doesn't matter how many languages or accents there are. The problem is that there was an established, large subset of those that it once understood and could comprehend, and now, that allegedly same technology - with several years of opportunities to mature and improve - is now struggling to understand those same people that it once could.
That as nothing to do with accents.
Now, while I acknowledge and agree that Siri, Alexa, and the other pre-AI voice activated assistance have declined in apparent comprehension, I'm not convinced it's entirely a degradation of the tech itself, but a significant increase in expectations and a subsequent decrease in articulation and diction thanks to VoiceGPT being able to handle it. As a result, we talk more naturally, with "uh"s, "um"s, pauses, bad grammar, slang, etc. Let's also acknowledge there's probably a statistically significant number of people (if for no other reason than them aging up into being able to afford/have said devices) that never used that "old" tech "Back in the day" of 2-3 years ago, who's only experience with it is using VoiceGPT first, then trying Siri or what have you and coming to the conclusion that the other voice assistant sucks. That's obviously not a "Fair" comparison, but it's one that gets made in the real all the time regardless when it comes to the court of public opinion, and informs pubic perception at large anyway.
Truthfully I think it's both, but regardless, it's failing to perform in an area where it once did. How much of that is the people changing, and how much of that is the technology, I'm not sure. But I doubt the cause is because we all suddenly switched accents on it.
Google Assistant on the other hand "knew" things. List movies from a director, verify if an actor was in a movie, pull random facts like the wheelbase of a 2004 subaru WRX. When having a discussion with friends/family I'd rather ask google to verify something then the annoying habit of checking out the conversation to check my phone. Last thing I want is to hang out with people who mostly end up looking at their phones.
GA does seem stupider than it was, seems like they are using a smaller model for cheaper inference. But GA still pretty good at random facts, weather, timers, alarm clock, playing music, broadcasting to the household, and related.
I won’t even use it for free. We already live in a surveillance state. At this point the wisest course of action is to launder your thoughtcrimes through multiple privacy-enhancing services.
You also dont have to say “hey siri” anymore, “siri” is enough.
No one's interested in paying for it. It's a mild convenience at the cost of letting Amazon into your home. It's not something I believe basically anyone is willing to pay for. It's something we use begrudgingly because it's convenient.
The only reason I even have Alexa devices in my house at all is Amazon kept throwing them at be for free when attending Amazon events like Re:Invent - I wanted to go Google Home, but I just got buried in devices.
I control my lights with Alexa and listen to podcasts. I'll just use my phone if they try to charge me.
I don’t believe I’ve ever used it regularly for anything else. Maybe once in a while I’ll be driving and I’ll ask Siri for directions to some place.
It’s difficult to see why anybody would bother paying monthly subscription money for Alexa. If you have an iPhone Siri can do all the basic stuff (set timers, look up the weather) that Alexa can.
Do some people use Alexa to adjust their home lights and stuff? Would non-wealthy people actually pay money in the form of a monthly subscription just so Alexa can adjust your home lights?
Seems like Amazon’s strategy here doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m not Jeff Bezos so what do I know….
Talk about inventing problems.
Still, my main point was the lights. I guess I am well into minority situation since turning them on/off is easier than talking to a thing or, god forbid, using a phone.
From experience, I just as baffling to these people as they are to me.
I also have kids that are terrible at turning things off, so I've stuck one smart bulb in each of their rooms and quietly conditioned them to prefer that light to some of the switch-activated lighting so I can just centrally switch them all off once they're gone or when leaving the house without trekking around.
However I can tell you that it's really handy to set timers for cooking, checking weather, or even just checking the time when your hands are busy or dirty.
My dad uses Alexa routines for lights and shutters. Turning the shutters up when the sun rises, and down again when the sun sets.
Siri has no trouble controlling that.
I often use Siri to play music, either from my library or from the free Apple Music radio selection. It rarely has trouble with that (provided the environment isn't noisy).
I use it regularly to add items to the grocery list when my hands are full or covered in raw chicken or something.
I don't think there's a lot Alexa can do that Siri can't, besides letting you spend money directly on Amazon products (if that's still a thing).
Would I pay a subscription to do these things if that were the only way to access them?
Honestly, I don't know. It's hugely convenient to be able to do it, and it's definitely become habit to do so in various ways. I would absolutely be pissed at Apple if they pulled a move like this.
Why pay a subscription to Amazon for Alexa when Siri offers all this for free?
I can understand if someone pays a one time payment to get an Alexa smart speaker for convenience. But a monthly subscription? Doesn’t make sense when Siri is free
I wonder if ‘customer obsession’ means less to his successor;or maybe the new boss’ success is judged differently (eg profit) than in Bezos’ time?
Maybe, but I have not noticed any significant change in the day to day quality of the service compared to when Jeff was around. Have you?
They oughta just save themselves the time and effort and just call it now.
I found the whole experience very underwhelming. Alexa frequently misunderstood me. At one time I tried asking it to play a particular type of music and it said I require a subscription. I tried some of the skills and they were total garbage. And then there are the privacy issues. I live alone so I was not too concerned but I would always make sure it was off before using the phone.
The only thing I would really want to use a product like Alexa for and pay for it with a subscription is if I could use it for language learning. But my bar for this is very high. I'm not interested in something that just feeds me phrases to learn. It would need to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the ability to adapt its output to my level, provide useful feedback, and have excellent voice recognition for bad accents and the ability to suggest improvements to my pronunciation and grammar. I don't see this happening any time soon.
Got it. Your alarm for 5pm “collet take out trash” is set.
I keep seeing articles about complaints with Alexa, but we use Google Home quite a bit without any of these problems.
It’s not perfect, but any issues we have with them now are the same issues we’ve always had with them. I don’t know of any regressions.
But maybe we don’t use those features?
We mostly use it to control our smart devices (lights, vacuums), set timers, ask it questions (that we would otherwise Google), and play music on Spotify. The most common uses, I would think.
I wish the voice assistant field got more complex and better. It was a neat tech diversion.
Also funny how all of the capabilities noted boil down to "Alexa can spend your money more easily and quickly".
Switching out to a novel AI model just to stay hip sounds expensive.
Modern phones are starting to do more processing locally and I could see that making its way to the smart speakers as well if they survive as a product category, but they're definitely paying for compute on most existing devices.
Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient.
From what I gather a Pi 5 can do it in 1.5 seconds, which is closer, so I suspect it's only a matter of time before we do have fully local STT running directly on speakers.
> Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient.
Yes, this is the approach taken by a lot of streaming STT systems, like Kaldi [0]. Rather than use a fully capable model, you train a specialized one that knows what kinds of things people are likely to say to it.
I wouldn't pay $1 for this, it's all stuff that my phone can already do.
Presumably it won't even be able to play music anymore.