I’d love to know what the people in Amazon who came up with that thought they were doing. Did they not use the product themselves? Surely they knew their users mostly didn’t want that. Why not add a way to turn that off?
Who am I kidding though, the odds he's using Alexa is zero, eh?
I'm being facetious of course, but that's probably what I would do if I were a tech mogul with billions and billions of dollars.
Whether that’s still true in 2025 I’m not sure, but the chances of him using it seems fairly high given its origins.
One time it was some package delivery notification and I let it slide. The next time was an ad for some Amazon service, which was an immediate “handle the crying baby for a few minutes while I get this shit eradicated from our house” moment.
That's because voice assistants are and have always been terrible, and could only play music, tell you the weather, set an alarm, and set a timer with any advantage over any other input method. People who liked using them for these things liked them. If you didn't need them for these things, there was no good reason to put a direct open line to Amazon, Google, or Apple in your house just to read you what wikipedia says about something.
People will love real assistants to death, especially local ones that learn from their personal habits. During the wave of voice assistants, they were promised that futuristic secretary through fraudulent advertising and endless industry marketing, and instead they got talking clock radios connected to advertising companies.
...and "Hey Siri, move my calendar event at 3pm tomorrow to 2pm Friday"
You have to be pretty deep in the weeds to consider doing these operations with any confidence via Siri, but hey! They mostly work! :-P
I feel like this is the feeling at every big tech company
Being on the outside looking in it seems like these companies rapidly innovate
But when you actually work at one, it feels like everything moves at a glacial pace and the “right” answers are never the ones implemented
A good friend of mine has worked at Nvidia for years and even he was complaining that “nothing gets done” there
I use and talk to chatGPT while driving to get things done and as a knowledgebase .... i.e. wanted get my car towed and junked and get best deal. GPT told me nearest junkyards and all details needed like need title & sign over title to them but it didnt interface with local junkyard's AI agent to schedule it all for me & send me an email confirmation or text. I wished it did.
we tried the Alexa/Home lighting solutions this last year and it gets so annoying to ask every morning to turn the lights on. even worse when one of the bulbs drops from the network or the wifi is down.
Lutron Clear Connect is great, but it’s not even a standard within Lutron. It’s a whole bunch of things, often wildly incompatible with each other. At least most of their stuff is compatible with Pico.
But I’m surprised you put Z-Wave above Zigbee. On the one hand, Z-Wave is a nice ecosystem where approximately everything is compatible with everything else, and even generally unfriendly companies publish detailed integration guides. On the other hand, the protocol itself is unbelievably bad. It does not recover well from transient connectivity issues. Meshing is janky, picks poor routes, and has seconds of latency even when working correctly. The range of non-LR links is beyond pathetic, at least in the US regulatory region. (I found some references suggesting that US rules on power spectral density play poorly with the protocol and the EU region is a big better.) At least long range mode has tolerable, but far from amazing, range.
I haven’t used Zigbee and Thread much, but my understanding is that Zigbee’s mesh should expect much lower latency than Z-Wave, and that Thread is even better. And Thread can supposedly sort-of-transparently use Ethernet backhaul to extend the mesh. Sadly the Thread ecosystem appears to be a mess.
Yeah, what I was trying to get at was specifically their Caseta line with 433 MHz Clear Connect (and not their more expensive solutions, which are also great, but a completely different tier).
> But I’m surprised you put Z-Wave above Zigbee.
I was a late-comer to Z-Wave, so I haven't used anything below Z-Wave 800 devices, and it's been solid for me, though I've been very judicious in the quality of devices I pick up, and am careful with device configuration to limit chatter, which can wreck Z-Wave networks. Zigbee has also been solid for me - the real upside for me with Z-Wave is simply the better range/reduced interference of 900 MHz vs 2.4 GHz.
> I haven’t used Zigbee and Thread much, but my understanding is that Zigbee’s mesh should expect much lower latency than Z-Wave, and that Thread is even better. And Thread can supposedly sort-of-transparently use Ethernet backhaul to extend the mesh. Sadly the Thread ecosystem appears to be a mess.
Thread's been pretty good for me too - but again, I'm pretty careful about devices. I use ethernet-connected Apple TVs on each floor of my house for the backhaul and don't have any thread devices that aren't also HomeKit compatible.
What country / regulatory region are you in? With Z-Wave, non LR, in the US, with 800 series devices and USB stick (properly extended on an extension cable) or 800 series devices meshed to each other, I sometimes struggle to get a connection at a range of 20 feet or so, with a single ordinary drywall + wood wall in the way or even sometimes line of sight. LR is better, but not fantastic.
20ft doesn't sound necessarily unreasonable though with a wall... I wouldn't expect Zigbee/Thread to perform better with comparable devices. I haven't found any of the low-power mesh networks to have especially great range when not taking advantage of the mesh.
I would love a way to ask recipes and have it look up in my NYT Cooking subscription and give me step by step.
IMHO the basic modalities have to change to make use of LLMs in a voice assistant. Alexa and other assistants are built around short utterances that map to a command or simple question answering. There's not much room to make that smarter; things like chained commands aren't just hard to parse (except with LLMs), they are hard to compose.
There's a lot of household use cases they could tackle, but it's almost like building a whole new product. I doubt they have the organization capacity to do that.
There's probably another category of development in making it more socially aware, also building on its position in a household. But it would have to change some of its privacy expectations to be "aware" beyond its wakeword. They have pretty good speaker identification, and I don't know what all they could do with their mic arrays and a sort of audio/spacial awareness, but I bet some interesting stuff is possible. By socially aware I mean adapting length of response, follow-ups, giving more continuity over time, and so on. That's something LLMs do well, but involves hidden state and theories of interaction that these big companies are very reluctant to implement. They are only comfortable implementing it at the training stage where it ends up in opaque model weights and no one takes any responsibility for the result.
From the article: "Research scientists who worked on the LLM said Amazon does not have enough data or access to the specialized computer chips needed to run LLMs to compete with rival efforts at companies like OpenAI."
To me this sounds like folks who don't know what they are trying to achieve, and coming up with excuses. (I thought there must be a term for this, and asked ChatGPT, and am quite delighted with all the options it gives: Strategic self-handicapping, Pretext paralysis, Deferral delusion, Obstruction illusion, Motivated impossibility – all of these seem to be hallucinated terms but focus on a different aspect.)
But it's true could also go deep with something like GPT's Advanced Voice Mode. This does actually does seem like a big technical lift. It's a change in the product, but besides the technical difficulties of better turn-taking, speech generation, memory, etc., it would otherwise be possible to drop it in to the product. It would change the relationship of Alexa with the household, but it's pretty clearly compelling.
If anything, I'd love ditching the cloud for the basics.