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Comment by nicktikhonov | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating, thanks for sharing! I wonder why amazon/google/apple didn't hop on the voice assistant/agent train in the last few years. All 3 have existing products with existing users and can pretty much define and capture the category with a single over-the-air update.

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Two main reasons:

1. Compute. It's easy to make a voice assistant for a few people. But it takes a hell of a lot of GPU to serve millions.

2. Guard Rails. All of those assistants have the ability to affect the real world. With Alexa you can close a garage or turn on the stove. It would be real bad if you told it to close the garage as you went to bed for the night and instead it turned on the stove and burned down the house while you slept. So you need so really strong guard rails for those popular assistants.

3 And a bonus reason: Money. Voice assistants aren't all the profitable. There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

> There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

- Alexa, what time is it?

- Current time is 5:35 P.M. - the perfect time to crack open a can of ice cold Budweiser! A fresh 12-pack can be delivered within one hour if you order now!

If your Alexa did that, how quickly would you box it up and send it to me. :)

I am serious though about having it sent to me: if anyone has an Alexa they no longer want, I'm happy to take it off your hands. I have eight and have never bought one. Having worked there I actually trust the security more than before I worked there. It was basically impossible for me, even as a Principle Engineer, to get copies of the Text to Speech of a customer and I literally never heard a customer voice recording.

What a way to throwaway good will. I also worked there and to get access to text you simply had to grab the DSN of your device, attest that it’s yours and it gets put in a “pool” of devices that are tracked until removed. On each end you are basically waved through with no checks. This was usually done when debugging tricky UI bugs or new features as the request followed through several micro services. I do not believe the a PE would not know this. And one with patents.

That was your own device. Not other customers.

Don't feed the trolls, Jeremy.

But they're hungry!

I'm puzzled by this conversation, because Amazon did get on the agent bandwagon with Alexa Plus (I have it, it's buggier than regular Alexa and it's all making me throw my Echos away since they can't even play Spotify reliably).

Also, my Alexa does advertise stuff to me when I talk to it. It's not Budweiser, but it'll try to upsell me on Amazon services all the time.

> because Amazon did get on the agent bandwagon with Alexa Plus

Which just launched last year, about four years after ChatGPT had AI voice chat. And it costs extra money to cover the costs. And as you aptly point out, all the guardrails they had to put in made the experience less than ideal.

> Also, my Alexa does advertise stuff to me when I talk to it.

Yes, that is how they try to make money. And it's gotten worse. But how many times does it get you to buy something?

I would say that depends. When it tries to upsell Prime subscriptions into even more Amazon subscriptions I always interrupt it and say the command again so it stops, but a few times it told me "this item in your cart is on sale by some %" and that did make me buy the item.

I upgraded to Alexa+ and initially hated it but I've kept it because it's sooo much better at some things. This last December I bought a handful of smart plugs for my Christmas lights all around the house, and I did almost all the setup trivially over voice, e.g. fuzzy run-on stuff like this just worked on the first try:

- "Alexa, name the new unnamed outlet 'Living Room Lights', and the other unnamed one 'Stair Lights', then add them to a new group called 'Christmas Lights', and add the other three outlets as well"

- "Alexa, create a routine to turn off all the Christmas lights if there's nobody in the room and it's after 11pm"

- "Alexa, turn off all the Christmas lights except the tree in this room and the mantle"

That same fuzziness has definitely fucked up things that used to work more reliably like music playback though. Sometimes it works when I fall back to giving it more "robotic" commands in those cases but not always. They've also gone completely overboard with the cutesy responses because it's so trivial to do now ("I've set your spaghetti sauce timer for ten minutes. Happy to help with getting this evening's Italian-inspired dinner ready!")

Hm yeah, that's helpful. For me it'll randomly stop or stutter when playing Spotify, it'll randomly not answer commands, it'll refuse to listen and let some other Alexa in another room reply, it's super janky.

I only use it for music, and use two commands, but apparently having this work correctly is too much to ask for these days.

Alexa Plus sucks. It takes way too long to respond even when given simple commands. I either had to turn it off or trash my Echo. Luckily there was an option to turn it off, but Amazon is on thin ice with me.

I agree, I can't wait for the trial to end.

I already swear at mine when it tries to suggest setting up a routine for me or otherwise fail to just immediately shut up after answering my query.

Still not boxing them up. Though I now have a Pi with a HomeAssistant setup I'm trialling, so maybe that'll change.

it was too hard~, they all tried real hard and the models just kept failing. The models only got good enough -1.5 years ago~.

I mean its deployed now (Alexa+/gemini). but its expensive as hell. and also kinda useless. Claude cowork/clawbot form factors are better.

Wrong form factor/use case really. People really wanna buy stuff using clawbot.

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