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In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across
by Bjartr 11y ago
In my limited experience using Echo at my parents house over the holidays I was distinctly not impressed by the Echo's abilities to understand voice from across the room. We often had to repeat ourselves, only louder and slower to get the Echo to understand us. We do not have strong accents.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cs2818 11y agoExact opposite for me, does a great job at recognizing speech but a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions.
- freyr 11y ago> a horrible job providing answers to even simple questions. If you think of it as a device that performs specific actions (i.e., plays audio, gives a weather forecast, sets a timer, etc.) via an voice interface, rather than a general intelligence that can answer random questions, you're going to have a better time.
- Daneel_ 11y agoTHIS. It baffles me how people expect devices such as the Echo to understand every nuance of human language, then get annoyed when it can't answer your overly-complex or vague question. Voice interfaces for me are always reduced to clearly enunciated and simple commands such as "set timer 10 minutes" or "play album Anjunadeep 4". You'll have a much better time than saying "alexaplaymesomealbumsbyaboveandbyond"
- lsaferite 11y agoWell, in fairness, Google does a much better job than Alexa at 'doing what I want'
- balls187 11y agoEcho has gotten much better at simple questions, and by prefacing "Wikipedia" prior to a query, I find the results satisfactory.
- dguaraglia 11y agoAs anecdata goes, I have an Echo. It was an impulse buy when it came on pre-sale, then didn't know what to do when I actually received. I've been using it for quite a while now and the voice recognition is amazing, but the software is not really there yet. I can tell it to set up a timer from the kitchen (which is around a corner from the device) without much of an issue, even with my, somewhat strong, Argentine accent. Many of the commands it "fails" at is when it tries to "guess" what I might have meant to say because it can't find something in its database. For example, if I give it a wrong name for a song (say "Alexa play She's Leaving by The Beatles" it might play some song called "She's Leaving" by some other band because it can't find that song under The Beatles.
- verbify 11y agoEveryone has an accent. Do you mean that you speak General American (i.e. the North East non-coastal accent)?
- baddox 11y agoOf course you're technically correct, but I find it quite common for Americans to understand that "no accent" refers to General American, even if they're not aware of the term "General American."
- verbify 11y agoIt's not just pedantics. I live in the UK, and some people who speak something between Received Pronunciation and the BBC accent also think they have no accent. People can't hear their own accents and presume they don't have any.
- baddox 11y agoBut this is more than just my bias for my own accent (which is very close to GA). When I meet other Americans with other regional accents, they will often describe me as having "no accent."