7 ms·
The inside story of how Amazon created Echo
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jkraker 11y agosummary: Bezos may or may not have established a requirement for the 1 second response time, Amazon did a bunch of testing to craft responses to common questions, Bezos wanted to make sure it wasn't seen as just another music device and it may eventually make Amazon $1 billion. I had hoped for a bit more detail.
- deanCommie 11y agoWhat were you hoping to get at this early time in the product's lifecycle? Most companies aren't Apple with their short-film-about-every-new-product approach with interviews and sexy renders.
- studentrob 11y agoA run down on the tech and some key employees credited with contributions would've made it more interesting for me. Something a little more than Bezos + 1 second. This article sounds a lot like the Jobs hating ones, just from a positive perspective. Anyway Bezos has obviously already done tons for Amazon. The article does nothing to boost Amazon's image and it's a weak attempt at boosting Jeff's.
- codyb 11y agoYea, I was hoping for the same. Specifically I came in curious as to how it knows to "start paying attention" at the prompt Alexa. I assume it must be integral to the local system although I was under the impression most of these artificial intelligence systems did a lot of their speech processing back home and not locally. Otherwise Amazon would A) be processing a lot of irrelevant conversation and B) be eavesdropping. So my guess was that the Alexa aspect must be local. Very neat, even with the kind of weak article I did put myself in the place of "Alexa, call me an Uber please, I'd like to go to the movies" which is pretty neat. Especially since you could work through, "what's playing nearby Alexa?" ..."okay, in 25 minutes call me an Uber for the Avengers Alexa" I assume you have to say Alexa everytime? But maybe once you're conversing it will keep talking with you? Can you say Alexa at the end? Does it keep track of the last five seconds or so of audial information at any given point for parsing questions? Lots of interesting challenges.
- alok-g 11y agoExcerpts from Wikipedia [1]: "In the default mode the device continuously listens to all speech, monitoring for the wake word to be spoken." "... Echo only streams recordings from the user's home when the 'wake word' activates the device." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Echo
- anonymouse12345 11y agoAll wake word spotting (whether for "Alexa," "Amazon," or "Echo," takes place on the device in order specifically to not stream unintended audio to the cloud (for privacy and for separately beneficial reduction in cloud processing costs).
- azinman2 11y agoIt's the same as "ok Google" on certain phones... Local dsp chip that only needs to process the wake word.
- anonymouse12345 11y agoAlso, not an article with a lot of on-the-record comment from Amazon (as is typical), so you're not going to see a lot of citable or confirmed detail.
- anonymouse12345 11y ago(1) Yes - after reviewing much internal and comparative data (2) Yes - lots and lots (3) Yes - he's not a huge music fan (4) Easy speculation, but probably yes given ASP and likely units sold source: physically present in many meetings in which first 3 were discussed, debated, and decided.
- rdl 11y agoDoes he like audiobooks? Audible integration is one of my main loves about the Echo -- I own 3 of them now. There are some minor tweaks which the app could use ("end-of-chapter sleep" being the main one, and maybe a go-back-5m on top of go-back-30s, and an auditory representation/readout of how far into a chapter/book/etc. you are.)
- galistoca 11y agoI don't think him being a non-music fan has anything to do with him not wanting it to be seen as just another music device though. IF what you built enables things that weren't possible before, you probably don't want it to be associated with already existing products in a crowded market.
- spark3k 11y agoJeff Bezos' marketing arm at it again. Notice that the Tesla Model 3 was the hottest news of the weekend and only got a tiny Business Insider article?
- catwithribbon 11y agoWithout trying very hard I found 4 Business Insider articles about the model 3 published in the space of 2 days, including 3 different articles about the model 3 published in one day... http://www.businessinsider.com/here-is-the-tesla-model-3-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/here-is-the-tesla-model-3-201... http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-everything-we-know-about-the-just-revealed-tesla-model-3-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-everything-we-know-abou... http://www.businessinsider.com/the-model-3-is-teslas-biggest-gamble-here-are-the-risks-2016-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-model-3-is-teslas-biggest... http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-model-3-2016-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-model-3-2016-4 Amusingly one of the comments under one of those articles even accuses BI of having a "lovefest" for Elon.
- matwood 11y agoI hope your comment was missing a /s, because you cannot be serious thinking that Tesla was not all over every news organization.
- p4wnc6 11y agoIs echo a profitable business unit for Amazon? I don't know a single person in my extended network, ranging from elderly family members to colleagues and tech professionals, to my teenage sister's cohort, who considers it anything but an obnoxious idea. I've actually made a point to try and ask people I know about it without sharing my opinions with them first, because I earnestly want to understand if people want these kinds of devices in their homes. Though the sample of my connections is small (N ~ 75 people), it is fairly diverse and randomized across age, income level, education, tech proficiency, and world-wide geographic location, and it has seriously been a completely uniform, 100% rate of negative opinion regarding the idea of Echo. I'd like to see more official numbers though, to better understand where the demand does come from for it.
- bigchewy 11y agoGiven the overall sales numbers and your survey of 0 out of 75, I think your opinions may be shining through despite your efforts to contain them. My equally anecodatal evidence is the opposite - Probably a dozen of my friends have purchased Echos in the last couple of months and almost all rave about it
- p4wnc6 11y agoWhat are the sales numbers?
- eclipxe 11y agohttp://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459726284&sr=8-1&keywords=echo%5C#customerReviews http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=... 35k people have reviewed it. 4.5 star average. 35k > 75
- p4wnc6 11y agoI don't find this convincing in the least. Just looking through many of the 5-star reviews, several of them come from people who actively contacted Amazon to request to purchase Alexa, which gives a clear bias in favor of a positive review (someone actively looking to like it, or an active reviewer of newer tech, not really representative of mainstream users). Many others come from the pool of "Top 50 Reviewer" or "Top 500 Reviewer" which again suffers the same problem. It's an Amazon product, so it's obviously not OK with Amazon to deride it, and top reviewers are unlikely to jeopardize their affiliation-with-Amazon status to give it a significantly negative review. The problem is I don't know the underlying population these reviews were drawn from, and at a cursory glance it looks highly different than the kind of population whose reviews I care about. However, I will say that one substantial sub-population within the reviews, the sub-population writing reviews related to the way Echo can be used by differently abled people, does seem to present some compelling information about that particular use case. Other than that, the reviews don't give me much of a reason to care (about the reviews themselves, not Echo), and this is not yet even taking into account what surely must be armies of sponsored reviews discreetly coming from Amazon itself.
- guptaneil 11y agoI'm fascinated by Echo because it seems like a silly idea on paper, yet I can't stop hearing good things about it. Genuine question: are people not concerned about the NSA potentially listening to all their conversations? I am tempted to buy one, based solely on the rave reviews, but I'm 80% confident the NSA could hack into it and bug my home if they wanted.
- Jemaclus 11y agoI guess an obvious question is: what makes you think they haven't already? You have a smartphone, yeah? More realistically, I would say that for most people, the NSA thing is a non-issue. Most of America isn't as privacy-minded as HN tends to be. I personally am not concerned about that. If the NSA is hacking into my Echo, there are bigger issues than the Echo -- namely, the NSA is overreaching. I'm not sure that ruling out an otherwise beneficial symptom of the problem really fixes the problem itself. In other words, if you don't have an Echo, does that magically make the NSA powerless? No, of course not.
- guptaneil 11y agoGreat points. While I don't consider myself that privacy-minded, I have been trying to be more conscious of it lately. I suppose I trust my phone more for two reasons: 1. The public battle between the FBI and Apple gives me some confidence that my phone isn't bugged. 2. Even if it is bugged, my phone spends most of its time in my pocket or in a corner of my bedroom charging. Its microphones aren't good enough to pick up any real conversation in either situation. The Echo is unique in that it is specifically designed to hear all conversation in a room and placed in a central location at all times. Having said that, I agree that the Echo will not make or break the NSA. It is, however, one more potential security hole I am willingly bringing into my life. I will have to weigh the benefits to that risk. Just like I continue to use my smartphone, Gmail, Facebook, etc because the benefits have outweighed the risk, I am coming around to the benefit side of Echo's equation.
- ajford 11y agoIf the NSA had any reason to listen in on your conversations, nothing will stop them. It's just as easy to point a laser microphone at any window in your home, or simply planting a bug in your home.
- serge2k 11y ago> seemed like more confirmation that the ecommerce giant lacked the chops to create a game-changing hardware device. Only if you haven't heard of the kindle. > lengthy internal debates about its market appeal something something fire phone.
- andersen1488 11y agoHow is this any more useful than my smartphone? I'm also extremely skeptical of voice controlled anything ever catching on. It's just too awkward, no matter how good the technology gets.
- Houshalter 11y agoIts much better than a smartphone mic. And always on, unlike a phone you need to take out of your pocket.
- voltagex_ 11y agoWhy can't I buy one outside of the US?
- greyman 11y agoI suppose they are busy meeting the demand from U.S. customers, but I hope they will go international later on.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]