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The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo
- zoidb 10y agoI wonder what conversation at bloomberg resulted in adding all of those extremely distracting (and annoying) animated gifs..
- igvadaimon 10y agoI found them wonderful.
- Taylor_OD 10y agoYeah I enjoy all the stuff they have done to make the pages interesting. When I just need to focus on the text I use Speedy Readie.
- glaberficken 10y agoWe seem to have come full circle since <blink>
- daveguy 10y agoHoly crap that is annoying. Is there a way to pause all animated gifs in chrome? Congratulations, Bloomberg, you captured the essence of a Geocities site. This has to be a not so subtle graphic design joke.
- neogodless 10y agoI opened up Chrome Developer tools and added img { display: none } which hides everything but the top banner, which you can scroll past ;)
- ceagrass 10y agoGood call. Add in a * { background: none !important } and you're golden.
- ajford 10y agoI have uBlock Origin, and it was as simple as right-click>Block Element and selecting the suggestion of amazon_echo_animation_.gif The filter for the curious: ||www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-amazon-echo/amazon_echo_animation_*.gif
- bildung 10y agoThere are several extensions, I use Gif Jam, which only plays animated gifs on demand. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bclnijbemellankmoaafepibbboobalb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bclnijbemellankmoa...
- coldpie 10y agoFor Firefox users, I recommend the Toggle Animated GIFs add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animated-gifs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat... Other useful config settings: image.animation_mode, media.autoplay.enabled
- Mwatson10 10y agoI agree with you, however I did enjoy opening up the developer console in Firefox and deleting all of the obnoxious background.
- daveguy 10y agoThank you! That works for chrome too. Right-click => inspect, then on the highlighted line the inspection window right-click => delete element.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bvm 10y agoBloomberg has really gone off the deep end of the design pool. It seemed to start with those somewhat janky, but pretty nice zero-padded headline overlays on the pics, and culminated in this: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-design/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-design/ which...well.
- dbbk 10y agoCHRIST
- GCA10 10y agoBig budget syndrome. If you've got $200 million to make a movie, the bridges MUST blow up. Bloomberg stands alone among U.S. media companies as a place with lots of available cash for whatever projects catch the top folks' fancy.
- GeechieCloud 10y agoHahahaha. I'm picturing HBO Silicon Valley 'doors go like this' guys look of disappointment if he funded a film for $200m and nothing blew up.
- turaw 10y agoI've been using Animation Policy [1] to only play gifs through once and it's worked pretty well so far (in contradiction to the reviews on the chrome store). edit: Except, apparently, on that site. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/ncigbofjfbodhkaffojakplpmnleeoee https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/animation-policy/n...
- Merad 10y agoAnnoying gifs seems to be the popular thing at the moment. I've backed several Kickstarter campaigns recently and every single one of them fills their status update posts with stupid gifs.
- suprfsat 10y agoI wonder what would happen if you stopped paying for gifs?
- nxzero 10y agoIf you like that gif, checkout Bloomberg's 404 gif... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11527578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11527578
- legitster 10y agoThis made my day.
- madelinecameron 10y agoI got yelled at and downvoted on Reddit because I said their "What is Code" article was a horrific disaster of design http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/ http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-cod... CW: REALLY BRIGHT COLORS, LARGE TEXT AND ANNOYING GIFS.
- galistoca 10y agoCongrats, here's one person who agrees with you. It's like Bloomberg has given some hipster interns full access to design the website. They probably think it's so awesome that they're using all the dynamic components
- rootbear 10y agoAmen! I had to cover them up so I could read the damn article.
- paulcole 10y ago"An e-commerce company wouldn’t seem like an obvious leader in [augmented reality]." Amazing that even today articles are still calling Amazon an e-commerce company. I wonder if this is an image Amazon actively cultivates or if it's just consistently lazy reporting?
- jonknee 10y agoE-commerces makes up the vast majority of their revenue and employees... I've read a lot worse descriptions of a company.
- scott_s 10y agoIt's possible the author of the article knows that Amazon is now a tech company as well, but is assuming that their audience does not yet realize this. My impression is that people who don't work in tech don't know this; I have explained many times to people outside of our world how Amazon is one of the most important tech companies in the world, and that discussion always starts with a puzzled look from them.
- paulcole 10y agoYeah, that's kind of my take as well. But I put that in the lazy reporting category. Seems like it would be worth the paragraph explaining the misconception and helping people realize why the seemingly weird stuff Amazon kinda does makes sense.
- apaprocki 10y agoDon't feel bad -- we at Bloomberg always get classed a "media" company when the media properties came about a decade after the software (& hardware). It's just easier to say because it fits better into public expectation. To most people Amazon is e-commerce because nearly everyone buys things from them online or via mobile apps.
- narrowrail 10y ago
- jamespo 10y agoMaybe it's time to release it in other territories now
- JabavuAdams 10y ago> "Generally, the engineers and product managers at Lab126 quelled their own dissent before it reached Bezos, instead concentrating on giving the boss what they thought he wanted. “We spent so much time trying to anticipate what Jeff would do or say, and read into little words he would say in meetings,” said one former employee. “It would lead to so much additional work.” This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Very worrying. How have they managed to be so successful with such broken communications?
- post_break 10y agoI really want an Echo, I just can't justify the cost. And the cheaper options don't have the listening mode which nerfs the whole appeal.
- delecti 10y agoThe full echo happens to be on sale today, and the Echo Dot (which doesn't include the full speaker, only a smaller one, and you can plug it into your own) is about half the price, and does still have the always-on listening mode.
- extra88 10y agoThe Echo Dot is ~$90 but my understanding is to buy it you must A) be an Amazon Prime member and B) use the voice interface on an existing Amazon product to place the order (the Echo itself being an obvious example but I guess also the Fire Stick).
- delecti 10y agoI don't remember the specifics, but I was able to buy my Dot without an existing Amazon voice product, they seem to have "fixed" that "problem" though. I have Prime, so I can't comment to that other issue.
- _JamesA_ 10y agoI was able to place an order for the Dot using the Amazon iOS app yesterday. I just tried again and it says "Available Exclusively from Alexa".
- manyxcxi 10y agoI got early access to pre-order (can't remember why) at $99 and almost didn't do it. I'm SO glad I did. It gets used all day every day. I grab the last two eggs and say "Alexa, add eggs to the grocery list", hands are full of mess while cooking, "Alexa, set a timer for 5 minutes", etc. The fact that it works with my home automation hub is also nice, when I'm across the room and want the lights off, or want the garage door closed. I could live without it for sure, but it just makes things easier. The voice recognition, especially from far away is incredible. I don't have to yell, or say things exactly right (like in my car). Knowing what I know now, I'd pay full price- especially with the new functionality and apps that get released every week it seems. I've even written a few of my own. The speaker itself is just okay, we play music on it all the time for the kids, but there are way better Bluetooth speaker setups, so if that's your primary goal you won't be that excited. If you can afford it and have a routine of any sort throughout the day where checking the weather, traffic, maintaining a grocery list (especially when you might not be the person going), getting a news briefing or listening to a podcast are part of it, then you'll find it useful immediately. If you don't, to get your money's worth, you'd want to start a routine of sorts.
- amelius 10y ago> You can use Alexa to turn off the lights, ask it how much gas is left in your car, or order a pizza. I'm getting a bit tired of these examples. Is there a comprehensive list of things Alexa can do?
- yanowitz 10y agoThe documentation is reasonably comprehensive: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_left_v4_sib?ie=UTF8&nodeId=201707210 https://smile.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=h...
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- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Rooksu 10y agoNo. It's an API that connects to every other API. The list of things it can do would just be a list of all the things that can be done.
- Karunamon 10y agoA list of the APIs would be a good starting point. "Controls your lights" isn't helpful. "Talks to Hue and IFTTT" is. Just saying it can do anything because internet is misleading and doesn't tell me where the walls are. Unless there already exists a "skill" that can give me load average, player count and tick rate on my Minecraft server.. :)
- delecti 10y agoSuch a list doesn't exist for the Echo any more than it does for your cell phone. The Echo is integrated into IFTTT, so any of the actions here [1] are available, and there are also an ever expanding list of actions called 'Skills' [2] that you can add to your particular Echo's list of available integrations (like installing a phone app). That's all in addition to the basic things it can do out of the box, like set timers and reminders, manage a todo list, play music and books (from an admittedly limited set of sources), tell (mostly bad) jokes, sync with your google calendar and respond to questions about upcoming events, tell you the weather forecast, read off headlines, and a bunch more. To a greater or lesser extent, it's like a living room installation of Siri. [1] https://ifttt.com/amazon_alexa https://ifttt.com/amazon_alexa [2] http://alexa.amazon.com/#skills http://alexa.amazon.com/#skills (might require you to already have an Echo)
- ccozan 10y agoI was looking for a fair comparison between Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa and I stumbled across this [0]. I find it interesting because it seems you would need all of them to answer all your questions. Do you have also some personal experince comparing with Now , Siri or Cortana? What went really bad or amazed in terms of speech recognition and speech comprehension? [0] http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-productivity/10-questions-for-cortana-siri-amazon-echo-and-google-now.html http://www.cio.com/article/2953989/software-productivity/10-...
- gervase 10y agoI can't speak for Cortana, but I have personal experience with Siri, Now, and Alexa. In terms of the actions that I do day-to-day (I would never ask for a dirty joke, for example, but I ask for the weather daily), I would rank them Now, Alexa, and distant third, Siri. There are two axes that I care about - how many useful commands are available, and how well they can understand me. Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. Alexa also has a very wide range of behaviors (especially with the Skills), but I do occasionally run into things I feel like it should do that it doesn't (yet). To be fair, I also use her the most, so it could be that I push her further than the others. The voice recognition is quite good; I would say it misunderstands me less than 5 times in 100. Siri is by far the worst. Her abilities are limited, but worse, she has a tendency to funnel commands that she can't do into things she can. For example, asking for the hours of a restaurant will instead show you a Bing search (!) for the restaurant's name, sans hours. This is not useful. It would be better to just inform me that she can't do that yet, file that in a log at Apple, and then add that behavior some time down the road. She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries.
- kuschku 10y ago> Google Now has a pretty wide range of behaviors, but it's the spooky-accurate voice recognition that sets it clearly ahead. In the last year, Google Now has only misunderstood me ONCE. > She also mishears me 25-45% of the time, AND she seems to be getting worse over time. I assume this is because they are trying to widen her audience beyond a standard California accent, but it's incredibly frustrating for a product to get worse, not better, over time. I now use her only for voice dictation of texts on my iPhone, and use Google Now in app form exclusively for more advanced queries. And this is pretty much a huge issue for this market. Entry requires having already spent several billions on voice tech. You’d have to practically use all of YouTube as training set. Which Google did. Maybe someday we can have laws that require all neural networks trained with data from others to be in the public domain, even if the people providing training data agreed to the data being used for training. Then we could compete on other things than "understands voice".
- sksixk 10y agoreads like a PR piece. does Amazon Echo really need a "the real story" piece? it's barely been out...
- projproj 10y agoProbably not a coincidence that the Echo is on sale today[0]. [0] www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI-Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E
- nxzero 10y agoBloomberg's 404 is... http://www.bloomberg.com/404.html http://www.bloomberg.com/404.html
- amzn-336495 10y agoThe story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all those managers from both echo and phone project. Better kick some more engineers off the life raft. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hardware-division-layoffs-2015-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hardware-division-layo... They have a real 'slaughter the goose that layed the golden egg because holy shit! there is a huge expensive golden egg and it's mine all mine, die, die, die..." culture. Bezos probably has an employee purge button built into his desk.
- eclipxe 10y agoYeah, that's not how it works at all. Not sure how you're making that conclusion?
- amzn-336495 10y agoThat is how it works at all. The company took in $107,000,000,000 dollars in 2015 but were just forced to layoff off engineers. Right, no despotic dictatorship banana republic stuff going on there.
- TheDong 10y agoIt didn't "layoff off [sic]" engineers; they quit. It could be argued with that much revenue they could afford a better work environment for their employees, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
- amzn-336495 10y agoDid you read the article at all? "Amazon laid off "dozens of engineers" in its Lab126 hardware unit"
- 10y ago
- spdustin 10y agoI have the remote as an early adopter. It's fun to hide in another room and say into the remote "Simon says, hey kids, Kraft no longer makes Mac and cheese and now just makes carrots and ranch dressing." A moment passes. "Dad, Alexa just told us...!" My geek dad game is strong.
- PascalsMugger 10y agoIt's amazing to think about kids growing up with a wonder box in their house that tells them the answer to any question when they yell at it. It's like straight out of the fables or science fiction of the past. I hope this result in people generally having better bullshit detectors in the next generation, and not some other unintended side effect like making them enthralled to said wonder box.
- shostack 10y agoWhat I've wondered is how much non-verbal context will be lost through such an interface. Today, when I'm trying to verify the authenticity or quality of something, it is a game that goes something like this: 1. Google it and click least spammy looking link (gauged by the URL, although that's no guarantee). I also see what sort of JS they try to load, if it is absolutely bloated with ad tags, etc. 2. Try to gauge from the design and other content of the site how genuine the answer might be. Are there affiliate links for anything they recommend peppered throughout? That's a signal it might not be unbiased info. Unfortunately, this is where judging a book by its cover comes into play as well. Some poorly designed sites buck the trend, but they are also prominent with spammy sites. 3. Find other sources to see if there is any consistent logic with said answer/product review/etc. 4. Make a decision hopefully. So many of those pieces of the puzzle just aren't available when you limit your input/output to a system like this. There are obvious tradeoffs here--I just hope we don't lose the ability to make more informed decisions. Already I hate things like Apple obfuscating the full URL in the URL bar.
- grillvogel 10y agoI think a more likely result is that when confronted with a choice between what people see and what the computer tells them they will believe the computer.
- goshx 10y agoI am waiting for the day when someone will sneak in those magic words into a TV commercial to wake up Echo, Siri, etc. Imagine like a DDoS caused by a TV commercial on Super Bowl. I have the Echo and sometimes it scares the * out of me when something on my TV sounds similar to "Alexa", like "a lexus".
- vhost- 10y agoMine actually gets triggered by the Echo commercials on TV and it really scares me sometimes.
- cbhl 10y agoAlready happened on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2016/03/06/469383361/listen-up-your-ai-assistant-goes-crazy-for-npr-too http://www.npr.org/2016/03/06/469383361/listen-up-your-ai-as...
- rootbear 10y agoYeah, they call the activation word a "wake word", but I couldn't help but think of it as a "safe word". It needs to be something that you're only likely to say when you mean it. Which, to me, implies it should be customizable. I should be able to set it to whatever makes sense for me. This issue comes up in science fiction stories, often set on spacecraft, where there is an AI that is spoken to. On Star Trek, they just said "Computer?" and that got it's attention. But that always seemed a little clunky to me. At first I thought the ship AI should have the same name as the ship, but I quickly realized that probably wouldn't work so well. Picard: "This is the USS Enterprise!" Computer: "Yes?" On Babylon 5, a Minbari character just called his ship, "ship", and in Alien, the ship was Mother, etc. I decided that if I ever wrote an SF story with a shipboard AI (or HAD a ship with a shipboard AI :) I would call it Maru-san.
- dang 10y agoThere was another long article about this a week ago with almost an identical title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416795.
- grillvogel 10y agoMaybe I'm old but i still really don't understand the appeal of a device that monitors and datamines all the communication in your home so you can buy products more easily.
- blacksmith_tb 10y agoNot sure just how seriously this is meant to be taken, but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" (and recognition of that is handled in the hardware, locally - if you're worried about devices with net access and microphones, you'll need to keep your phone turned off at home, too). It's fair to assume that once you are interacting with it Amazon mines at least some data, however.
- grillvogel 10y ago>but the Echo doesn't monitor anything until you say "Alexa" then how does it know when you say Alexa?
- dbbk 10y agoBecause the code that understands 'Alexa' is hardcoded into the device. Once it hears that word, that's when audio starts getting sent over the Internet to Amazon's servers.
- brndn 10y agoWhen is Google going to build a Google Now for the living room to compete with Echo? I want an Echo, but I think a Google product with access to the whole Google ecosystem would be more useful to me. We know Echo will never play nice with Google (you can't buy Chromecast on Amazon is evidence). If Google built this product, the only feature they probably couldn't match would be buying products on Amazon, which I don't know if I would use anyway.
- serge2k 10y ago> Generally, the engineers and product managers at Lab126 quelled their own dissent before it reached Bezos, instead concentrating on giving the boss what they thought he wanted. “We spent so much time trying to anticipate what Jeff would do or say, and read into little words he would say in meetings,” said one former employee. “It would lead to so much additional work.” That sounds like a questionable at best policy.
- beagle3 10y agoI've played with the Echo, it is really nice, but ... much like Siri, Cortana and Google Now, using it fully gives up any shred of remaining privacy you had within your own home. I would gladly pay twice as much for an Echo-device that doesn't route all my instructions through $BEHEMOTH servers.
- anotheryou 10y agough, please no gifs, I'm trying to read here! Big quotes I already read in the text are similarly annoying...