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This article far exaggerates the devices problems, at least as I've experienced it. If someone shouts my name—Alex—across the apartment, it will activate Alexa

This article far exaggerates the devices problems, at least as I've experienced it. If someone shouts my name—Alex—across the apartment, it will activate Alexa That's trivially fixable. You can rename her to "Echo", "Amazon", or "Computer". sometimes Alexa will also be activated by arbitrary syllables in ordinary conversation. ... As I read this paragraph aloud to myself, her blue ring has already lit up several times I've had this happen at random (i.e., when I didn't say her name accidentally) exactly once that I've noticed. not only is Alexa incapable of looking up even basic facts This is an exaggeration. By all accounts Google's device does better. But it's simply false that it can't look up "even basic facts". It's quite limited, but far from absolutely useless. In my mind, Alexa's greatest flaw is in the design for its skill interface. You can't interact with her conversationally, because you always need to preface every command with its skill name, e.g., "Alexa, ask Spaceman what's the news today?" [1]. You must always remember these special names, and used them in this stilted fashion for all interactions. And making this worse is that Amazon insists that the interactions within each skill must be completely discoverable, so that they don't want to publish more than a couple of samples from each, encouraging you to experiment and discover yourself, a process I find tiresome and one guaranteed to leave at least some of the capabilities unknown. [1] Shameless plug - this is a skill I wrote to give you news about scheduled rocket launches, near earth object passes, and lunar phase - https://sites.google.com/view/spacemanforalexa/ https://sites.google.com/view/spacemanforalexa/

zippergz 10y ago
> That's trivially fixable. You can rename her to "Echo", "Amazon", or "Computer". In my experience, this just changes the times that it accidentally triggers. It doesn't actually reduce how often it happens. Our triggers for random crap all the time, both when we say stuff that sounds like "Alexa" and for completely indecipherable reasons. We actually have two of them in our house, and only one regularly goes of at the wrong time. I thought it might be defective, so I swapped them, but then the other one started doing it. It's location-dependent in our house, so it must have to do with the acoustics or something. Regardless, it's annoying, and the less technical family members are far less tolerant of this kind of stuff than I am. All that said, I still agree that the article goes overboard in exaggeration. Overall I like my Echos, and I think they work pretty well most of the time. There's a lot of room for improvement, but it is a new product.

zippergz 10y ago

> That's trivially fixable. You can rename her to "Echo", "Amazon", or "Computer". In my experience, this just changes the times that it accidentally triggers. It doesn't actually reduce how often it happens. Our triggers for random crap all the time, both when we say stuff that sounds like "Alexa" and for completely indecipherable reasons. We actually have two of them in our house, and only one regularly goes of at the wrong time. I thought it might be defective, so I swapped them, but then the other one started doing it. It's location-dependent in our house, so it must have to do with the acoustics or something. Regardless, it's annoying, and the less technical family members are far less tolerant of this kind of stuff than I am. All that said, I still agree that the article goes overboard in exaggeration. Overall I like my Echos, and I think they work pretty well most of the time. There's a lot of room for improvement, but it is a new product.