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I don't live in the US and I never saw an ad for Alexa or G Home - and I have a problem understanding how can they be useful beyond a fancy gimmick. Can you ser

by dandare 10y ago

I don't live in the US and I never saw an ad for Alexa or G Home - and I have a problem understanding how can they be useful beyond a fancy gimmick. Can you seriously trust it with your pizza order even if you don't know what the menu is and what you want? Then how many times a week do you order a pizza? Maybe I it is just me being old, please educate me.

disgusting_guy 10y ago
In the kitchen they are particularly useful, or any time you don't have your hands free: "Alexa, play some soft rock" "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes" "Alexa, skip this track" "Alexa, how long do I boil an egg for"
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
A friend of mine has an Alexa, and I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be able to say "Alexa, play <some song>" and have it just happen. The marketers far overstate its significance, like marketers do, but it is a handy little gizmo to have around.
- eddieroger 10y ago
  So far, the best combination of neat and useful for me has been integration with Logitech Harmony and having Alexa start turning stuff on while I approach the couch. It feels so futuristic to be able to shout in to the air that I would like to watch some TV or play a game and have all that stuff just come up for me. If I spent more time with it, I could probably even get it turning to specific channels or launching Rocket League automatically. I tried doing the normal shopping list routine with it, or asking it to set timers, but none of that has really stuck in the same way that "Alexa, turn on AppleTV has." I do like her sense of humor though, and "tell me a joke" is a mainstay.
- j_s 10y ago
  Twitch streamers do this sometimes, and it's usually purposely choosing an annoying song.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    I like to use it for situationally-appropriate accompaniment. Just won a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'We Are the Champions'." Just lost a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It'." :)
amelius 10y ago
Also, who pays if by accident it orders 1000 pizzas?
- NKCSS 10y ago
  What pizza delivery place would actually try to deliver 1000 pizza's?
  - mfukar 10y ago
    Fine, 10. Your $20 order just became $200.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Any pizza place in a city where it’s common that a school or a professor would order hundreds of pizzas. Our high school, due to having no cafeteria for a while, ordered once or twice a week hundreds of pizzas from several pizza places. And we have a professor at our university who always promises to give everyone free pizza if more than 25% of the class are still there the week before the exam. Sometimes it works, sometimes too many fail. But ordering many pizzas, especially online, is possible. Although some places will call you back to confirm
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    In college I worked a pizza joint. 300 pizza orders were not uncommon, but anything over 200 dollars got a callback to make sure it was legit. But hey, if the card clears, noone cares.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Easily solved, though, by adding additional confirmation steps if the amounts are above a certain level or the order deviates from your usual patterns. I look forward to giving Star Trek type authorization codes when ordering pizzas...
Negitivefrags 10y ago
My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to play while their food gets cold. After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday. One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"
- danieldk 10y ago
  One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!
_pmf_ 10y ago
You clearly have the wrong mindset; it's not about what the device can do for you, it's about what you can to for the company operating the device.
- delegate 10y ago
  Beautiful !
buserror 10y ago
I love mine(s) now. I made a bridge between my RF wall switches [0], outlets and so on and I can turn things on/off using Alexa. The best is at night before going to bed, I can say 'Alexa, turn off downstairs' and that will turn off all lights, lamps, speakers, amplifiers. But yes, I can also tell her to play some music thru the speakers, and 'Alexa, turn on speakers' and the music automagically starts playing on the stereo. Then there's all the other bits, but the timers we use really all the time, the 'Alexa, what's up' in the morning is pretty nice too... [0]: https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge
bargl 10y ago
I have alexa and we use it CONSTANTLY as a timer for our kid. You have 2 minutes in timeout. Boom alexa does it. I can take him to timeout and get that started at the same time. It also makes it so that I'm not saying when he gets out but a device is saying when he gets out. He doesn't tend to argue with Alexa but he will argue (negotiate) with me so it helps in that way. I also use it to play music and read books to me. In the future I'm going to set it up to work with my smart home, but I haven't set that up because we're selling our house. Was it worth the price point? No, but now that I have it it's become part of my daily life.
- dmix 10y ago
  That's quite a brilliant use case. This is why I believe chat bots and by proxy voice assistants like this will be standard technology, despite the risks (having an always on microphone is not entirely necessary). There are probably thousands of these niche use cases that we haven't thought of because these are new interface form factors. Tons of opportunity for innovation/products here. The only downside (besides the need for server voice processing) is that you are building a company on a platform. The whole Twitter and Facebook platform debacles showed the risks of trusting your business life support to a bigger indifferent company - who may just steal your idea and implement it.
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by dandare 10y ago

disgusting_guy 10y ago

In the kitchen they are particularly useful, or any time you don't have your hands free: "Alexa, play some soft rock" "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes" "Alexa, skip this track" "Alexa, how long do I boil an egg for"

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

A friend of mine has an Alexa, and I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be able to say "Alexa, play <some song>" and have it just happen. The marketers far overstate its significance, like marketers do, but it is a handy little gizmo to have around.

eddieroger 10y ago
So far, the best combination of neat and useful for me has been integration with Logitech Harmony and having Alexa start turning stuff on while I approach the couch. It feels so futuristic to be able to shout in to the air that I would like to watch some TV or play a game and have all that stuff just come up for me. If I spent more time with it, I could probably even get it turning to specific channels or launching Rocket League automatically. I tried doing the normal shopping list routine with it, or asking it to set timers, but none of that has really stuck in the same way that "Alexa, turn on AppleTV has." I do like her sense of humor though, and "tell me a joke" is a mainstay.
j_s 10y ago
Twitch streamers do this sometimes, and it's usually purposely choosing an annoying song.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  I like to use it for situationally-appropriate accompaniment. Just won a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'We Are the Champions'." Just lost a game of Pandemic? "Alexa, play 'It's the End of the World as We Know It'." :)

amelius 10y ago

Also, who pays if by accident it orders 1000 pizzas?

NKCSS 10y ago
What pizza delivery place would actually try to deliver 1000 pizza's?
- mfukar 10y ago
  Fine, 10. Your $20 order just became $200.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Any pizza place in a city where it’s common that a school or a professor would order hundreds of pizzas. Our high school, due to having no cafeteria for a while, ordered once or twice a week hundreds of pizzas from several pizza places. And we have a professor at our university who always promises to give everyone free pizza if more than 25% of the class are still there the week before the exam. Sometimes it works, sometimes too many fail. But ordering many pizzas, especially online, is possible. Although some places will call you back to confirm
- Neliquat 10y ago
  In college I worked a pizza joint. 300 pizza orders were not uncommon, but anything over 200 dollars got a callback to make sure it was legit. But hey, if the card clears, noone cares.
vidarh 10y ago
Easily solved, though, by adding additional confirmation steps if the amounts are above a certain level or the order deviates from your usual patterns. I look forward to giving Star Trek type authorization codes when ordering pizzas...

Negitivefrags 10y ago

My fiance and I have just finished serving up a plate of food for dinner. We go and sit down on the couch and want to start eating, but someone has to futz around with their phone for a couple of minutes to get an episode of TV to play while their food gets cold. After getting a home one of us can just say "Ok google, play The Next Generation from Netflix on the TV" while walking towards the couch. It plays the next episode right were we left off yesterday. One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. After getting a home it's just a matter of saying "Ok google, pause the TV"

danieldk 10y ago
One of us gets up to go to the toilet, normally it means screwing around with the phone, and oh look, the chromecast disconnected from the phone so we have to reconnect again. It's easy to spend a whole minute just to get the damn episode to pause. Reality: if you have a slightly non-standard accent, you will be shouting at your device five times before anything happens. While I could just have pressed the play button on my Apple TV remote and be done with it (no fiddling with a phone necessary). Then there are all kinds of cultural realities that are apparently not considered in Silicon Valley. My favorite five pet peeves: (1) Our family name is 'de Kok'. Very often these assistants totally mess up when I ask e.g. to call family (either they start complaining about dirty language or literally search for 'cock'). (2) We are a multilingual family, languages used in our household are German, Dutch, and sometimes English. None of these voice assistants work with multiple languages. So, the only alternative is to choose one language and stick with it. Unfortunately, if you choose English you are having a hard time navigating in Germany, looking up a German TV program, or calling a Dutch or German friend. If you set the language to German, you forgo looking up shows on Netflix by their English titles reliably. (3) Usability goes down the drain once you have kids. Voice assistants typically do not work well when multiple people are speaking at the same time. If you are lucky, they are just confused, if you are unlucky they start doing whatever they infer from a semi-random mix of words. You cannot tell your three year old to be quiet, because mom or dad has to tell Siri what to do. (I use Siri sometimes, and our daughter currently likes to scream 'hey siri' repeatedly when I use Siri.) (4) Voice assistants are unusable in most environments where there are other people. (5) Voice assistants, especially in-house voice assistants are a potential privacy violation. So, you have to ask people that visit you if they are OK with your conversations being recorded (accidentally or intentionally) and switch off the device if they do mind the latent spying. tl;dr: voice assistants only work well in monolingual families where all of the family members have a perfect accent and where none of your acquaintances mind the privacy violations. Edit: added some more annoyances. Edit 2: heavy downvoting :/. Please explain why!

_pmf_ 10y ago

You clearly have the wrong mindset; it's not about what the device can do for you, it's about what you can to for the company operating the device.

delegate 10y ago
Beautiful !

buserror 10y ago

I love mine(s) now. I made a bridge between my RF wall switches [0], outlets and so on and I can turn things on/off using Alexa. The best is at night before going to bed, I can say 'Alexa, turn off downstairs' and that will turn off all lights, lamps, speakers, amplifiers. But yes, I can also tell her to play some music thru the speakers, and 'Alexa, turn on speakers' and the music automagically starts playing on the stereo. Then there's all the other bits, but the timers we use really all the time, the 'Alexa, what's up' in the morning is pretty nice too... [0]: https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge https://github.com/buserror/rf_bridge

bargl 10y ago

I have alexa and we use it CONSTANTLY as a timer for our kid. You have 2 minutes in timeout. Boom alexa does it. I can take him to timeout and get that started at the same time. It also makes it so that I'm not saying when he gets out but a device is saying when he gets out. He doesn't tend to argue with Alexa but he will argue (negotiate) with me so it helps in that way. I also use it to play music and read books to me. In the future I'm going to set it up to work with my smart home, but I haven't set that up because we're selling our house. Was it worth the price point? No, but now that I have it it's become part of my daily life.

dmix 10y ago
That's quite a brilliant use case. This is why I believe chat bots and by proxy voice assistants like this will be standard technology, despite the risks (having an always on microphone is not entirely necessary). There are probably thousands of these niche use cases that we haven't thought of because these are new interface form factors. Tons of opportunity for innovation/products here. The only downside (besides the need for server voice processing) is that you are building a company on a platform. The whole Twitter and Facebook platform debacles showed the risks of trusting your business life support to a bigger indifferent company - who may just steal your idea and implement it.
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