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Gimmicks are short-lived for fundamental reasons. I'm going to sound like a broken record but, as someone who has owned multiple Alexa devices and quit their j

Gimmicks are short-lived for fundamental reasons. I'm going to sound like a broken record but, as someone who has owned multiple Alexa devices and quit their job to start a voice-UI business(didn't pan out), the current generation of "smart speakers" are a joke when it comes to doing anything serious besides asking for the weather or toggling light switches. I have no doubt that they are useful to people in very limited ways, but they are still sold as being a lot smarter than they really are. For what they provide, the privacy trade-off is too great for me. Alexa is a gimmick because it's a speech-to-text command line, and it's sold as being smart even though it's not. Since before I was a kid in the 90s, there have been many attempts to revolutionize computing with speech-to-text technology. Because speaking comes so naturally to us, it's easy to assume that voice-activated anything is better than pushing buttons. In reality, without intelligence and autonomy, lots of interfaces are made slightly worse with voice activation. For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense. Alexa frequently gets things wrong and activates from sounds that aren't even close to the wake-word. The ability to create lists is barely practical because it so often can't understand a word, in which case the user has to go to the Alexa app and manually punch in the item. Voice control would be great if it were revolutionized, but it's hardly in a different state than it was decades ago. The only two things that have changed are improved speech synthesis and ample cloud computing. Because of this, most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong like "Alexa, what's the weather?" or "Alexa, what time is it?". My parents still sometimes use it to play music(which I gave up on as a music fan), but it gets requests hilariously wrong 1/5 times.

umanwizard 8y ago
"Besides [a bunch of useful stuff], Alexa is useless! Therefore it's a gimmick." I have an Echo Dot which I use almost exclusively for a few static purposes: the weather, setting alarms, turning my lights on and off, and asking what time it is. I also ask it basic questions like whether various sports teams won or what time they're playing, which it also answers well. Not sure why you think it is useless just because it's not a magical general AI that can do everything. I find it extremely useful. > For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense I'm not visually impaired and I use this feature all the time. It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch. > most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong Yeah, exactly. How does this make it useless?
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  The point is that these few useful things can be all achieved much cheaper with much greater ergonomics. > the weather, setting alarms, (...) and asking what time it is. You can do that on your phone. Even assuming you wanted it hands-free, it doesn't justify an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. We had the tech to do this level of voice recognition reliably in the 2000s. > It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch. Kids from my generation used to solder clap detectors for like $5-$10, and they're already more reliable and faster to use. Voice is cool, it's like being in Star Trek. I get it, I built my own system to control music in the 2000s, complete with audio responses snipped from Star Trek shows. But the feeling of "living in the future" wears off pretty quick, and you're left with a ridiculously expensive and user-hostile gimmick.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. This is a dishonest characterization of how every smart speaker in existence works. There is no continuous stream as this statement implies. There is a continuous buffer of a couple of seconds for the device to locally catch a wake word. (You can verify this by disabling the device's internet connectivity - it will still catch the wake word and speak an apologetic message about not being able to connect). Also, changing the wake word requires a full restart, which says "firmware" to me. After the wake word is spoken, that buffer and anything immediately after it is what gets sent up to the cloud for voice recognition. The buffer serves a purpose in that it prevents an awkward pause between the wake word and the action reqeusted. (So you get to do "Alexa, turn on the lights" rather than "Alexa? bong Turn on the lights.") The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have. I'd say it beats the alternative from a pure functionality standpoint.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      In an ideal world that's true. But Alexa doesn't only upload your audio when you say the wake word, it uploads it when it thinks you said the wake word. Unless the recognition is 100% accurate, that's an important difference. There was the one very publicized instance where it recorded private conversations and sent them to a random contact, but you have to wonder how many other non-Alexa commands have been picked up and sent off to Amazon even though they shouldn't have been. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24/an-amazon-echo-recorded-a-familys-conversation-then-sent-it-to-a-random-person-in-their-contacts-report-says/?utm_term=.8bcd45495059 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24... So even if you trust Amazon with recordings of your weather queries, you also need to trust Amazon's wake word recognition to not pick up anything other than your weather queries. And there was that other time when they took 1700 of their recordings, accidentally sent them to the wrong person, and a journalist was able to track down the recorded person based on their personal information from the recordings: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-recordings-to-wrong-person-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-re...
pushpop 8y ago
I completely agree with every single word you’ve posted there. From the history recap to the modern era problems. These days the only thing my Echo does which is remotely useful is setting named timers while cooking. So I can have my hands dirty with raw meat and ask Alexa to set various timers for each step of the meal. I found that particularly good when cooking meals that have large gaps in time between stages (like Sunday roasts when there can be 5 minutes or more between the cooking times of different vegetables). However even there it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth when it starts mishearing names of vegetables or duration numbers when spoken. The most disappointing thing is that I spent a few days working with Alexa’s - frankly terrible - SDK to integrate it into my existing home automation (all stuff I’ve built myself and powered by a FreeBSD server). Not only was the development progress of Alexa skills amongst the most frustrating I’ve had in my ~30 years of experience writing software; but it turned out to be a complete waste of my time because Alexa is so piss poor at any interactions more complex than the very basic (as you described). It’s also very laggy at such interactions so even when it does work it feels slow. So slow, in fact, that it ends up taking longer and being more painful using the voice control than it would have been to wake my laptop from sleep and trigger the same HTTP API endpoints Alexa would used but instead doing so manually from the command line using curl. So needless to say I very quickly gave up using Alexa for home automation.
Karunamon 8y ago
>the current generation of "smart speakers" are a joke when it comes to doing anything serious besides asking for the weather or toggling light switches. The primary use of my Alexa devices is being a voice-controlled IP radio. I paid about $300 many years ago for Logitech/Slim Devices' crack at this, the Squeezebox, and I loved it. Now, I get that same functionality for $40 shipped with more on top. Everything else is a bonus. including the smart home stuff - being able to turn the lights on with grocery bags in hand is damn futuristic. Does it screw up sometimes? Sure. But it beats the hell out of a keyboard or dials for the use case.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  I've got a setup of google home devices, and that's pretty much all I use em for - the occasional stupid question and the rest of the time it's playing music that I can control with my voice, which I find incredibly convenient.

umanwizard 8y ago

"Besides [a bunch of useful stuff], Alexa is useless! Therefore it's a gimmick." I have an Echo Dot which I use almost exclusively for a few static purposes: the weather, setting alarms, turning my lights on and off, and asking what time it is. I also ask it basic questions like whether various sports teams won or what time they're playing, which it also answers well. Not sure why you think it is useless just because it's not a magical general AI that can do everything. I find it extremely useful. > For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense I'm not visually impaired and I use this feature all the time. It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch. > most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong Yeah, exactly. How does this make it useless?

TeMPOraL 8y ago
The point is that these few useful things can be all achieved much cheaper with much greater ergonomics. > the weather, setting alarms, (...) and asking what time it is. You can do that on your phone. Even assuming you wanted it hands-free, it doesn't justify an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. We had the tech to do this level of voice recognition reliably in the 2000s. > It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch. Kids from my generation used to solder clap detectors for like $5-$10, and they're already more reliable and faster to use. Voice is cool, it's like being in Star Trek. I get it, I built my own system to control music in the 2000s, complete with audio responses snipped from Star Trek shows. But the feeling of "living in the future" wears off pretty quick, and you're left with a ridiculously expensive and user-hostile gimmick.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. This is a dishonest characterization of how every smart speaker in existence works. There is no continuous stream as this statement implies. There is a continuous buffer of a couple of seconds for the device to locally catch a wake word. (You can verify this by disabling the device's internet connectivity - it will still catch the wake word and speak an apologetic message about not being able to connect). Also, changing the wake word requires a full restart, which says "firmware" to me. After the wake word is spoken, that buffer and anything immediately after it is what gets sent up to the cloud for voice recognition. The buffer serves a purpose in that it prevents an awkward pause between the wake word and the action reqeusted. (So you get to do "Alexa, turn on the lights" rather than "Alexa? bong Turn on the lights.") The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have. I'd say it beats the alternative from a pure functionality standpoint.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    In an ideal world that's true. But Alexa doesn't only upload your audio when you say the wake word, it uploads it when it thinks you said the wake word. Unless the recognition is 100% accurate, that's an important difference. There was the one very publicized instance where it recorded private conversations and sent them to a random contact, but you have to wonder how many other non-Alexa commands have been picked up and sent off to Amazon even though they shouldn't have been. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24/an-amazon-echo-recorded-a-familys-conversation-then-sent-it-to-a-random-person-in-their-contacts-report-says/?utm_term=.8bcd45495059 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24... So even if you trust Amazon with recordings of your weather queries, you also need to trust Amazon's wake word recognition to not pick up anything other than your weather queries. And there was that other time when they took 1700 of their recordings, accidentally sent them to the wrong person, and a journalist was able to track down the recorded person based on their personal information from the recordings: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-recordings-to-wrong-person-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-re...

pushpop 8y ago

I completely agree with every single word you’ve posted there. From the history recap to the modern era problems. These days the only thing my Echo does which is remotely useful is setting named timers while cooking. So I can have my hands dirty with raw meat and ask Alexa to set various timers for each step of the meal. I found that particularly good when cooking meals that have large gaps in time between stages (like Sunday roasts when there can be 5 minutes or more between the cooking times of different vegetables). However even there it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth when it starts mishearing names of vegetables or duration numbers when spoken. The most disappointing thing is that I spent a few days working with Alexa’s - frankly terrible - SDK to integrate it into my existing home automation (all stuff I’ve built myself and powered by a FreeBSD server). Not only was the development progress of Alexa skills amongst the most frustrating I’ve had in my ~30 years of experience writing software; but it turned out to be a complete waste of my time because Alexa is so piss poor at any interactions more complex than the very basic (as you described). It’s also very laggy at such interactions so even when it does work it feels slow. So slow, in fact, that it ends up taking longer and being more painful using the voice control than it would have been to wake my laptop from sleep and trigger the same HTTP API endpoints Alexa would used but instead doing so manually from the command line using curl. So needless to say I very quickly gave up using Alexa for home automation.

Karunamon 8y ago

>the current generation of "smart speakers" are a joke when it comes to doing anything serious besides asking for the weather or toggling light switches. The primary use of my Alexa devices is being a voice-controlled IP radio. I paid about $300 many years ago for Logitech/Slim Devices' crack at this, the Squeezebox, and I loved it. Now, I get that same functionality for $40 shipped with more on top. Everything else is a bonus. including the smart home stuff - being able to turn the lights on with grocery bags in hand is damn futuristic. Does it screw up sometimes? Sure. But it beats the hell out of a keyboard or dials for the use case.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
I've got a setup of google home devices, and that's pretty much all I use em for - the occasional stupid question and the rest of the time it's playing music that I can control with my voice, which I find incredibly convenient.