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It's certainly become an inconvenient name to utter around our house, due to the responses it elicits from our countertops. So my daughter came up with the idea
by MarkLowenstein 6y ago
It's certainly become an inconvenient name to utter around our house, due to the responses it elicits from our countertops. So my daughter came up with the idea of referring to the device as "Amelia" whenever we talk about her. It has worked brilliantly and I suggest that everyone adopt the same convention.
- cadence- 6y agoWe use the name Lexi instead.
- justtocomment 6y agoIt's interesting how we twist our behaviour to accomodate the technology and not the other way around. What worked great for us was not buying the thing in the first place.
- throw14082020 6y agoDon't worry the wake word will be customizable soon enough;
- ghaff 6y agoYou can change it to Amazon, Echo, or Computer. None of which are likely to be names of people in your house--other than the Dollhouse exception for Echo. Most people just likely prefer a more personal name which is, almost by definition, an accepted human name.
- Channel 6y agoComputer is great because it reminds me of Star Trek.
- cosmie 6y agoWhile not completely customizable, it is already configurable. The Alexa/Echo devices currently support 4 wake words - Alexa, Amazon, Computer, and Echo. I work with an Aleksa that I refer to frequently during calls, and was quite excited when I stumbled on the wake word setting in the Alexa app.
- NullPrefix 6y agoOr you could just throw away those listening devices.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoDo you think unrequested snarky comments like this will actually convince anyone?
- Channel 6y agoIt reminds me of the web... New frightening technology.
- scollet 6y agoIt's not snark, surely. It's a legitimate option. Ditch the surveillance boxes, they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way.
- scubbo 6y ago> they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way Claims like this one seriously undermine the (worthwhile) privacy movement. Convenience and entertainment _are_ worthwhile uses of technology. Those of us with an understanding of privacy and surveillance technology might well make the judgement that certain forms of convenience and entertainment are not justified by the intrusion that they present - but to claim that there is _zero_ benefit to those technologies just makes you look out-of-touch or cranky to the very people who would benefit from more awareness. Would I give up all my credit card details in order to have a marginally better music playback experience? No. Would I tell a company my birthday if they paid me $1,000,000 for it? Yes. There is a continuum of "privacy/payback evaluation", and different people lie at different points along it.
- sep_field 6y agoThere's no reason the language model couldn't be stored locally. It doesn't need to be transmitting everything you say all the time to corporate HQ.
- exporectomy 6y agoIt's the same problem having a dog. You can't go mentioning its name willy-nilly or it'll respond. But dogs go one step further and adapt to misuse of their name by unlearning it. I refer to ours as various insulting names even when she's not around, out of habit.
- LeoPanthera 6y agoWe just say "the echo" when we want to refer to it without triggering it. But you can change the hotword in Echo devices anyway, if you don't like "Alexa".
- mc32 6y agoCan't you just change the prompt for the device to one of the other options? Though I dunno why they can't make it use any wake word you choose.
- sib 6y agoBecause different words have very different best potential performance characteristics when used as wake words. We would have liked to enable fully custom wake words, but it would have led to bad user experiences with the device either failing to wake up too often (false negatives) or having too many false positives or both. So we compromised by enabling more than one, but not full choice.
- mc32 6y agoThanks for the insight. Is it difficult to fingerprint a sound bite? Have people repeat it several times and again for each user that wants to use the custom wake word?
- Daegalus 6y agofrom my observations of the masses that Alexa and co try to cater to, that's too much work or too technical. we have to remember the average joe/jane don't know what a browser is.
- sib 6y agoIt's not so much the "fingerprinting" - it's more that there are some words ("type 1") that have many relatively frequent words that sound like them, and there are other words ("type 2") that only have a very few other words (and infrequent ones at that) that sound like them. Type 2 words make better potential wake words. (That's not the whole story, but I think it's good model.)
- mrcartmenez 6y agoI just wanted to let you know that you have caused great distress to my aunt, my daughter and my wider family through you and your colleagues thoughtless actions. I hope someday you, and Amazon as a whole, gets its comeuppance.
- thrtythreeforty 6y agoAWS employee here. We purposely say "ALex-uh" in group calls instead of "uhLEXa", because we talk about the service and devices all the time and using the correct pronunciation would trigger 10-15 Alexas sitting on everyone's desks!