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Amazon thought Alexa would be the next iPhone. But it's a glorified clock radio
- theflyingelvis 4y agoIt still seems early times with voice assistants. Working with one seems transactional as opposed to conversational, to me anyway. I think that once this is overcome and we can converse with a voice assistant they will be more widely adopted.
- puffoflogic 4y agoIt will never happen, for a very simple reason: the first moment Alexa becomes non-transactional, I (and everyone else who owns one) will tell her to stop trying to upsell me on additional features. Boom, that's it for Amazon, game over.
- clnq 4y agoBut there's no reason a conversational language model needs to know how to stop doing anything.
- darreninthenet 4y agoUntil they're unplugged for being too annoying
- jleyank 4y agoHow can they make money for Amazon (or whomever)? Unless they sell them at a realistic end-price they’ll lose money, I can’t see people choosing voice over phone on accuracy and ease of use issues when ordering. And without feedback how can comparison shopping work?
- tinus_hn 4y agoThe idea could be that it is a foothold in the home; if it becomes popular you can sell add-on devices and create a services ecosystem around it. Unfortunately voice assistants mostly get used for very simple tasks like setting timers.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jti107 4y agonot sure about alexa but google assistant/nest audio is pretty great and i'm finding it quite difficult to stop using it. i use it for everything from playing music, adding stuff to my to do list, getting sports scores, turning on/off my smart lights, to figuring out measurements and setting timers while cooking. the speech recognition and speech synthesis is great! this is actually the only google product i still use...everything else has been replaced by apple, duckduckgo, fastmail, etc.
- gbronner 4y agoI've written skills for them. The issue is that as a skill writer, you have to pay for all the CPU usage, even when almost all the benefits accrue to amazon. Not nice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xen2xen1 4y agoI'm waiting for Stable Diffusion / GPT3 level goodness for stuff like this. That will be amazing.