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Alexa is unimaginably bad considering the money and time they’ve spent on it. Someone should do a business school case study on how it could be so bad. It liter

Alexa is unimaginably bad considering the money and time they’ve spent on it. Someone should do a business school case study on how it could be so bad. It literally can’t handle the most basic of tasks involving playing music on Spotify without making idiotic mistakes, or even properly processing the same 3 commands we give it every day to turn on or off the lights. I’ve been muttering for the past 2 years to myself about how they should fire everyone involved in the project. I guess they finally realized it too.

kranke155 3y ago
How much of our technology was directly inspired by ideas by the Star Trek TV shows? Indeed ChatGPT is now achieving something close to what "Computer" used to do in the Enterprise bridge 30 years ago.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  Remember Star Trek was set about 200 years in the future from now.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    SciFi is always an extrapolation of what you know in your own time.
therippa 3y ago
You can safely say this for any user-facing product Amazon has. Look at the Prime TV interface, the Amazon Music app (and their "free" tier), etc. Everything they put out is third-rate, the only thing they know how to do well is AWS, which keeps the lights on.
- danielbln 3y ago
  The Alexa app is horrid as well, the audible app is VERY third rate, the Kindle app is... alright. What is pretty great is the kindle, my current gen kindle (the one with the large screen and the warm light) I cherish.
- eigenvalue 3y ago
  I don't find the Amazon Fire interface to be nearly as horrible and frustrating as Alexa is. What I don't understand is how it is so bad. You could literally just glue together the tiny.en Whisper model and the Mistral7b LLM and add some APIs and get something that would work so much better than Alexa for most tasks. I feel like I could do that in well under a month and replicate the most essential functionality, but with something that actually works well. So what exactly have the hundreds of highly compensated devs been doing for years there? It's truly mind-boggling to me.
  - therippa 3y ago
    I was an SDM at Amazon up until last month, I can tell you that the engineers are busy arguing over minute details and choice of wording in design docs. That's essentially the job.
horns4lyfe 3y ago
Maybe offshoring mass segments of your labor force too low cost countries isn’t a great strategy for innovation, but what do I know

kranke155 3y ago

How much of our technology was directly inspired by ideas by the Star Trek TV shows? Indeed ChatGPT is now achieving something close to what "Computer" used to do in the Enterprise bridge 30 years ago.

olddustytrail 3y ago
Remember Star Trek was set about 200 years in the future from now.
- kranke155 3y ago
  SciFi is always an extrapolation of what you know in your own time.

therippa 3y ago

You can safely say this for any user-facing product Amazon has. Look at the Prime TV interface, the Amazon Music app (and their "free" tier), etc. Everything they put out is third-rate, the only thing they know how to do well is AWS, which keeps the lights on.

danielbln 3y ago
The Alexa app is horrid as well, the audible app is VERY third rate, the Kindle app is... alright. What is pretty great is the kindle, my current gen kindle (the one with the large screen and the warm light) I cherish.
eigenvalue 3y ago
I don't find the Amazon Fire interface to be nearly as horrible and frustrating as Alexa is. What I don't understand is how it is so bad. You could literally just glue together the tiny.en Whisper model and the Mistral7b LLM and add some APIs and get something that would work so much better than Alexa for most tasks. I feel like I could do that in well under a month and replicate the most essential functionality, but with something that actually works well. So what exactly have the hundreds of highly compensated devs been doing for years there? It's truly mind-boggling to me.
- therippa 3y ago
  I was an SDM at Amazon up until last month, I can tell you that the engineers are busy arguing over minute details and choice of wording in design docs. That's essentially the job.

horns4lyfe 3y ago

Maybe offshoring mass segments of your labor force too low cost countries isn’t a great strategy for innovation, but what do I know