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The problem is not discoverability. The problem is there is nothing there to be discovered that is useful or entertaining enough for people to pay money for. Th

The problem is not discoverability. The problem is there is nothing there to be discovered that is useful or entertaining enough for people to pay money for. The only thing surprising here is that it took so long for Amazon to admit its a failure.

nextworddev 3y ago
You need discoverability to incentivize innovators to add more value, which itself feeds back into the value of the overall ecosystem, etc. But yes, natural language as an interface requires higher activation energy versus GUI which hampers how much value Alexa Skills (and GPT) can provide.
- criddell 3y ago
  You do need discoverability, but you also need a capable platform and things worth discovering. When I look at Amazon’s skills page, it’s a wasteland. Until there’s something worth surfacing, discoverability doesn’t really matter. That said, I do have two Echos in my house (and one Home Pod) and use them all the time for basic things.
IshKebab 3y ago
I disagree. I have used Alexa and Google Assistant a lot and also developed an Alexa skill for controlling Dyson's robot vacuum cleaners, so I'm pretty familiar. The problem is that the set of supported operations are always MUCH smaller than the set of operations people randomly try. You might develop a skill with 200 commands or whatever and think you've covered everything, but people can up with thousands of possible commands just by guessing. This means if people just do "I'll try asking this..." then probably 80% of the time it won't work. That's an incredibly frustrating experience. You quickly give up and just stick to the features that you know work, and never try to find any new ones. But I also disagree that OpenAI has the same problem, because LLMs means you don't need to manually add thousands of possible commands, so any random request that people make is MUCH more likely to work.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  Honestly I'm disappointed Amazon hasn't married these two technologies either, but I think it must just be too expensive. I would think you could even prompt a midrange LLM to process the request and generate structured data for the limited list of supported prompts for a skill.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Too expensive and they're probably scared about how uncontrollable and unreliable LLMs are. Can't say I blame them really. Every time a company deploys an LLM you get a news story like "hurr durr I tricked it into saying poopy pants" or whatever.

nextworddev 3y ago

You need discoverability to incentivize innovators to add more value, which itself feeds back into the value of the overall ecosystem, etc. But yes, natural language as an interface requires higher activation energy versus GUI which hampers how much value Alexa Skills (and GPT) can provide.

criddell 3y ago
You do need discoverability, but you also need a capable platform and things worth discovering. When I look at Amazon’s skills page, it’s a wasteland. Until there’s something worth surfacing, discoverability doesn’t really matter. That said, I do have two Echos in my house (and one Home Pod) and use them all the time for basic things.

IshKebab 3y ago

I disagree. I have used Alexa and Google Assistant a lot and also developed an Alexa skill for controlling Dyson's robot vacuum cleaners, so I'm pretty familiar. The problem is that the set of supported operations are always MUCH smaller than the set of operations people randomly try. You might develop a skill with 200 commands or whatever and think you've covered everything, but people can up with thousands of possible commands just by guessing. This means if people just do "I'll try asking this..." then probably 80% of the time it won't work. That's an incredibly frustrating experience. You quickly give up and just stick to the features that you know work, and never try to find any new ones. But I also disagree that OpenAI has the same problem, because LLMs means you don't need to manually add thousands of possible commands, so any random request that people make is MUCH more likely to work.

jeremyjh 3y ago
Honestly I'm disappointed Amazon hasn't married these two technologies either, but I think it must just be too expensive. I would think you could even prompt a midrange LLM to process the request and generate structured data for the limited list of supported prompts for a skill.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Too expensive and they're probably scared about how uncontrollable and unreliable LLMs are. Can't say I blame them really. Every time a company deploys an LLM you get a news story like "hurr durr I tricked it into saying poopy pants" or whatever.