5 ms·
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To th
by taeric 2y ago
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality.
This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.
Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.
To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoIf the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.
- taeric 2y agoThis could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.
- criddell 2y agoWhen I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?". It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.
- mgiampapa 2y agoYou can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1. This took about 5 minutes to setup.
- brewdad 2y agoHa! You just reminded me how we changed our Alexa to Ziggy while my kid was away at college. He came home over a break and was eventually screaming "Alexa" trying to get it to wake up.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoGoogle has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini. I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google. It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not. Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.
- taeric 2y agoI'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.
- stacktrust 2y agoIs there a modern equivalent?
- taeric 2y agoNot that I know of? But, I have also not been watching that market for a long long time. I am actually somewhat interested on building a small speaker thing that I can load a VXML document on and start adding use cases to it. Especially after considering how much I could save by dropping all of my current subscription stuff.
- esafak 2y agoI bet the people involved in the decision to bork it up don't even use the product. Management by OKRs. The numbers look good, ship it!
- 65 2y agoI never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
- taeric 2y agoI don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.
- dangus 2y agoIs not having your phone on you at all times worth spending money on a stupid speaker device? And you need one in every room you spend time in? Like, the solution is to put your phone in your pocket. I don't get it. Unless you are walking around naked most of the time, the solution is a device you already own. That's something I like a lot about Apple's smart home setup having the option of having the Apple TV as the hub. I don't want or need a smart voice command speaker considering I already own the hardware capable of such things. I have no use for a low quality shitty speaker device that sits there and does nothing useful besides take voice commands.
- Spivak 2y agoI feel like you decided the speakers are stupid and therefore anything someone might use them for must also be by the transitive property. My voice "assistant" runs on my NUC via HomeAssistant. The only thing I needed to buy was a USB mic. I was already using HA and had some old computer speakers lying around. It works great and I'm not tempted to get out my phone as much. Being able to call out multiple timers while cooking and change the music is so nice.
- taeric 2y agoDid you read the rest of my post? As hands free and stays in the room when I leave are pretty big deals. I confess being able to turn the oven off or switch to warming temperature would be nice.
- iugtmkbdfil834 2y agoIt is not completely unexpected. Within executive ranks there is an odd FOMO on 'new big thing'. That's partially why you saw attempts to sell more passing fads like crypto-everything, blockchain-everything, iot everything, subscription everything. It is easy to make fun (especially in retrospect), but being wrong means executive may make the mistake that Dwight made and declare internet a fad.
- taeric 2y agoThis makes some sense, but I generally you'd make sure the TAM of what you are building isn't smaller than one you would be cannibalizing. Amusingly, this is exactly what Google did with Reader back in the day. They actually had Reader and Buzz integrated rather nicely, but lit it on fire in an effort to get circles going.