Amazon’s Next-to-Minimal Voice Assistant Hasn’t Come to a High Scale, Expected Expectations

On November 6th, Amazon announced the launch of its answer to the question “What are you doing?” A passion project for its founder, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s digital voice assistant was inspired by and aspired to be Star Trek’s “Computer” — an omniscient, omnipresent, and proactive artificial intelligence controlled by your voice. “It has been a dream since the early days of science fiction to have a computer that you can talk to in a natural way and actually ask it to have a conversation with you and ask it to do things for you,” Bezos said shortly after Alexa’s launch. “And that is coming true.”

Despite the launch last year of this LLM-powered assistant, we have heard nothing more. There was no big hardware event this year in which Amazon normally announces dozens of new devices and services. This is likely because, based on reports, Amazon is far from achieving its promised “New Alexa.”

Amazon Can’t Lock You Out Of Your Home… Or Does It Really Matter? How Intelligent Smart Computers Can Help You Keep Your Home Safe

Don’t forget his science project; set the alarm when he leaves. After disarming the alarm, lock the back door for the plumbing professional at 4PM and then at 5PM. If I am late, then preheat the oven at 6PM and adjust the time.

Unlike Google and Apple — which have access to data about you through your smartphone, calendar, email, or internet searches — Amazon has largely been locked out of your personal life beyond what you buy on its store or select data you give it access to. People are not willing to trust it because of its privacy missteps.

This alone would be a big leap forward. But while generative AI could make voice assistants smarter, it’s not a silver bullet. A basic make sense of language problem can be solved by LLMs but they don’t have the ability to act on that language, and there are many concerns about an artificial intelligence hallucinating in your home.

Hearing “‘Lamp’ isn’t responding. The command is beyond frustrating if it does not include a check of its network connection and power supply. And spending hours a month configuring and troubleshooting your smart home wasn’t part of the promise. This is what a smart computer should be able to do for you.

The Domino’s Pizza Connection: How My Mother and I Found a Pizza for Her Mom and Dad in the Early Post-Primordial Era

The interface for finding and using all those skills, though, has always been a mess. If you ask it to order you a pizza, it might tell you it has a few skills for that and recommend Domino’s. If you don’t know why Amazon picked Domino’s over Pizza Hut or any other pizza-summoning service, you can ask. Great question. No idea.) You respond yes. “Here’s Domino’s,” Alexa says. Then, a moment later, there is the skill Domino’s. Another moment, then: “To link your Domino’s Pizza Profile please go to the Skills setting in your Alexa app. To place a guest order, you need an email address. Please enable ‘Email Address’ permissions in your Alexa app.” It would be much easier to just click on the Domino’s website if you could find a hidden setting in an app you might not have on your phone. You can call the place.

Decades ago, my parents bought what was then the latest in audio technology: a modular stereo system that consisted of a turntable, a receiver, an AM / FM radio, and a cassette tape player. Now it sat unused, having become too complicated for my mother to deal with. But with the Echo, she could play music whenever she liked. She didn’t even have to remember the names of the songs she liked or the musicians that she had once doted on. All she had to do was say, “Alexa, play some quiet music,” or “Alexa, play some happy music.” Alexa would play some old-time blues or folk or big-band music. And I’d get a call about how she had listened to her music and how good it made her feel.

Here’s how it started. My mother was a smart, savvy woman with an education degree and a progressive political point of view who lived most of her life in the NYC public schools system. But she was now entering her late 90s and beginning to have serious problems with her health and her short-term memory recall. Despite her determination to remain independent as long as possible, this affected her ability to do simple tasks, learn new skills and live independently because of the increased stress of her day-to-day activities.

We were able to hire an aide to help her during the daylight hours — make meals, clean up, and help with other chores that she was now unable to do herself. But my mom was also stubborn and refused to have anyone there at night or to wear any kind of emergency button in case she needed help. I spent most of the time with her at my home 40 minutes away. We needed some way of making sure she was okay when she was the only person in the apartment.

I got her an Amazon display in hopes it would be the start of a smart home system that would keep her safe and active. It was all dependent on my mother’s opinion of the device, she was always excited about having a home telephone. The Echo’s eight-inch screen was large enough for her to be able to view it easily but small enough so it wouldn’t overwhelm the room. She could interact with the personal assistant, while the camera would allow me to interact with her remotely. I put it up and talked to her.

I believe we could use it as a way to communicate. That was a failure. My mother was a huge fan of using a phone but wasn’t that fond of using it herself, even though she liked “see the person you’re talking to” She said that it was not for her.

I thought there was a feature called the drop-in. It could be used to watch what was happening in the apartment. The Den was a small room in the kitchen where my mom used to have her meals, and it’s where the Echo Show was placed, so that it could only be seen from there. The one time I suggested that I put cameras around the apartment, I got one of her looks — the one that made me feel as if I were five years old again. A camera in the bedroom? No way.

Amazon’s Voice Assistant is Just As Good as App Stores: Why You Shouldn’t Have an App Store, Unless You’re a Smart TV

Amazon tried to make skills happen. The company steadily rolled out new tools for developers, paid them in AWS credits and cash when their skills got used (though it recently stopped doing so), and tried to make skill development practically effortless. There are over 160,000 skills that can be found on the platform, and all that effort paid off. That pales next to the millions of app store apps on smartphones, but it’s still a big number.

If you know the skill you’re looking for, the system is a little better. You can say “Alexa, open Nature Sounds” or “Alexa, enable Jeopardy,” and it’ll open the skill with that name. But if you don’t remember that the skill is called “Easy Yoga,” asking Alexa to start a yoga workout won’t get you anywhere.

Child says that Volley’s players use a device with a screen. He says that they are long on smart TVs. “Every single smart TV that’s sold now has a microphone in the remote. I think it would make sense to have casual voice games.

One of the reasons for the success of the app stores is because they have good Facebook ads, he says. The pipeline from a hyper-targeted ad to an app install has been ruthlessly perfected over the years, and there’s just nothing like that for voice assistants. The nearest equivalent is probably people asking their Alexa devices what they can do — which Child says does happen! There is no competing with the amount of social scrolling and in-feed ads. “Because you don’t have that hyper-targeted marketing, you end up having to do broad marketing, and you have to build broad games.” The games Jeopardy and Millionaire appeal to everyone.

These are hardly unique challenges, by the way. Mobile app stores have similar huge discovery problems, issues with monetization, sketchy subscription systems, and more. The solution was that you shouldn’t need an app store, and wouldn’t even need it with Amazon’s voice assistant. You should just be able to ask for what you want, and Alexa can go do it for you.