When Alexa was first announced in 2014, I thought, "OK, right now it can only do simple things like play a song on Spotify or tell you the weather. But they're going to iterate rapidly, and in 10 years we'll be talking to it like a computer from Star Trek."
The rapid progress of GPT-3 and friends seemed to confirm this.
But here we are in 2022 and... we're nowhere near Star Trek, nor even GPT-3-ish levels of conversation. There seemed to be a failure of imagination: you wanted some cool sci-fi stuff, maybe shared storytelling like AI Dungeon[0]. But you got triggers for home automation, which 90% of people don't care about.
In 90's Star Trek they also don't talk with computer much more than saying very specific commands and getting some response just like one would ask Alexa for a weather. I can also setup some sensors so it would give me status report if I want to.
You take voice recognition for granted - it is not easy - it was really not possible not that long ago on level we have now like even in 2000's.
From 1990's to today - I feel that I live in the future.
If you take Doctor the hologram or holosuite characters - well yeah AI of today is nowhere near and I believe it never will be - but as I say my mind is blowing up when I see level of voice recognition, image recognition, game engines of today compared to what was possible in 1990's or even 2000's.
The wealth of knowledge that language models like these have is fantastic. Although as Meta's Galactica has demonstrated, you can't just slap an input box on a pre-trained model and ship it. It needs to be much more integrated with useful services, and robust with fact-checking. But a company like Amazon should not have problems doing both (and more) if they would commit to it.
It's so sad to read about the mismanagement of this technology in the article. They have a tremendous stake in the world of AI assistants and I wish Amazon were more optimistic about the technology. Perhaps a conversational AI assistant could drive revenues itself (without the need of complex monetization).
Starting in the last two years it has increasingly, and aggressively, started “advertising” skills and products following a voice request. So much so that I began looking into alternative voice engines.
Now I know why it was ramping up so quickly.
“Alexa, do this” Done.
What I get from Alexa:
“Hi there, let’s have a conversation where I pester you about products and ask questions about other things I can do, etc.”
For what it's worth, this is largely how the Google Assistant works from my "smart" speakers.
Jesus I just want to set a timer not be enlightened about some crappy skill that a pushy PM that’s going up for promo is trying for force engagement with.
- "You had a long day, shall I order pad thai for you?"
I use my Google Nest hub to watch YouTube which shows me ads. I think Amazon should've doubled down on the Echo Show and video content delivery (they do own twitch after all). The real money for platforms like Alexa/echo is content delivery, associated ad revenue, and replacing your telephone -- not as a medium to buy more shit on Amazon. And I think all of this could've been achieved with a 10000+ person division.
I use Apple TVs with the phone as a remote, but I wonder what kind of utility an Amazon device would have to provide for me to consider it over an Apple TV. And similarly for an Android user to consider an Amazon device over a Chromecast.
