The revolution that was related to theAlexa Skills was not

Amazon hasn’t done its homework: How good is your voice? Why you shouldn’t worry about the service or product, but what you can do about it

A decade on, it appears that an all-powerful, omni-capable voice AI might just be impossible to pull off. If Amazon were to make everything so seamless and fast that you never even have to know you’re interacting with a third-party developer and your pizza just magically appears at your door, it raises some huge privacy concerns and questions about how Amazon picks those providers. If it asked you to choose all those defaults for yourself, it’s signing every new user up for an awful lot of busy work. If it allows developers to own and operate even more of the experience, it wrecks the ambient simplicity that makes Alexa so enticing in the first place. There is too much simplicity in the way it’s presented.

We haven’t heard anything since last year’s launch of this LLM-powered assistant. Amazon even skipped its big hardware event this year, where it traditionally announces dozens of new Alexa and Alexa-compatible devices and services. This is likely because, based on reports, Amazon is far from achieving its promised “New Alexa.”

Why Smart Home Appliances Haven’t Served Up! Why Amazon’s Alexa Did Not Respond to My Demand for Science Projects, Not My Son’s

Tell my son not to forget his science project, set an alarm when he leaves, and speak to Amazon’s Alexa. Disarm the alarm and unlock the back door for the plumber at 4PM, then lock it again at 5PM. If I am late, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and then adjust the time.

Amazon doesn’t give access to your personal data beyond what it gives you on its store or when you purchase something on its website, so you don’t have a say in it. And its privacy missteps have kept people from trusting it.

This would be a big jump in the right direction. generative artificial intelligence can make voice assistants smarter, but it is not a silver bullet. The problem of the make sense of language can be solved by LLMs, but they are not currently able to act on it.

“Lamp isn’t responding” It’s beyond frustrating to issue a command and not check its network connection and power supply. It wasn’t the part of the promise when you spent hours configuring and repairing your smart home. This is what a smart computer should be able to do for you.

Amazon Echo Show 8: Helping an Assisted Person to Live Independently in the House and in the Presence of an Emergency? A Case Study

In retrospect, Amazon’s idea was pretty much exactly right. In order to be more interactive on the internet, OpenAI and other companies are also attempting to build their own third-party ecosystems with the help of chatbots. For the longest time, Amazon never figured out how to make skills work. It never solved some fundamental problems for developers, never cracked the user interface, and never found a way to show people all the things their Alexa device could do if only they’d ask.

I got a call from my mother about two years ago. She said that the person was really working out. I was feeling a little depressed, so I told Alexa to play some nice music, and that’s exactly what she did. I was feeling better in a few minutes.

Here’s how it started. My mother had lived most of her life as a teacher in the NYC public schools system, a smart, savvy woman with a master’s in education, a progressive political point of view, and a sometimes irritating ability to assume charge of almost any situation. 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 stay independent as long as possible — by playing games on her computer, keeping up with the news, and writing copious journal entries of her day-to-day activities — this increasingly affected her ability to do simple tasks, to learn new skills, and to live independently.

We hired an aide to help her during the day to make meals, clean up, and help with other chores that she was unable to do herself. my mom refused to have anyone with her at all times because she was stubborn and not willing to wear an emergency button. I lived about 40 minutes away and only spent weekends with her. She was the only one in the apartment so we needed to make sure she was ok.

So I got her an Amazon Echo Show 8 smart display in the hopes that it could be the beginning of a smart home system that would help keep her safe and active. I depended on my mother to accept the device because she was born at a time when a home telephone was new and exciting. 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 set it up and introduced her to Alexa.

I thought we could start by using it as a way to communicate visually. That was pretty much a failure. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about using it herself because she wasn’t impressed with the idea of “see the person you’re talking to.” She said it was not for her.

Okay, I thought, there’s always the “drop-in” feature. I could use it to monitor what was happening in the apartment. The room where my mother had her meals, wrote in her journal, and spent most of her time was located off the kitchen, and as a result, the show was only able to see into that room. I got one of her looks that made me feel like I was five years old again, when I suggested that I put cameras around the apartment. A camera in the bedroom? No way.

The Amazon App Store isn’t a Solvable Platform to Enable Yoga or Jeopardy in Mobile App Stores

Amazon made efforts to make skills happen. When their skills became used, the company paid them in credits for using their skills, and tried to make skill development easy. All of that work has paid off, as Amazon says there are over 160,000 skills available for the platform. That pales next to the millions of app store apps on smartphones, but it’s still a big number.

The system is a little better if you know the skills you are looking for. 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.

Volley makes money through subscriptions. The full Jeopardy experience, for instance, is $12.99 a month, and like so many other modern subscriptions, it’s a lot easier to subscribe than to cancel. It’s one of the few ways that a developer can make money with skills, such as asking users to add their credit card details directly and having audio ads in some types of skills. Ads are only useful at vast scale — there was a brief moment when a lot of media companies thought the so-called “flash briefings” might be a hit, but that hasn’t turned into much.

He says that Facebook ads are so good that it’s one of the reasons that the app store is so successful. 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! — but there’s just no competing with in-feed ads and hours of social scrolling. “Because you don’t have that hyper-targeted marketing, you end up having to do broad marketing, and you have to build broad games.” Hence games like Jeopardy and Millionaire, which are huge brands that appeal to practically everyone.

These are hardly unique challenges, by the way. Huge discovery problems, issues with monetization, and other issues can be found in mobile app stores. It’s just that with Alexa, the solution seemed so enticing: you shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, even need an app store. You should just be able to ask for what you want, and Alexa can go do it for you.