8 ms·

How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system

180 points by nutellalover 2y ago

labrador 2y ago
Amazon invested $4 billion into Anthropic [1], which makes Claude AI, the AI I use almost exclusively. Claude is being trained to be very human-like, safe and friendly and has improved very much in that area lately [2], so I assume the idea is that Claude will be Alexa 2.0. In my experience, even employees maintaining the current version of a product can be out-of-the-loop on the future of the product. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-anthrop... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character
- AnotherGoodName 2y ago
  In fact I think you sometimes have to ensure the old guard is gone to let the new guard take over. Google and Apple have been in the news with cuts to their voice assistant teams in recent times too, similar to the Alexa cuts. It’s obvious current ai can handle context reasonably well which is something the previous voice assistants failed badly at. The next thing is to write all the apis so the ai can reasonably act on that context. It’s such a new way of doing things it’s probably best to hard cut development of the previous way to do it which was seemingly hard coded triggers->actions which always failed badly if you wanted to add context eg. “open house blinds when I pick up the phone in the morning or when the alarm goes off, whichever comes first” would never work with the old voice assistants. It might just work with the new ai systems but it’ll be a completely different system, not even a rewrite at that point.
  - Obscurity4340 2y ago
    AIPIS
- hawski 2y ago
  After Apple announcement they should name it Amazon Intelligence.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Pity Google, Microsoft, Meta didn't have the foresight to name their companies in preparation for the AI boom. Adobe, Autodesk, Alibaba, and AirBnB are looking pretty smart. I suppose this might explain the Google -> Alphabet thing but they haven't really embraced the new corporate name enough for "Alphabet Intelligence" to make any sense.
darby_nine 2y ago
I will invest a lot of money in the first voice system that offers serious text editing so i can correct mistakes without repeating everything.
- sambull 2y ago
  I can't even do that with other humans - or they can't do that with me, or some combination of that.
- MH15 2y ago
  There was something on Show HN that did this with some promise recently, can't find it now
  - pneumic 2y ago
    Aqua Voice: https://withaqua.com/ https://withaqua.com/
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Yeah I'm impressed with how well it does a straight shot paragraph but I can't use it comprehensively. It's the little things that make it unworkable, like moving the cursor and selection to do rapid nonlinear edits, getting it to use your personal capitalization style, and I'd imagine it's a nightmare trying to write code with voice dictation, with how nonlinear and dependent on symbols and spacing it is.
  - webappguy 2y ago
    GPT voice is almost exactly always what I want, I think using whisper, and yet every app and both OS devices android and iOS can’t even transcribe a single sentence correct without errors. Pathetic really.
- RheingoldRiver 2y ago
  i want talon voice for android
- 2y ago
ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
I worked on a research team in Alexa. Almost all projects were focused on short term delivery, non immediate need innovation was highly discouraged. Most models were just direct imports of open source models created by Meta/Google. Extremely short delivery timelines for incremental improvement. Alexa employees were often highly political tenured Amazon employees. Minimal room for growth as they sucked oxygen out of the room. The Amazon philosophy of constant execution is at odds with large leap technical innovation. It works very well for ops heavy AWS orgs, and supply chain related optimization problems. The company has a cultural problem Regardless of the above, ChatGPT made almost all NLP technologies across all companies obsolete.
- criddell 2y ago
  By the way, oxygen is a colorless, odorless gas with an atomic number of eight. If you would like to know more about elements just say "Alexa, tell me about the periodic table of elements".
  - esafak 2y ago
    You sound like Clippy. "It looks like you're writing about oxygen! Would you like to know its chemical properties?"
  - djeastm 2y ago
    Alexa's "by the ways" will be its downfall. What kind of assistant says "by the way" apropos of nothing? An annoying one. It's just a thinly disguised ad that was never asked for.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    Oxygen gas is molecular not atomic - at least on this planet.
    - criddell 2y ago
      Your order of "Boost Oxygen Pocket Size Natural Aroma 3 Liter Portable Oxygen Canister, Respiratory Support for Aerobic Recovery, Altitude, Performance and Health" is $23.91 and will be delivered tomorrow. To check the status of your order, use the Alexa app.
empath75 2y ago
The problem with all the original iterations on these assistants is that they fail so often that people stop using them for anything except for the few things that they can do reliably which for most people is basically setting timers, playing music and turning the lights off and on. They're annoying to use, because the interface sort of implies affordances (like, you know, just talking to it like a person) that aren't actually available, and really it's just a menu tree that's barely more sophisticated than a customer support call tree.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Right. You develop a small number of simple, useful, common tasks and you pretty much just stick to those.
- ultrarunner 2y ago
  In a situation with such a low margin of value for the user, there's an even finer point on reducing friction. I know Alexa stopped being used in my household shortly after the "by the way…" addendums were introduced. This seemed to be in recognition of the trend of reduction to memorized phrases, but it was a bad approach. If the other comments are true, and incremental progress was more rewarded, it stands to reason that such a major problem with the service was under appreciated. Had it been recognized as the dead-end of the product, maybe more sophisticated models would have been pursued.
- tssva 2y ago
  My guess is that there is going to be all this investment and research poured into AI voice assistants and in the end the result is going to be the same.
  - danielbln 2y ago
    What makes you guess that?
    - tssva 2y ago
      Because to date I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear to be a solution in search of a problem.
keeptrying 2y ago
At Amazon you get paid when you create whole new businesses which you used to pitch to Bezos. Incremental improvement was rewarded through the regular stock and pay process. Thus no one cared enough to quickly switch to LLMs. Suoer interesting how org design - even when brillaint can be severely lacking.
- orwin 2y ago
  And I think they're better for it. We use both azure ans AWS at my current org. We recently had an internal 'hackathon' to try Llms in both orgs (Claude for AWS, ChatGPT4 for Azure) on our knowledge bases. Clearly, we couldn't differentiate them on response quality, not in 3 days, but on how easy and integrable the LLM was, AWS was superior, even for our mostly Azure teams, weirdly.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  I don't know if that's really true - I've heard people who spin up successful teams can get bonuses (which basically don't exist at Amazon) for doing so. In that sense, incremental improvement isn't really rewarded at all - there's very little to no pay-for-performance as a concept at Amazon.
  - malfist 2y ago
    We're one of the few companies that count stock growth against you during comp reviews.
    - keeptrying 2y ago
      LOL - seriously? Nice. In NYC they do this all the time. They'd also nitpick the hell out of your work. You'd feel like a complete loser after your review. Pretty hilarious when thinking back about it.
      - malfist 2y ago
        Yeah, we do yearly comp reviews not with stock grant numbers, but with total comp targets. So if you do mediocre one year and get a mediocre grant, then kick it into high gear next year, but the stock grew in the meantime, you're told "tough luck" and not rewarded for the extra effort. Or at least stock growth is deducted from your effort reward. It's absolutely insane, but Amazon is the easiest faang to get into
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
The problem with Alexa isn’t technology or product design. It’s the organizational issues. It was a bloated team with over 10000 people. After a decade of investment, they had no real business model. They may have had decent engineers and scientists, but lots of managers and executives got promoted to very high levels despite showing zero results, mostly based on the size of their teams. Those empire builders then moved around the company and industry, leaving behind a wasteland.
- esafak 2y ago
  This is an industry-wide problem. The solution is not to overhire and crack down on these empire bulders, but this means fewer FAANG jobs. Engineers have to pick their poison.
zhyder 2y ago
I think we overstate how useful such a system is. Visual UIs with buttons are so predictable and efficient to use, so anytime you can reach for a screen and hand-operated-input for anything complex, you will. I've stopped using home devices like the Echo (coz of privacy concerns, esp with hotword mistriggers): now use voice only when driving the car. Maybe multimodal LLMs like GPT-4o will spawn new useful use-cases, but I think they're unlikely to be for the same use-cases Alexa the product+brand is known for.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Exactly - Amazon wasn't the only company gutting their conversational UI teams because they couldn't figure out how to make money with them. My guess is 99% of conversational UIs are some combination of: 1. Set my alarm/timer. 2. "What's the weather?" 3. "Turn on/off my lights" for those with connected lights. etc. We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days.
  - wenc 2y ago
    > We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days. It depends what culture you’re from. Many cultures around the world prefer voice. If you live in a fair large city just look around for folks on the phone. There are still many people who need a voice plan.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      It also depends greatly on the conversation you plan to have. If I'm hitting up my wife to see what she wants for dinner, that's perfect as a text - it's brief and benefits from being asynchronous. But if I want to talk about something time sensitive (perhaps I'm at the restaurant already so I need an answer now, or maybe an emergency has happened) I call. I don't think people prefer to use text most of the time so much as they use the most appropriate medium for the discussion.
karaterobot 2y ago
> Amid this news, a former Alexa colleague messaged me: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.” I assume the goal of Alexa was never to be the top conversational system on the planet, it was to sell more stuff on Amazon. Apple's approach to making a friendly and helpful chat assistant helps keep people inside their ecosystem, but it's not clear how any skill beyond "Alexa, buy more soap" was going to contribute meaningfully to Alexa's success as a product from Amazon's perspective. I saw the part about them having a "how good at conversation is it" metric, but that cannot be the metric that leadership actually cared about, it was always going to be "how much stuff did we sell off Alexa". In other words, Amazon did not ever appear to be in the race to make the best voice assistant, and I'm not sure why they would want to be.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Amazon could be at the late Sears and Robucks phase already where it cares more about people subscribing to Prime than it does selling things. It’s painful to see them give up a good brand just as the moment when a change in technology could have given them wheels…
  - SavageBeast 2y ago
    AMZN execs are watching AAPL stock go bonkers today on yesterdays AI announcement. APPLE IS DOING AI AND WE ALL NEED NEW PHONES TO USE IT! I expect a similar thing to happen when AMZN announces some AI consumer product. Never mind they were in a Prime (ahahah - get it - "PRIME") position to be the first mover here. An opportunity good and truly squandered.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Is Alexa really that primed to be useful? For home devices, maybe. For mobile? The Goog's seems like it would be better primed with its Android devices. What I saw from Apple this week shows me that they've been much more focused on making the assistant useful for anything/everything someone could do on their devices. I have not see that kind of focus from anyone else.
throwinga10101 2y ago
The infra part particularly resonated with me. Leadership caring about high level metrics deprioritize "in-the-weeds" dev experience. At <redacted applied ML place>, I was working on data infra, but pressure from above made it impossible to have time to focus and instead focused on short-term deliverables. It was hard to convince others to adjust their priorities for "the greater good". The only way to make things better (in my mind) was to use my own time to improve the infra, and because the metrics don't track these infra improvements I don't get rewarded so I just became burned out. Part of me think this is the reason why you want bloat in orgs, so that motivated people with enough redundancy will actually feel comfortable chasing longer term incentives.
TheGRS 2y ago
Good read and really just highlights the complexity and tension involved with huge corporate organizations. I would not have ever guessed that Alexa alone would have so many teams and engineers involved, because from the outside it seems like the only iterations were on the physical models. The voice assistant didn't seem to change in any meaningful way for a very long time. It even seems like Amazon employs some form of internal start-up model, but that still struggles because of the internal politics. Maybe when it comes to individual products, its best to keep the teams small and nimble.
neilv 2y ago
The first paragraph of the first section of reasons given is: > Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with. I really don't want this to be a message companies are hearing right now -- that being conscientious about customer data is a lethal barrier to progress, in the "AI" gold rush. Also, without knowing anything about the organization, I'd expect it to probably have a high level of dysfunction, being at a company known for being excessively metrics-driven from the top, and for ruthless stack-ranking and related HR practices... trying to organize a large coherent cutting-edge R&D effort against that cultural backdrop. Like suggested by this bit elsewhere in the section: > And most importantly, there was no immediate story for the team’s PM to make a promotion case through fixing this issue other than “it’s scientifically the right thing to do and could lead to better models for some other team.” No incentive meant no action taken.
- johndhi 2y ago
  You may not want privacy guard rails to be contrary to progress in AI but I'm afraid they may be.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  > I really don't want this to be a message companies are hearing right now They won't be hearing it, they'll be (and are) sending it. "AI would be better for you if it had fewer guardrails around your privacy. Trust us."
- wepple 2y ago
  Whilst there may be some inefficient bureaucracy in large orgs, I’m tempted to offer the following proposition: Companies that are absolutely at the forefront of AI, must be by definition, doing terrible things wrt privacy & security.
deleted 2y ago
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apeace 2y ago
I've always thought it was Apple who dropped the ball with Siri. When Siri came out in 2011 -- two years before Alexa -- all my coworkers and I had iPhones. I remember sitting in my office as people yelled at Siri all day trying to get her to be useful. "Hey Siri, what's the weather tomorrow? No... No SIRI, WHAT'S -- THE -- WEATHER -- TOMORROW!" Even though it sucked, it seemed every hardcore Apple user was ready to jump onboard. Who cares if I'm in a crowded office with people trying to get work done while I spend 10x longer to perform a function in the noisiest possible way? I'm using this thing!! The voice recognition has improved since then. But the functionality still sucks. When I'm in private, there are a couple commands I'll use. - "Hey Siri, call xyz" where xyz is someone in my contact list I have tested with Siri and is known to work. Not recommended to try without testing first. - While cooking, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." Works great. - While driving and navigating: "Hey Siri, take me to the nearest gas station." That one is pretty good, except the actual maps are not smart enough so sometimes you'll be turned around in the opposite direction you were going, since technically that's where the nearest gas station is. I never understood why they couldn't make this tool better, even before LLMs and without any AI at all. Just hard-code a bunch of phrases, and ways to translate those phrases into some action. "Hey Siri, how close is my UPS delivery?" "Hey Siri, where can I get the best price on xyz cat food?" "Hey Siri, what's my bank balance?" "Hey Siri, how much is a Lyft to xyz?" I bet if they had a single developer working on adding Siri commands full-time, they could announce something like 20-50 new Siri functions at every WWDC. But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks. They could've dominated the "conversational system" market 13 years ago.
- noahtallen 2y ago
  > But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks. I almost completely agreed with you, but this is not true! Apple is trying to solve the task & API problem with “task intents”, on which they go into more detail outside of the keynote: https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE The new Siri models are trained on a large number of schemas. Apps can implement those schemas to say “I provide this action” (aka, the user intends to do this action). Siri can use the more advanced NLP that comes with GenAI to match what you say to a schema, and send that to an app. These app intents are also available to spotlight and shortcuts, making them more powerful than just being Siri actions
laidoffamazon 2y ago
> Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with. I was in Alexa and this rings painfully true. So many workarounds and endless classification escalations. The customer-data certified compute environments were extremely painful to use (though later improved but still annoying) and getting data in or out, even for anodyne reasons, was nigh impossible. For a long period, even getting access to this system (called Hoverboard) took months. During my internship I spent about half of it waiting for access to be granted and had to spend a big chunk of it testing out my training system on CPU...not fun.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  I get the feeling that you weren't intending to say so many kind things about the access control practices for Alexa data. Sounds like good work.
  - laidoffamazon 2y ago
    This was a common complaint in Alexa and one interesting bit of insider information I found out from people that either left for Google Assistant or came from there is that their tools did not have this level of pain around data security. As a result I'm guessing there's a middle ground between customer data security and making it impossible to work with - either that, or Google just didn't care.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
      > either that, or Google just didn't care Let's just say I get the impression Google doesn't care. Really, that access control for Alexa data ought to be the standard.
      - mh- 2y ago
        "So painful it contributes to the downfall of your product" need not be the standard. There is a middle ground that takes customer data seriously.
rco8786 2y ago
3 nights ago at about 1am my Alexa started blasting heavy metal music at 1am. I unplugged it and am not too sure about plugging it back in.
- thiagoeh 2y ago
  Someone, maybe a family member, has an Spotify account connected to Alexa, and chose your Echo device as output
  - mh- 2y ago
    I accidentally did this to a vacation home we stayed in once, like weeks after we checked out. It took me a solid minute to piece together 'where the music was going'. I felt so bad; hopefully the house was vacant.
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  About a month or two ago Alexa started telling us it didn't understand "stop" while it played the audio we didn't ask for (Alexa's voice recognition is really poor). I had to unplug it. I probably could have used the app to stop it but I didn't think about that at the time.
pjs_ 2y ago
I remember talking to Alexa about eight years ago. I was a bit skeptical and asked, "what color is a red car?". I was seriously impressed that it knew that a red car is red.
ryandrake 2y ago
IMO voice assistants keep underwhelming because customers don't want to learn their language--we want them to understand our language. It's frustrating to have to know the exact magic spell wording to get an assistant to do something. They need to be like "Computer" in Star Trek TNG or they're dead in the water. 80% of the way there still isn't good enough--I'd rather just use a mouse and keyboard than endure an awkward trial-and-error with an "assistant" that is supposed to be smart.
- johnyzee 2y ago
  If only there was a technology that understood unstructured natural language really well.
- pomian 2y ago
  So you pick up the mouse, and talk into it? .... Seriously though, I don't understand why the state of voice interaction is so poor. In the 90's we had voice commands (early dragon ?) available to tell our computer what to do. It was limited, but it worked extremely well, even in busy environments. I remember my Thinkpad 486dx2(?), at a party - opening software and choosing music to play from a list, and controlling volume, all by voice. Thinking to ourselves, imagine what this will be like when we have a stronger, faster computer, in five years.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    It's truly gone nowhere. Still, the most advanced thing you can reliably get it to do is "Set a timer for 10 minutes." I wonder if these "SmartAssistant" programmers ever actually had a human personal assistant. For most of what you need them to do, you don't even ask them to do it, they just know you and do it. An actually good computerized SmartAssistant would know that it's been a year, so it's time to book my physical with my doctor. It would have contacted the doctor's office for me, checked my calendar, scheduled the appointment, and then proactively reminded me a few days in advance. I shouldn't have to say "Hey, Assistant: Please schedule a physical for Doctor X at Clinic Y on July 1 of this year." (by the way SmartAssistants can't even currently do that). The voice interaction should only be for exceptional cases: "Hey, Assistant: My trip to the Paris office needs to be delayed by one week." The assistant should then go and re-book flights, hotels, and rental cars, and then when finished, merely say "Done." Until they can do this, tech companies might as well stop bothering releasing incremental crap products that can barely understand a task I'd expect a 4 year-old to be able to do.
jackconsidine 2y ago
> Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access For what it’s worth we were working on a conversational health app and this why we picked Alexa over alternatives (if you’re big enough to get on GPT enterprise you can probably implement HIPAA safeguards, but we never got replies)
markx2 2y ago
I bought into Alexa/Echo because at the time my late wife could not work remote controls (Multiple Sclerosis). She only had her voice. It was great for her to play different radio stations, playlists, news. It did the job. I did try linking it to a TV but that was terrible. Slow, janky, unreliable. Since she died - Dec 2018 - "Alexa play LBC" "Alexa stop" Oh, if you do have an Alexa device "Alexa, what noise does a hamster make?"
- djeastm 2y ago
  > Oh, if you do have an Alexa device "Alexa, what noise does a hamster make?" I just did this and it said "Here's a hippopotamus' grunt" So that's how it's going for Alexa in my house
  - brevitea 2y ago
    AGI Alexa is truly a work of innovation. It gaslights you into thinking you wanted hippopotamus.
nextworddev 2y ago
Hmm, I'm an early Alexa PM (2016) that left Alexa before the OP joined it (2019). Alexa's main failure was mainly that the tech wasn't ready - it was basically a ASR + NLU + rule engine. If we had 2023 LLM tech, then we may have "won" the Assistants market. Yes, organizational bloat and politics was a problem but OP was hired as a result of the mass hiring spree, so he was a beneficiary of that.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  They don't seem to have modded Alexa to keep pace with accessibility of the pubic to LLMs though? Presumably they'd have just let that market lead slide in the same way.
  - nextworddev 2y ago
    They are actually planning to do that - it's just a software update - though they are doing that with Amazon Titan model, which might be kind of behind.. Also they are trying to sell as a subscription which is interesting since Siri is free.
- krisroadruck 2y ago
  Honestly I think the only reason you guys shipped as many units as you did was blocking other voice assistants from interacting with Audible. I've had an Alexa/Echo since the early beta and it has literally always been worse than other options like google home. It's gotten progressively worse over time as well. Not just comparatively but vs it's own experience several years ago.
  - nextworddev 2y ago
    Yep, can confirm that it was better in 2017 than 2021. Mainly because when the org chart grows, more "rules" are added to the rules engine, where each rule is managed by another service... which all adds to end to end user perceived latency, etc... that's why rule engines don't work.
  - ratg13 2y ago
drcongo 2y ago
We've had weeks and weeks of "Apple have dropped the ball over AI" so now it's Alexa's turn I guess.
jarjoura 2y ago
I had a manager who came from Amazon and shared some of the horror stories from their time on Alexa. It seemed like a lot of senior folks were only using it for career advancement because it was where all the R&D money was flowing into. So a bunch of hard working folks building things, leadership playing political games with each other, and an org that had no idea what problems they were actually trying to solve. It definitely captured the market, but without a top down vision, the whole thing was just a huge letdown.
deleted 2y ago
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suyash 2y ago
Siri dropped the ball even before Alexa, it had the golden opportunity to become ChatGPT about 10 years ago.
mrkramer 2y ago
I never used smart speakers but do they allow third party apps and if they do how developed is the ecosystem? I see so many use cases as of voice commanded apps, voice games etc.
potatolicious 2y ago
One thing really worth addressing from the post that I don't think author accepted, and I see this a lot with engineers: > "That did introduce tension for our team because we were supposed to be taking experimental bets for the platform’s future. These bets couldn’t be baked into product without hacks or shortcuts in the typical quarter as was the expectation." If I can pump one learning into engineers' and PMs' heads it's this: intermediate deliverables are not optional no matter how cutting-edge your team is. You will never succeed if your pitch to leadership is "give us a budget for the next N years and expect no shippable products until the end of N years". Even if you get approved somehow at the beginning, there's a 99.5% chance your team/project will be killed before you get to N years. Again, once again for the audience in the back: there is no such thing as a multi-year project without convincing, meaningful intermediate deliverables. To clarify, that doesn't mean "don't have multi-year roadmaps", it means "your multi-year roadmaps must deliver wins at a consistent cadence". Understanding this will carry you a lot further in the industry. As a fairly cutting-edge R&D team part of your job is to figure out what slice of this is shippable (and worth shipping). If you're coming up empty you are not ready to pitch this to execs.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  As an engineer it's much easier to "polish" (or work on useless stuff) than to deliver real products. I see that all the time, specially with "platform" teams that have no external product requirements. They waste a lot of time trying to figure out the most amazing way to deliver something instead of delivering something in a timely fashion. If you push in any way they start to scream "tech debt" and everyone just accepts it. I've been through a migration mandated by an infrastructure team where where were 0 improvements for the teams that used the platform, all benefits were for the platform team only, and this was green-lighted and forced upon everyone without a second thought. It's unbelievable.
  - golergka 2y ago
    > If you push in any way they start to scream "tech debt" and everyone just accepts it. Just as real-life debt, building a company without it is unrealistic and unwise. You just have to manage it.
oidar 2y ago
They haven't lost yet. Alexa is still the top conversational system appliance for most households right now. A smart speaker is almost an essential device among my group of friends. Siri on HomePod is still subpar for basic kitchen tasks like setting timers, adding items to shopping lists, and creating reminders. I don't even think Google has a current device that competes in this space. I really want HomePod to be better at household tasks such as managing shopping lists, timers, and reminders, but it's not there yet. As soon as the HomePod can replace my Alexa devices, I'll be all in. I have a HomePod right next to every Alexa device in my house, and I'm just waiting for Apple to turn on their "Apple intelligence."
- sporedro 2y ago
  Does siri/homepod not just directly connect to your iPhones calander/notes/reminders? I honestly ask this because I never tried though… I use my homepod as a glorified timer, alarm clock, and speaker. I’m just sitting here in the apple ecosystem hoping one day things will actually feel connected.
  - oidar 2y ago
    It doesn't "directly" connect - it changes things on iCloud - it just doesn't work well. It takes more than a few seconds for it to add things to reminders. It has to verify your voice to add things to reminders - god forbid if you are sharing a shopping list with another person in your household. That nearly doubles the time it takes to add something to a shopping list. With Alexa, adding things to a shopping list is instant, it doesn't verify if you are authorized to add things to the shopping list, Alexa just adds them.
- datpiff 2y ago
  > A smart speaker is almost an essential device among my group of friends. You live in a bubble
- GJim 2y ago
  > A smart speaker Can we give these things their real name: Smart Microphones Alexa = Amazons microphone.
_yb2s 2y ago
I don’t know if my voice is weird or what, but these things- alexa, siri, etc. don’t work for me at all, they can’t understand anything I say unless I repeat it slowly half dozen times, yet regular people understand me just fine.
- brookst 2y ago
  My s/o talks weird to devices... she pitches her voice oddly and it's hard for even me to understand her. Devices do not understand. Maybe record yourself or ask someone to listen to you talking to a device and see if you're unconsciously changing delivery?
- jedberg 2y ago
  Voice assistants are much better with lower voices than higher ones (especially Alexa). One tip is to deepen your voice, that might help.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    My voice is extremely, unusually deep. I actually suspect that is the problem itself, it is deep enough that it doesn’t even register as speech to these systems.
stderrout 2y ago
Always surprised how little Alexa changed over the years from initial version. Both on software and hardware there could have been so much possibilities and learning from years of user feedback. Appstore and skills deserted from years of broken to unusable functionality. Hardware remain stuck to initial speaker version where there was possibility to replace so many dedicated boxes around house each connected to power supply providing singular function - Access Point, routers, smart device gateway, streaming device, NAS for backup or private cloud, etc Last one failure for entire BigTech where desire to maintain control prevented any form of standardization or interoperability to the point where hobbyist open source solutions are now leading on how to do smart home right way and not abandon user base in 6 months after release.
creeble 2y ago
I'm not sure I would have a lot of use for voice-controlled conversational AI, as odd as that may sound. Like most people, I use Alexa for _commands_: home automation, timers, tell me the weather, ask a specific question looking for a specific answer, play this music. That's not "conversational", and I don't want it to be. I use generative AI for other things, mostly writing code for me, or telling me about code problems in general. It's rare that I want output that I'm _not_ going to copy/paste somewhere. Alexa isn't a failure, it just didn't sell more stuff for Amazon. And, well, it costs an awful lot for them to keep running. So maybe it is.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
barumrho 2y ago
Alexa is not on a phone or PC. It could only be so useful being available only at home.
- jedberg 2y ago
  Sure it is. There are Alexa phone apps that do full Alexa. Up until about a year ago you could also do it on the computer but they took it down. https://alexa.amazon.com/ https://alexa.amazon.com/
  - brevitea 2y ago
    ... Because it was a huge privacy risk.
throwaway_j12 2y ago
I have some personal insight on this one. My opinion is that data access restrictions did not cause Alexa to fail. If you think about it, it wasn't lack of machine learning that contributed to its issues. Alexa attempted to solve the long tail of customer requests with the equivalent of spaghetti "if statements" - rule engines. This was never going to scale. Alexa did not have a generic enough approach to cover the long tail of customer requests (e.g. AGI). With rule engines, there was always a tension between latency and functionality. Alexa solved this with bureaucracy - monitor latency, monitor customer request types, and make business decisions about how to evolve the rule engines. But it was never fundamentally able to scale out of the most basic requests or solve chicken-egg problems (customers don't ask complicated requests because Alexa isn't capable, so they don't show up as large enough use cases to optimize for). Top use cases remained playing music and setting timers. A more fundamental issue was monetizing. Early on Bezos liked the idea of having a small, essentially free, device that would reduce the friction to buying things. If you remember the "easy buttons" Amazon floated there were many ideas like this. In practice, building a robust voice assistant that could purchase items proved challenging for a myriad of reasons. So the business looked for other ways to monetize. Advertising kept coming up but there was rank and file pushback to this because it could break customer expectations and/or privacy concerns. Alexa considered pivoting into various B2B ventures (hospitality, healthcare, business) and other customer scenarios (smarthome, automotive) but took half-measures into each of them rather than committing to an opportunity. It felt like a solution looking for a problem. Alexa would have (could still?) benefit from modern LLM technology. However to be truly useful it would need to do more than chat. It would need some layer to take actions. This would all have to be carefully considered and designed so that it scales - so that it isn't a bureaucracy trying to measure what people are wanting to do and "if statement"ing a rules engine to enable it. OpenAI and others appear to be poised with the machine learning expertise to do this. Finally, it's my opinion that Alexa's machine learning scientists were very good, however as a population they did not appear to me to really care about the business/product use case. Many of them worked on research for publication on problems like distance estimation, etc. The expertise was very heavy on voice transcription and audio processing. However there was less expertise in "reasoning". This I hypothesize contributed to the approach of iterated rules engines, with the science community focused primarily with improving transcription accuracy by small numbers of basis points.
booleandilemma 2y ago
I threw my Alexa in the garbage after I asked it to turn off my house lights and it tried to recommend something (a schedule or something) for what must have been the third time.
tlogan 2y ago
I set up our home with smart shades, lights, iAqua, Somfy, etc., but my family and me now just use the remotes due to frustration with Amazon Alexa. I was always under impression that Amazon uploads all our data because I notice data transfers whenever I use voice commands, which makes me doubt their privacy claims. It seems like Alexa was designed more to learn from us rather than to genuinely assist us. Its primary goal appears to be gathering data rather than helping users.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  > I was always under impression that Amazon uploads all our data because I notice data transfers whenever I use voice commands... As I recall, they said as much. The device uploads a clip of the audio to get processed by the back end, does it not?
sokoloff 2y ago
Come home to find a yellow ring on the Echo. "Alexa, tell me my messages." "You don't have any messages. You have one notification; would you like me to read it?" <silently> "Jesus H Christ, what do you think?!" <aloud> "Yes"
pciexpgpu 2y ago
You don’t need to bring a rocket launcher to a banana fight. Most of the queries are gonna involve setting an alarm or turn on/off a thing. They didn’t drop the ball- they were very customer savvy and really knew what they were getting into.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

180 points by nutellalover 2y ago

Amazon invested $4 billion into Anthropic [1], which makes Claude AI, the AI I use almost exclusively. Claude is being trained to be very human-like, safe and friendly and has improved very much in that area lately [2], so I assume the idea is that Claude will be Alexa 2.0. In my experience, even employees maintaining the current version of a product can be out-of-the-loop on the future of the product. [1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-anthropic-ai-investment https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-anthrop... [2] https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character

AnotherGoodName 2y ago
In fact I think you sometimes have to ensure the old guard is gone to let the new guard take over. Google and Apple have been in the news with cuts to their voice assistant teams in recent times too, similar to the Alexa cuts. It’s obvious current ai can handle context reasonably well which is something the previous voice assistants failed badly at. The next thing is to write all the apis so the ai can reasonably act on that context. It’s such a new way of doing things it’s probably best to hard cut development of the previous way to do it which was seemingly hard coded triggers->actions which always failed badly if you wanted to add context eg. “open house blinds when I pick up the phone in the morning or when the alarm goes off, whichever comes first” would never work with the old voice assistants. It might just work with the new ai systems but it’ll be a completely different system, not even a rewrite at that point.
- Obscurity4340 2y ago
  AIPIS
hawski 2y ago
After Apple announcement they should name it Amazon Intelligence.
- brookst 2y ago
  Pity Google, Microsoft, Meta didn't have the foresight to name their companies in preparation for the AI boom. Adobe, Autodesk, Alibaba, and AirBnB are looking pretty smart. I suppose this might explain the Google -> Alphabet thing but they haven't really embraced the new corporate name enough for "Alphabet Intelligence" to make any sense.

darby_nine 2y ago

I will invest a lot of money in the first voice system that offers serious text editing so i can correct mistakes without repeating everything.

sambull 2y ago
I can't even do that with other humans - or they can't do that with me, or some combination of that.
MH15 2y ago
There was something on Show HN that did this with some promise recently, can't find it now
- pneumic 2y ago
  Aqua Voice: https://withaqua.com/ https://withaqua.com/
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
Yeah I'm impressed with how well it does a straight shot paragraph but I can't use it comprehensively. It's the little things that make it unworkable, like moving the cursor and selection to do rapid nonlinear edits, getting it to use your personal capitalization style, and I'd imagine it's a nightmare trying to write code with voice dictation, with how nonlinear and dependent on symbols and spacing it is.
- webappguy 2y ago
  GPT voice is almost exactly always what I want, I think using whisper, and yet every app and both OS devices android and iOS can’t even transcribe a single sentence correct without errors. Pathetic really.
RheingoldRiver 2y ago
i want talon voice for android
2y ago

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago

I worked on a research team in Alexa. Almost all projects were focused on short term delivery, non immediate need innovation was highly discouraged. Most models were just direct imports of open source models created by Meta/Google. Extremely short delivery timelines for incremental improvement. Alexa employees were often highly political tenured Amazon employees. Minimal room for growth as they sucked oxygen out of the room. The Amazon philosophy of constant execution is at odds with large leap technical innovation. It works very well for ops heavy AWS orgs, and supply chain related optimization problems. The company has a cultural problem Regardless of the above, ChatGPT made almost all NLP technologies across all companies obsolete.

criddell 2y ago
By the way, oxygen is a colorless, odorless gas with an atomic number of eight. If you would like to know more about elements just say "Alexa, tell me about the periodic table of elements".
- esafak 2y ago
  You sound like Clippy. "It looks like you're writing about oxygen! Would you like to know its chemical properties?"
- djeastm 2y ago
  Alexa's "by the ways" will be its downfall. What kind of assistant says "by the way" apropos of nothing? An annoying one. It's just a thinly disguised ad that was never asked for.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Oxygen gas is molecular not atomic - at least on this planet.
  - criddell 2y ago
    Your order of "Boost Oxygen Pocket Size Natural Aroma 3 Liter Portable Oxygen Canister, Respiratory Support for Aerobic Recovery, Altitude, Performance and Health" is $23.91 and will be delivered tomorrow. To check the status of your order, use the Alexa app.

empath75 2y ago

The problem with all the original iterations on these assistants is that they fail so often that people stop using them for anything except for the few things that they can do reliably which for most people is basically setting timers, playing music and turning the lights off and on. They're annoying to use, because the interface sort of implies affordances (like, you know, just talking to it like a person) that aren't actually available, and really it's just a menu tree that's barely more sophisticated than a customer support call tree.

ghaff 2y ago
Right. You develop a small number of simple, useful, common tasks and you pretty much just stick to those.
ultrarunner 2y ago
In a situation with such a low margin of value for the user, there's an even finer point on reducing friction. I know Alexa stopped being used in my household shortly after the "by the way…" addendums were introduced. This seemed to be in recognition of the trend of reduction to memorized phrases, but it was a bad approach. If the other comments are true, and incremental progress was more rewarded, it stands to reason that such a major problem with the service was under appreciated. Had it been recognized as the dead-end of the product, maybe more sophisticated models would have been pursued.
tssva 2y ago
My guess is that there is going to be all this investment and research poured into AI voice assistants and in the end the result is going to be the same.
- danielbln 2y ago
  What makes you guess that?
  - tssva 2y ago
    Because to date I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear to be a solution in search of a problem.

keeptrying 2y ago

At Amazon you get paid when you create whole new businesses which you used to pitch to Bezos. Incremental improvement was rewarded through the regular stock and pay process. Thus no one cared enough to quickly switch to LLMs. Suoer interesting how org design - even when brillaint can be severely lacking.

orwin 2y ago
And I think they're better for it. We use both azure ans AWS at my current org. We recently had an internal 'hackathon' to try Llms in both orgs (Claude for AWS, ChatGPT4 for Azure) on our knowledge bases. Clearly, we couldn't differentiate them on response quality, not in 3 days, but on how easy and integrable the LLM was, AWS was superior, even for our mostly Azure teams, weirdly.
laidoffamazon 2y ago
I don't know if that's really true - I've heard people who spin up successful teams can get bonuses (which basically don't exist at Amazon) for doing so. In that sense, incremental improvement isn't really rewarded at all - there's very little to no pay-for-performance as a concept at Amazon.
- malfist 2y ago
  We're one of the few companies that count stock growth against you during comp reviews.
  - keeptrying 2y ago
    LOL - seriously? Nice. In NYC they do this all the time. They'd also nitpick the hell out of your work. You'd feel like a complete loser after your review. Pretty hilarious when thinking back about it.
    - malfist 2y ago
      Yeah, we do yearly comp reviews not with stock grant numbers, but with total comp targets. So if you do mediocre one year and get a mediocre grant, then kick it into high gear next year, but the stock grew in the meantime, you're told "tough luck" and not rewarded for the extra effort. Or at least stock growth is deducted from your effort reward. It's absolutely insane, but Amazon is the easiest faang to get into

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

The problem with Alexa isn’t technology or product design. It’s the organizational issues. It was a bloated team with over 10000 people. After a decade of investment, they had no real business model. They may have had decent engineers and scientists, but lots of managers and executives got promoted to very high levels despite showing zero results, mostly based on the size of their teams. Those empire builders then moved around the company and industry, leaving behind a wasteland.

esafak 2y ago
This is an industry-wide problem. The solution is not to overhire and crack down on these empire bulders, but this means fewer FAANG jobs. Engineers have to pick their poison.

zhyder 2y ago

I think we overstate how useful such a system is. Visual UIs with buttons are so predictable and efficient to use, so anytime you can reach for a screen and hand-operated-input for anything complex, you will. I've stopped using home devices like the Echo (coz of privacy concerns, esp with hotword mistriggers): now use voice only when driving the car. Maybe multimodal LLMs like GPT-4o will spawn new useful use-cases, but I think they're unlikely to be for the same use-cases Alexa the product+brand is known for.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Exactly - Amazon wasn't the only company gutting their conversational UI teams because they couldn't figure out how to make money with them. My guess is 99% of conversational UIs are some combination of: 1. Set my alarm/timer. 2. "What's the weather?" 3. "Turn on/off my lights" for those with connected lights. etc. We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days.
- wenc 2y ago
  > We've had voice calling for over a century, yet it feels like the majority of us prefer to text most of the time these days. It depends what culture you’re from. Many cultures around the world prefer voice. If you live in a fair large city just look around for folks on the phone. There are still many people who need a voice plan.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    It also depends greatly on the conversation you plan to have. If I'm hitting up my wife to see what she wants for dinner, that's perfect as a text - it's brief and benefits from being asynchronous. But if I want to talk about something time sensitive (perhaps I'm at the restaurant already so I need an answer now, or maybe an emergency has happened) I call. I don't think people prefer to use text most of the time so much as they use the most appropriate medium for the discussion.

karaterobot 2y ago

> Amid this news, a former Alexa colleague messaged me: “You’d think voice assistants would have been our forte at Alexa.” I assume the goal of Alexa was never to be the top conversational system on the planet, it was to sell more stuff on Amazon. Apple's approach to making a friendly and helpful chat assistant helps keep people inside their ecosystem, but it's not clear how any skill beyond "Alexa, buy more soap" was going to contribute meaningfully to Alexa's success as a product from Amazon's perspective. I saw the part about them having a "how good at conversation is it" metric, but that cannot be the metric that leadership actually cared about, it was always going to be "how much stuff did we sell off Alexa". In other words, Amazon did not ever appear to be in the race to make the best voice assistant, and I'm not sure why they would want to be.

PaulHoule 2y ago
Amazon could be at the late Sears and Robucks phase already where it cares more about people subscribing to Prime than it does selling things. It’s painful to see them give up a good brand just as the moment when a change in technology could have given them wheels…
- SavageBeast 2y ago
  AMZN execs are watching AAPL stock go bonkers today on yesterdays AI announcement. APPLE IS DOING AI AND WE ALL NEED NEW PHONES TO USE IT! I expect a similar thing to happen when AMZN announces some AI consumer product. Never mind they were in a Prime (ahahah - get it - "PRIME") position to be the first mover here. An opportunity good and truly squandered.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Is Alexa really that primed to be useful? For home devices, maybe. For mobile? The Goog's seems like it would be better primed with its Android devices. What I saw from Apple this week shows me that they've been much more focused on making the assistant useful for anything/everything someone could do on their devices. I have not see that kind of focus from anyone else.

throwinga10101 2y ago

The infra part particularly resonated with me. Leadership caring about high level metrics deprioritize "in-the-weeds" dev experience. At <redacted applied ML place>, I was working on data infra, but pressure from above made it impossible to have time to focus and instead focused on short-term deliverables. It was hard to convince others to adjust their priorities for "the greater good". The only way to make things better (in my mind) was to use my own time to improve the infra, and because the metrics don't track these infra improvements I don't get rewarded so I just became burned out. Part of me think this is the reason why you want bloat in orgs, so that motivated people with enough redundancy will actually feel comfortable chasing longer term incentives.

TheGRS 2y ago

Good read and really just highlights the complexity and tension involved with huge corporate organizations. I would not have ever guessed that Alexa alone would have so many teams and engineers involved, because from the outside it seems like the only iterations were on the physical models. The voice assistant didn't seem to change in any meaningful way for a very long time. It even seems like Amazon employs some form of internal start-up model, but that still struggles because of the internal politics. Maybe when it comes to individual products, its best to keep the teams small and nimble.

neilv 2y ago

The first paragraph of the first section of reasons given is: > Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with. I really don't want this to be a message companies are hearing right now -- that being conscientious about customer data is a lethal barrier to progress, in the "AI" gold rush. Also, without knowing anything about the organization, I'd expect it to probably have a high level of dysfunction, being at a company known for being excessively metrics-driven from the top, and for ruthless stack-ranking and related HR practices... trying to organize a large coherent cutting-edge R&D effort against that cultural backdrop. Like suggested by this bit elsewhere in the section: > And most importantly, there was no immediate story for the team’s PM to make a promotion case through fixing this issue other than “it’s scientifically the right thing to do and could lead to better models for some other team.” No incentive meant no action taken.

johndhi 2y ago
You may not want privacy guard rails to be contrary to progress in AI but I'm afraid they may be.
pessimizer 2y ago
> I really don't want this to be a message companies are hearing right now They won't be hearing it, they'll be (and are) sending it. "AI would be better for you if it had fewer guardrails around your privacy. Trust us."
wepple 2y ago
Whilst there may be some inefficient bureaucracy in large orgs, I’m tempted to offer the following proposition: Companies that are absolutely at the forefront of AI, must be by definition, doing terrible things wrt privacy & security.

deleted 2y ago

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apeace 2y ago

I've always thought it was Apple who dropped the ball with Siri. When Siri came out in 2011 -- two years before Alexa -- all my coworkers and I had iPhones. I remember sitting in my office as people yelled at Siri all day trying to get her to be useful. "Hey Siri, what's the weather tomorrow? No... No SIRI, WHAT'S -- THE -- WEATHER -- TOMORROW!" Even though it sucked, it seemed every hardcore Apple user was ready to jump onboard. Who cares if I'm in a crowded office with people trying to get work done while I spend 10x longer to perform a function in the noisiest possible way? I'm using this thing!! The voice recognition has improved since then. But the functionality still sucks. When I'm in private, there are a couple commands I'll use. - "Hey Siri, call xyz" where xyz is someone in my contact list I have tested with Siri and is known to work. Not recommended to try without testing first. - While cooking, "Hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes." Works great. - While driving and navigating: "Hey Siri, take me to the nearest gas station." That one is pretty good, except the actual maps are not smart enough so sometimes you'll be turned around in the opposite direction you were going, since technically that's where the nearest gas station is. I never understood why they couldn't make this tool better, even before LLMs and without any AI at all. Just hard-code a bunch of phrases, and ways to translate those phrases into some action. "Hey Siri, how close is my UPS delivery?" "Hey Siri, where can I get the best price on xyz cat food?" "Hey Siri, what's my bank balance?" "Hey Siri, how much is a Lyft to xyz?" I bet if they had a single developer working on adding Siri commands full-time, they could announce something like 20-50 new Siri functions at every WWDC. But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks. They could've dominated the "conversational system" market 13 years ago.

noahtallen 2y ago
> But it seems the goal now is just "Make it an LLM," instead of focusing on recognizing the task that the user wants to do, and connecting it to APIs that can do those tasks. I almost completely agreed with you, but this is not true! Apple is trying to solve the task & API problem with “task intents”, on which they go into more detail outside of the keynote: https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE https://youtu.be/Lb89T7ybCBE The new Siri models are trained on a large number of schemas. Apps can implement those schemas to say “I provide this action” (aka, the user intends to do this action). Siri can use the more advanced NLP that comes with GenAI to match what you say to a schema, and send that to an app. These app intents are also available to spotlight and shortcuts, making them more powerful than just being Siri actions

laidoffamazon 2y ago

> Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access. Definitely a crucial practice, but one consequence was that the internal infrastructure for developers was agonizingly painful to work with. I was in Alexa and this rings painfully true. So many workarounds and endless classification escalations. The customer-data certified compute environments were extremely painful to use (though later improved but still annoying) and getting data in or out, even for anodyne reasons, was nigh impossible. For a long period, even getting access to this system (called Hoverboard) took months. During my internship I spent about half of it waiting for access to be granted and had to spend a big chunk of it testing out my training system on CPU...not fun.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
I get the feeling that you weren't intending to say so many kind things about the access control practices for Alexa data. Sounds like good work.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago
  This was a common complaint in Alexa and one interesting bit of insider information I found out from people that either left for Google Assistant or came from there is that their tools did not have this level of pain around data security. As a result I'm guessing there's a middle ground between customer data security and making it impossible to work with - either that, or Google just didn't care.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    > either that, or Google just didn't care Let's just say I get the impression Google doesn't care. Really, that access control for Alexa data ought to be the standard.
    - mh- 2y ago
      "So painful it contributes to the downfall of your product" need not be the standard. There is a middle ground that takes customer data seriously.

rco8786 2y ago

3 nights ago at about 1am my Alexa started blasting heavy metal music at 1am. I unplugged it and am not too sure about plugging it back in.

thiagoeh 2y ago
Someone, maybe a family member, has an Spotify account connected to Alexa, and chose your Echo device as output
- mh- 2y ago
  I accidentally did this to a vacation home we stayed in once, like weeks after we checked out. It took me a solid minute to piece together 'where the music was going'. I felt so bad; hopefully the house was vacant.
dpkirchner 2y ago
About a month or two ago Alexa started telling us it didn't understand "stop" while it played the audio we didn't ask for (Alexa's voice recognition is really poor). I had to unplug it. I probably could have used the app to stop it but I didn't think about that at the time.

pjs_ 2y ago

I remember talking to Alexa about eight years ago. I was a bit skeptical and asked, "what color is a red car?". I was seriously impressed that it knew that a red car is red.

ryandrake 2y ago

IMO voice assistants keep underwhelming because customers don't want to learn their language--we want them to understand our language. It's frustrating to have to know the exact magic spell wording to get an assistant to do something. They need to be like "Computer" in Star Trek TNG or they're dead in the water. 80% of the way there still isn't good enough--I'd rather just use a mouse and keyboard than endure an awkward trial-and-error with an "assistant" that is supposed to be smart.

johnyzee 2y ago
If only there was a technology that understood unstructured natural language really well.
pomian 2y ago
So you pick up the mouse, and talk into it? .... Seriously though, I don't understand why the state of voice interaction is so poor. In the 90's we had voice commands (early dragon ?) available to tell our computer what to do. It was limited, but it worked extremely well, even in busy environments. I remember my Thinkpad 486dx2(?), at a party - opening software and choosing music to play from a list, and controlling volume, all by voice. Thinking to ourselves, imagine what this will be like when we have a stronger, faster computer, in five years.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  It's truly gone nowhere. Still, the most advanced thing you can reliably get it to do is "Set a timer for 10 minutes." I wonder if these "SmartAssistant" programmers ever actually had a human personal assistant. For most of what you need them to do, you don't even ask them to do it, they just know you and do it. An actually good computerized SmartAssistant would know that it's been a year, so it's time to book my physical with my doctor. It would have contacted the doctor's office for me, checked my calendar, scheduled the appointment, and then proactively reminded me a few days in advance. I shouldn't have to say "Hey, Assistant: Please schedule a physical for Doctor X at Clinic Y on July 1 of this year." (by the way SmartAssistants can't even currently do that). The voice interaction should only be for exceptional cases: "Hey, Assistant: My trip to the Paris office needs to be delayed by one week." The assistant should then go and re-book flights, hotels, and rental cars, and then when finished, merely say "Done." Until they can do this, tech companies might as well stop bothering releasing incremental crap products that can barely understand a task I'd expect a 4 year-old to be able to do.

jackconsidine 2y ago

> Alexa put a huge emphasis on protecting customer data with guardrails in place to prevent leakage and access For what it’s worth we were working on a conversational health app and this why we picked Alexa over alternatives (if you’re big enough to get on GPT enterprise you can probably implement HIPAA safeguards, but we never got replies)

markx2 2y ago

I bought into Alexa/Echo because at the time my late wife could not work remote controls (Multiple Sclerosis). She only had her voice. It was great for her to play different radio stations, playlists, news. It did the job. I did try linking it to a TV but that was terrible. Slow, janky, unreliable. Since she died - Dec 2018 - "Alexa play LBC" "Alexa stop" Oh, if you do have an Alexa device "Alexa, what noise does a hamster make?"

djeastm 2y ago
> Oh, if you do have an Alexa device "Alexa, what noise does a hamster make?" I just did this and it said "Here's a hippopotamus' grunt" So that's how it's going for Alexa in my house
- brevitea 2y ago
  AGI Alexa is truly a work of innovation. It gaslights you into thinking you wanted hippopotamus.

nextworddev 2y ago

Hmm, I'm an early Alexa PM (2016) that left Alexa before the OP joined it (2019). Alexa's main failure was mainly that the tech wasn't ready - it was basically a ASR + NLU + rule engine. If we had 2023 LLM tech, then we may have "won" the Assistants market. Yes, organizational bloat and politics was a problem but OP was hired as a result of the mass hiring spree, so he was a beneficiary of that.

pbhjpbhj 2y ago
They don't seem to have modded Alexa to keep pace with accessibility of the pubic to LLMs though? Presumably they'd have just let that market lead slide in the same way.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  They are actually planning to do that - it's just a software update - though they are doing that with Amazon Titan model, which might be kind of behind.. Also they are trying to sell as a subscription which is interesting since Siri is free.
krisroadruck 2y ago
Honestly I think the only reason you guys shipped as many units as you did was blocking other voice assistants from interacting with Audible. I've had an Alexa/Echo since the early beta and it has literally always been worse than other options like google home. It's gotten progressively worse over time as well. Not just comparatively but vs it's own experience several years ago.
- nextworddev 2y ago
  Yep, can confirm that it was better in 2017 than 2021. Mainly because when the org chart grows, more "rules" are added to the rules engine, where each rule is managed by another service... which all adds to end to end user perceived latency, etc... that's why rule engines don't work.
- ratg13 2y ago

drcongo 2y ago

We've had weeks and weeks of "Apple have dropped the ball over AI" so now it's Alexa's turn I guess.

jarjoura 2y ago

I had a manager who came from Amazon and shared some of the horror stories from their time on Alexa. It seemed like a lot of senior folks were only using it for career advancement because it was where all the R&D money was flowing into. So a bunch of hard working folks building things, leadership playing political games with each other, and an org that had no idea what problems they were actually trying to solve. It definitely captured the market, but without a top down vision, the whole thing was just a huge letdown.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

suyash 2y ago

Siri dropped the ball even before Alexa, it had the golden opportunity to become ChatGPT about 10 years ago.

mrkramer 2y ago

I never used smart speakers but do they allow third party apps and if they do how developed is the ecosystem? I see so many use cases as of voice commanded apps, voice games etc.

potatolicious 2y ago

One thing really worth addressing from the post that I don't think author accepted, and I see this a lot with engineers: > "That did introduce tension for our team because we were supposed to be taking experimental bets for the platform’s future. These bets couldn’t be baked into product without hacks or shortcuts in the typical quarter as was the expectation." If I can pump one learning into engineers' and PMs' heads it's this: intermediate deliverables are not optional no matter how cutting-edge your team is. You will never succeed if your pitch to leadership is "give us a budget for the next N years and expect no shippable products until the end of N years". Even if you get approved somehow at the beginning, there's a 99.5% chance your team/project will be killed before you get to N years. Again, once again for the audience in the back: there is no such thing as a multi-year project without convincing, meaningful intermediate deliverables. To clarify, that doesn't mean "don't have multi-year roadmaps", it means "your multi-year roadmaps must deliver wins at a consistent cadence". Understanding this will carry you a lot further in the industry. As a fairly cutting-edge R&D team part of your job is to figure out what slice of this is shippable (and worth shipping). If you're coming up empty you are not ready to pitch this to execs.

mlinhares 2y ago
As an engineer it's much easier to "polish" (or work on useless stuff) than to deliver real products. I see that all the time, specially with "platform" teams that have no external product requirements. They waste a lot of time trying to figure out the most amazing way to deliver something instead of delivering something in a timely fashion. If you push in any way they start to scream "tech debt" and everyone just accepts it. I've been through a migration mandated by an infrastructure team where where were 0 improvements for the teams that used the platform, all benefits were for the platform team only, and this was green-lighted and forced upon everyone without a second thought. It's unbelievable.
- golergka 2y ago
  > If you push in any way they start to scream "tech debt" and everyone just accepts it. Just as real-life debt, building a company without it is unrealistic and unwise. You just have to manage it.

oidar 2y ago

They haven't lost yet. Alexa is still the top conversational system appliance for most households right now. A smart speaker is almost an essential device among my group of friends. Siri on HomePod is still subpar for basic kitchen tasks like setting timers, adding items to shopping lists, and creating reminders. I don't even think Google has a current device that competes in this space. I really want HomePod to be better at household tasks such as managing shopping lists, timers, and reminders, but it's not there yet. As soon as the HomePod can replace my Alexa devices, I'll be all in. I have a HomePod right next to every Alexa device in my house, and I'm just waiting for Apple to turn on their "Apple intelligence."

sporedro 2y ago
Does siri/homepod not just directly connect to your iPhones calander/notes/reminders? I honestly ask this because I never tried though… I use my homepod as a glorified timer, alarm clock, and speaker. I’m just sitting here in the apple ecosystem hoping one day things will actually feel connected.
- oidar 2y ago
  It doesn't "directly" connect - it changes things on iCloud - it just doesn't work well. It takes more than a few seconds for it to add things to reminders. It has to verify your voice to add things to reminders - god forbid if you are sharing a shopping list with another person in your household. That nearly doubles the time it takes to add something to a shopping list. With Alexa, adding things to a shopping list is instant, it doesn't verify if you are authorized to add things to the shopping list, Alexa just adds them.
datpiff 2y ago
> A smart speaker is almost an essential device among my group of friends. You live in a bubble
GJim 2y ago
> A smart speaker Can we give these things their real name: Smart Microphones Alexa = Amazons microphone.

_yb2s 2y ago

I don’t know if my voice is weird or what, but these things- alexa, siri, etc. don’t work for me at all, they can’t understand anything I say unless I repeat it slowly half dozen times, yet regular people understand me just fine.

brookst 2y ago
My s/o talks weird to devices... she pitches her voice oddly and it's hard for even me to understand her. Devices do not understand. Maybe record yourself or ask someone to listen to you talking to a device and see if you're unconsciously changing delivery?
jedberg 2y ago
Voice assistants are much better with lower voices than higher ones (especially Alexa). One tip is to deepen your voice, that might help.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  My voice is extremely, unusually deep. I actually suspect that is the problem itself, it is deep enough that it doesn’t even register as speech to these systems.

stderrout 2y ago

Always surprised how little Alexa changed over the years from initial version. Both on software and hardware there could have been so much possibilities and learning from years of user feedback. Appstore and skills deserted from years of broken to unusable functionality. Hardware remain stuck to initial speaker version where there was possibility to replace so many dedicated boxes around house each connected to power supply providing singular function - Access Point, routers, smart device gateway, streaming device, NAS for backup or private cloud, etc Last one failure for entire BigTech where desire to maintain control prevented any form of standardization or interoperability to the point where hobbyist open source solutions are now leading on how to do smart home right way and not abandon user base in 6 months after release.

creeble 2y ago

I'm not sure I would have a lot of use for voice-controlled conversational AI, as odd as that may sound. Like most people, I use Alexa for _commands_: home automation, timers, tell me the weather, ask a specific question looking for a specific answer, play this music. That's not "conversational", and I don't want it to be. I use generative AI for other things, mostly writing code for me, or telling me about code problems in general. It's rare that I want output that I'm _not_ going to copy/paste somewhere. Alexa isn't a failure, it just didn't sell more stuff for Amazon. And, well, it costs an awful lot for them to keep running. So maybe it is.

aaron695 2y ago

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barumrho 2y ago

Alexa is not on a phone or PC. It could only be so useful being available only at home.

jedberg 2y ago
Sure it is. There are Alexa phone apps that do full Alexa. Up until about a year ago you could also do it on the computer but they took it down. https://alexa.amazon.com/ https://alexa.amazon.com/
- brevitea 2y ago
  ... Because it was a huge privacy risk.

throwaway_j12 2y ago

I have some personal insight on this one. My opinion is that data access restrictions did not cause Alexa to fail. If you think about it, it wasn't lack of machine learning that contributed to its issues. Alexa attempted to solve the long tail of customer requests with the equivalent of spaghetti "if statements" - rule engines. This was never going to scale. Alexa did not have a generic enough approach to cover the long tail of customer requests (e.g. AGI). With rule engines, there was always a tension between latency and functionality. Alexa solved this with bureaucracy - monitor latency, monitor customer request types, and make business decisions about how to evolve the rule engines. But it was never fundamentally able to scale out of the most basic requests or solve chicken-egg problems (customers don't ask complicated requests because Alexa isn't capable, so they don't show up as large enough use cases to optimize for). Top use cases remained playing music and setting timers. A more fundamental issue was monetizing. Early on Bezos liked the idea of having a small, essentially free, device that would reduce the friction to buying things. If you remember the "easy buttons" Amazon floated there were many ideas like this. In practice, building a robust voice assistant that could purchase items proved challenging for a myriad of reasons. So the business looked for other ways to monetize. Advertising kept coming up but there was rank and file pushback to this because it could break customer expectations and/or privacy concerns. Alexa considered pivoting into various B2B ventures (hospitality, healthcare, business) and other customer scenarios (smarthome, automotive) but took half-measures into each of them rather than committing to an opportunity. It felt like a solution looking for a problem. Alexa would have (could still?) benefit from modern LLM technology. However to be truly useful it would need to do more than chat. It would need some layer to take actions. This would all have to be carefully considered and designed so that it scales - so that it isn't a bureaucracy trying to measure what people are wanting to do and "if statement"ing a rules engine to enable it. OpenAI and others appear to be poised with the machine learning expertise to do this. Finally, it's my opinion that Alexa's machine learning scientists were very good, however as a population they did not appear to me to really care about the business/product use case. Many of them worked on research for publication on problems like distance estimation, etc. The expertise was very heavy on voice transcription and audio processing. However there was less expertise in "reasoning". This I hypothesize contributed to the approach of iterated rules engines, with the science community focused primarily with improving transcription accuracy by small numbers of basis points.

booleandilemma 2y ago

I threw my Alexa in the garbage after I asked it to turn off my house lights and it tried to recommend something (a schedule or something) for what must have been the third time.

tlogan 2y ago

I set up our home with smart shades, lights, iAqua, Somfy, etc., but my family and me now just use the remotes due to frustration with Amazon Alexa. I was always under impression that Amazon uploads all our data because I notice data transfers whenever I use voice commands, which makes me doubt their privacy claims. It seems like Alexa was designed more to learn from us rather than to genuinely assist us. Its primary goal appears to be gathering data rather than helping users.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
> I was always under impression that Amazon uploads all our data because I notice data transfers whenever I use voice commands... As I recall, they said as much. The device uploads a clip of the audio to get processed by the back end, does it not?

sokoloff 2y ago

Come home to find a yellow ring on the Echo. "Alexa, tell me my messages." "You don't have any messages. You have one notification; would you like me to read it?" <silently> "Jesus H Christ, what do you think?!" <aloud> "Yes"

pciexpgpu 2y ago

You don’t need to bring a rocket launcher to a banana fight. Most of the queries are gonna involve setting an alarm or turn on/off a thing. They didn’t drop the ball- they were very customer savvy and really knew what they were getting into.

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