
A year and a half with Alexa - raimundjoss
https://medium.com/@sawaba/a-year-and-a-half-with-alexa-amazon-echo-9d04e0e2041b#.7m710asve
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esthermun
The key to get _magic_ from Alexa long term will be get unsupervised learning
working on it, and then shared back across the entire Alexa user base. The
Brazilian real to USD is a great example. If by the 3rd try it gets the right
answer, it should notate that and equate the first 2 questions as similar
ones. I am surprised it couldn't catch the first 2. The word2vec output should
be fairly similar.

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VLM
"In fact, I’ve had to avoid turning into ‘that guy’. I encourage my family to
use Alexa, but then I started admonishing them for not recalling the precise
sequence of words that unlocked the dusty tomb filled with knowledge of
exchange rates and types of currency."

Its interesting that in the last 30 years we've gone from unworkable text
adventure interfaces to the same unworkable interface in verbal form instead
of typed/read text. A lot of his story reads as a parody of an Infocom game
but spoken instead of typed.

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jmcdonald-ut
I'll add my two cents on top of the author's. I have both the Amazon Echo and
the Amazon Tap. This article was spot on. I'm perhaps less forgiving than the
author. If Alexa can't answer a question on the first try I'll just give up.
When Alexa does answer a question or a request she usually does a phenomenal
job and it's just really cool. It really feels futuristic.

Echo is cool, it can be pretty useful, but it hasn't realized its full
potential yet.

I bought the Tap as a portable speaker to take with me on bike rides with
friends. Well I took it out the other day and the minute it lost WiFi
connection it just wouldn't work. I'm sure this was a problem on my end, but I
had already paired the devices and I wasn't going to spend time fiddling with
it while I was out with friends.

EDIT: Also it doesn't happen too often but Alexa has definitely accidentally
triggered. It even woke me up at 2 AM after the power went out temporarily to
tell me that it had no WiFi.

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wccrawford
We've only had our Echo a couple weeks, but we've already found that
characters named Alexa in TV shows are a problem, and that at least once it
has responded to something that wasn't "Alexa" from the TV. So yeah, it
definitely has false positives.

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spdustin
I don't know what the hell is going on at the author's house, but I have both
an Xbox One (with active Kinect) and an Amazon Echo in the living room, along
with two kids, and I can count on one fist how many times either of them have
activated accidentally. That is to say, zero.

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uslic001
I occasionally have it activate accidentally. Maybe once a week on average.
Usually when the TV is on or when my wife and I are talking. For how much the
TV is on in the room where she is set up this in not too bad.

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giovannibajo1
Consider that Google and Apple get those questions right at the first time; so
it's not that we need to wait for science from the future to have a "working"
digital assistant in the home; we just need one from one of those two company.
And if that still paired with my Amazon account for the shopping pat, it'd be
great :)

