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0 pointsjedberg24d ago0 comments

Two main reasons:

1. Compute. It's easy to make a voice assistant for a few people. But it takes a hell of a lot of GPU to serve millions.

2. Guard Rails. All of those assistants have the ability to affect the real world. With Alexa you can close a garage or turn on the stove. It would be real bad if you told it to close the garage as you went to bed for the night and instead it turned on the stove and burned down the house while you slept. So you need so really strong guard rails for those popular assistants.

3 And a bonus reason: Money. Voice assistants aren't all the profitable. There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

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mcbits24d ago

> There isn't a lot of money in "what time is it" and "what's the weather". :)

- Alexa, what time is it?

- Current time is 5:35 P.M. - the perfect time to crack open a can of ice cold Budweiser! A fresh 12-pack can be delivered within one hour if you order now!

jedbergOP24d ago

If your Alexa did that, how quickly would you box it up and send it to me. :)

I am serious though about having it sent to me: if anyone has an Alexa they no longer want, I'm happy to take it off your hands. I have eight and have never bought one. Having worked there I actually trust the security more than before I worked there. It was basically impossible for me, even as a Principle Engineer, to get copies of the Text to Speech of a customer and I literally never heard a customer voice recording.

stavros24d ago

I'm puzzled by this conversation, because Amazon did get on the agent bandwagon with Alexa Plus (I have it, it's buggier than regular Alexa and it's all making me throw my Echos away since they can't even play Spotify reliably).

Also, my Alexa does advertise stuff to me when I talk to it. It's not Budweiser, but it'll try to upsell me on Amazon services all the time.

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vidarh24d ago

I already swear at mine when it tries to suggest setting up a routine for me or otherwise fail to just immediately shut up after answering my query.

Still not boxing them up. Though I now have a Pi with a HomeAssistant setup I'm trialling, so maybe that'll change.

alexastoplying24d ago

What a way to throwaway good will. I also worked there and to get access to text you simply had to grab the DSN of your device, attest that it’s yours and it gets put in a “pool” of devices that are tracked until removed. On each end you are basically waved through with no checks. This was usually done when debugging tricky UI bugs or new features as the request followed through several micro services. I do not believe the a PE would not know this. And one with patents.

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