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Amazon's range of smart speakers and their artificial intelligence assistant Alexa have proved to be a huge sales hit.
"We have thousands of engineers inside Amazon adding to [its] capability every day and then another tens of thousands of developers adding to the skills," he tells the BBC.
"The thing I am sure of is that this time next year she will be significantly more intelligent than she is now, and that sometime in the future we will hit our goal of reinventing the Star Trek computer."
It's a lofty goal, especially since any attempt to go beyond commanding a weather update or asking for the lights to be switched on is currently asking for trouble.
Try to have anything close to a normal conversation with Alexa and it tells you it doesn't understand or cannot help.
But though it may not always be obvious, the firm says rapid progress is being made.
Which will prevail, Alexa, Cortana, or Siri?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Sunday July 30 2017, @02:59PM (12 children)
That's correct. "AI", it is not.
It's a big increment, though. The ability to correctly translate what is said is extremely good. What's missing is the next step: understanding general human speech so that further progress on the request can be made. Alexa, thus far, has demonstrated very close to nothing along these lines. It is, just as you say, dependent upon looking up the translated speech among canned strings provided by developers. That will have to change before this tech moves much further along.
No, really, it doesn't. I (and many others) have carefully watched the network traffic from the device. Until it hears (or thinks it hears) the trigger word (presently, user's preset choice of Alexa, Computer, Echo, or Amazon), it doesn't send along what it hears. It does connect to check for updates to its software, and so the potential is there for this to change without warning, but so far, it hasn't. Frankly, I think it unlikely, as that would result in serious negative publicity for Amazon. As opposed to the low-level rumor-mongering that goes on now.
On the other hand, the cellphone most of us carry can both hear what you say and send it along to both the network and the phone company; so it's a little late to worry about hardware capabilities. It's all about what the device actually does, not what the paranoid think it might be doing.
As for the usability at present, there are things the Echo does well, and things it doesn't. At $50 a pop for the Echo dot, given what it can do now, I find it well worth the candle. We use various Echo models around the home to control lights and similar non-critical household devices, play music, tell us the temperature / weather, time, set alarms, timers and reminders, and order / re-order things from Amazon. All of these things it does very well, and in doing so is both hugely convenient and frankly, fun. Our home is a large open plan, and the light switches can be fifty feet away. That's the kind of thing that can make usability of devices like these very high.
The most important step will be when these devices can recognize speech locally. Then a WAN connection won't be required for many useful operations; and that's when worries about security will settle down.
Devices like Mycroft [mycroft.ai] coming from the open source community will keep the pressure on the commercial devices like the Echo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:17PM (3 children)
The thing I worry about is the ability of Amazon to perform a software change on the device. You say that you "carefully watched" the network traffic and found that data was only transmitted when a trigger word occurred. That may be true right now, on your particular device. However, at any time, Amazon can perform a very quick and very simple software update on your device which could either change/add the trigger word(s) or simply have the device send all audio data through. I'm sure the TOS grants them permission to do so. When Bezos - or any other employee of Amazon - publicly state that the device doesn't or won't spy on you, it is merely a fluff statement: the TOS still says they can.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:28PM (2 children)
Yes, I specifically called out that possibility. I also pointed out that the cellphones many of us carry can also be compromised in the same manner (except more thoroughly, as they not only have voice acquisition, but also multiple cameras, email account access, location tracking, and so on.)
There are many potential threats. I choose to worry about the ones that are actually threats now. The Echo isn't.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:37PM (1 child)
So you surround yourself with a bunch of proprietary technology that doesn't respect your freedoms and become dependent upon it to some degree, and then just wait until you're abused (abuse besides denying you your software freedoms, which is a form of abuse in and of itself) before maybe doing something about it? That seems very short-sighted. Before you know it, you'll have created a proprietary fortress that could turn against you at any moment in ways that are difficult to spot.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday July 31 2017, @05:04AM
I don't subscribe to this viewpoint at all. Actually, I think it's kind of hilarious.
My "software freedom" is embodied in the software I write. Which I have been doing for well over 40 years. I'm perfectly happy to write what I need, or to buy someone else's solutions if and when they're selling things I want. YMMV, and that's fine. I'm not feeling the least discommoded by Amazon's business model WRT the Echo ATM. If they change it in the future, I'll give it further consideration. Right now, it's fine.
See, this is just the kind of hyperbolic nonsense that gives me that feeling of amusement. Fortress, eh? You know how strong that "fortress" is? I reach out, pull the power cords, and throw these things in the trash. End of "fortress." And that, BTW, is what it likely to keep Amazon in line, if they aren't inclined to otherwise: if they abuse their customers, their customers can just walk away.
In any case, there's no threat, and there's no ability for anyone to force me to use the tech if it became a threat (of which there has been no actual sign, unfounded speculation such as yours notwithstanding.)
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:40PM (2 children)
You cannot dismiss this as mere paranoia, especially not at this point in time. The NSA is conducting mass surveillance on the populace and countless government agencies (besides them and including them) are looking for any and all ways to break any security anyone might have. It is foolish in the extreme to not take the future into account when selecting what technologies you choose to surround yourself with. For this reason, I do not have a cellphone, and will not have one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @03:58PM
They're talking about me behind my back, aren't they?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday July 31 2017, @04:55AM
Amazon is not the NSA, and the NSA isn't likely to be collecting information on demand out of the Echo inasmuch as it doesn't send anything along unless you use the wake word.
So yes, it's paranoia. Pure and simple.
It's worth keeping an eye on (and I do – my network is monitored and logged, I know what's going on within it, and specifically so WRT the various Echos) but until information starts flowing out of here without my say-so and explicit agreement, there's no call to disadvantage myself in the interim.
Oh, please. If the Echos get out of hand, they get unplugged and trashed. Problem solved. Same for any other such device, up to and including my cellphone. These are here to serve me, not the other way around – the very second I decide they're not doing that, they're history. You're asserting I should inconvenience myself right now because of something you think might happen in the future. That makes no actual sense. It is, in your own words, foolish. There's no present threat, and if, and it's a big if, the issue should actually arise, it is a matter of no more than a few seconds before it is 100% taken care of.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sjames on Sunday July 30 2017, @07:22PM (2 children)
That's funny you should mention it. It looks like Google has gotten the shaft again. The Google assistant on my Android phone understands my speech just fine when I take mobile data and WiFi both offline. It's at least as useful as Siri. But for some reason, nobody even gives it a thought.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday July 31 2017, @04:44AM (1 child)
That's very interesting. I wonder if Google Home can do this as well.
I don't give it a thought – have not up till now, anyway – because Google doesn't offer what the Echo does. Amazon's connection to its product and media offerings is a heck of a come-on, not to mention the large ecosystem of Echo-friendly devices.
Also - while Amazon has never directly screwed me personally, Google has. So they're not on the top of my "hey, let's try that" list.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 31 2017, @07:06AM
Google has it's drawbacks and limitations, for sure. But it does indicate where the state of the art is now.
I find it surprising the feature goes practically unmentioned in Android advertising. Especially when every other commercial was for Siri.
(Score: 1) by Virindi on Sunday July 30 2017, @10:27PM (1 child)
I was talking about the commands you send it. Which provide them a lot of useful information!
Now, you can say it is the same as using a spyware'd app, or an OS with piles of builtin "telemetry", or a search engine that does everything it can to track you, but many of us avoid those things as well.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday July 31 2017, @04:40AM
Honestly, I am utterly unconcerned about Amazon and partners knowing what songs I listen to, streams I watch, and when I turn my devices on and off, or when I ask for time and weather.
Useful, in this case, means I get better music suggestions, playlists, viewing suggestions, less spam in my product suggestions, etc. It's exactly, IMHO, what that information is both good for and should be used for.
Should it become an issue, these devices can be trashed even faster than they were invited into the LAN. But it's not an issue. At all. It is something to be aware of as a possibility, and I am. However, short of that possibility being realized – and there is zero sign of that – I'm unwilling to cut off my nose to spite my face. If folks want to not have convenience now because they think that someday in the future Amazon may go too far, that's fine too. Everyone has choices. And consequences. :)