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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: 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.)