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posted by martyb on Sunday July 30 2017, @12:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-back-'Eliza' dept.

Amazon's range of smart speakers and their artificial intelligence assistant Alexa have proved to be a huge sales hit.

But the product is still a shadow of what the man in charge - Dave Limp - and indeed their owners, hope it will become.

"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?


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  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday July 31 2017, @04:40AM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday July 31 2017, @04:40AM (#546977) Journal

    I was talking about the commands you send it. Which provide them a lot of useful information!

    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. :)

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