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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, @04:55AM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Monday July 31 2017, @04:55AM (#546983) Journal

    You cannot dismiss this as mere paranoia, especially not at this point in time. The NSA is conducting mass surveillance

    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.

    It is foolish in the extreme to not take the future into account when selecting what technologies you choose to surround yourself with.

    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.

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