How Do We Learn to Talk to Alexa? When Will My Son Tell Me What I Have Done About Him? The Last of the LLM-powered Assistants

After all these years, just talking to Alexa remains the biggest hurdle. We had to learn how to talk to someone else instead of doing it to ourselves. If I am standing in front of the kitchen sink I have to tell my Amazon assistant to give me 2 cups of hot water.

We have not heard anything since last year’s launch of this LLM-powered assistant. Amazon even skipped its big hardware event this year, where it traditionally announces dozens of new Alexa and Alexa-compatible devices and services. It is most likely due to the reports that Amazon is far from achieving its promised new voice assistant.

Alexa, tell my son not to forget his science project; set the alarm when he leaves. Disarm the alarm then lock the door at 5PM for the plumbing professional. If I’m late for work, adjust the time in the oven to 386 degrees at 6PM.

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Amazon doesn’t give you access to personal data like your phone number, email address, or browsing history, it gives you access to what you buy and what you give it access to. People are wary of trusting it because of its privacy gaffes.

This would make a huge leap forward. generative AI can make voice assistants smarter, but that is not a silver bullet. The make sense of language problem is solved by the LLM, but they don’t have the ability to act on that language, and there are worries about an artificial intelligence hallucinating in your home.

Hearing “‘Lamp’ isn’t responding. Please check its network connection and power supply” after issuing a command is beyond frustrating. And spending hours a month configuring and troubleshooting your smart home wasn’t part of the promise. This is what a smart computer should be able to do for you.

Amazon Alexa: What do you do when you can’t do something? How do you get your skills? The case of yoga and song quizzes

There are little friction points like this all across the system. When you’ve activated a skill, you have to explicitly say “stop” or “cancel” to back out of it in order to use another one. You can’t easily do things across skills — I’d like to price-check my pizza, but Alexa won’t let me. And maybe most frustrating of all, even once you’ve enabled a skill, you still have to address it specifically. To speak with an all knowing assistant, like AmazonAlexa, and use it well is much more difficult than just learning a computer’s language.

Amazon did everything it could to make skills happen. New tools for developers were frequently rolled out, and the company paid them in Amazon Web Services credits and cash when they used their skills. There are more than 160,000 different skills that can be found on the platform, according to Amazon. That pales next to the millions of app store apps on smartphones, but it’s still a big number.

If you know the skill you’re looking for, the system is a little better. You can say “Alexa, open Nature Sounds” or “Alexa, enable Jeopardy,” and it’ll open the skill with that name. If you don’t know that the skill is called “easy yoga”, asking to start a yoga workout will not get you anywhere.

Most of the most popularAlexa skills are made by Volley, which is a company that makes easy-to-answer Q&A games. From Song Quiz to Jeopardy to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader, Volley is one of the companies that has figured out how to make skills that really work. And Max Child, Volley’s cofounder and CEO, says that getting your skill in front of people is one of the most important — and hardest — parts of the job.

He says that one of the reasons that the app stores are so successful is because Facebook ads are so good. There’s nothing like it for voice assistants, and the process from a hyper- targeted ad to an app install has been perfect over the years. The nearest equivalent is probably people asking their Alexa devices what they can do — which Child says does happen! There is no competition to in-feed ads and hours of social scrolling. “Because you don’t have that hyper-targeted marketing, you end up having to do broad marketing, and you have to build broad games.” Hence games like Jeopardy and Millionaire, which are huge brands that appeal to practically everyone.

These are not different challenges by the way. Mobile app stores have similar huge discovery problems, issues with monetization, sketchy subscription systems, and more. The solution seemed so simple, you shouldn’t and wouldn’t even need an app store. You should just be able to ask for what you want, and Alexa can go do it for you.

While the company searches for its vision, Jassy has installed a new head of the devices and services division under which Alexa falls. Panos Panay has been at the company for a year now, and Bloomberg reports the former head of Microsoft’s Surface division has “brought a focus on higher-quality design to a group adept at utilitarian gadgets.”

One tester says the ongoing hallucinations aren’t always wrong, just uncalled for, as if Alexa is trying to show off its newfound prowess. For instance, before, if you asked Alexa what halftime show Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at, it might say the 2004 Super Bowl. Now, it’s just as likely to give a long-winded addendum about the infamous wardrobe malfunction.

Bloomberg’s sources say those beta users who did get to chat have been unimpressed (I requested access several times but with no luck). They said the responses were slow, sounded stiff and weren’t useful. Apparently, the new alexa messes up smart home integrations and tries to show off. According to the reports by Bloomberg.