Comment on Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec

• JonEFive@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This is why I’m so confused by Amazon’s approach. I know they’ve already sunk millions if not billions of dollars into this, so why has the user experience not improved in the last 8 years?

  I’m not going to buy things with my voice when just getting the lights to turn off or music to play can be an infuriating endeavor. Speech recognition has stagnated.

  The third party integrations are just so clunky too. They could have made money by selling licenses to businesses in order to access the service, but again, they haven’t improved that experience at all.

  The “Alexa, let me talk to dominos.” or “Alexa, ask LG to turn off the TV” is just stupidly cumbersome. Why can’t you set up preferred providers? I don’t have to say “ask Spotify to play music” I just say “play music”, so we know it’s possible. It would be trivial to implement other preferred service providers compared to the overall scale of Alexa.

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  • theragu40@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I don’t know if you’re in IT at all, but the really crazy thing is that as half baked as Alexa stuff feels…a ton of AWS’s offerings feel the exact same way. Their marketing material is great, and I do believe their engineers are passionate and have the right intentions. But none of it feels “finished”. It all feels like an elaborate beta test. Things don’t work, documentation is out of date or just plain wrong, it’s impossible to get actual expert support from Amazon directly.

    AWS is their biggest money maker and even that is a cobbled together, confusing pile half the time. Sometimes feels like everything is a house of cards.

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