Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person

Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person by lisper on Thursday December 20, 2018 @06:12PM (#18730098)

    * Find phone/computer
    * Unlock
    * Locate self in interface and navigate to application selector
    * Invoke note-taking or reminder app
    * Type in note or reminder
    * Navigate through tagging/scheduling interface
    * Commit note/reminder

I just now took a stopwatch to time how long it took me to do all of this: 30 seconds, and 20 of those were walking to my office. That is not a negligible amount of time, but it's not a huge cost either. But...

    * Be in shouting distance of phone or assistant base station
    * "Okay Google/Alexa, note to self/set a reminder for eight pm: <blah blah blah>"

That's what happens when everything goes right. But based on observing friends who have Alexa, things only go right about two times in three. The rest of the time Alexa gets something wrong, often with comical results. The time it takes to recover from those situations can be a lot longer than 30 seconds. Often my friends just give up and drag out a laptop, or, more often, just decide that whatever it was they were trying to do really wasn't that important after all and give up.

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Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person by snaky on Thursday December 20, 2018 @09:31PM (#18731043)

I think the key difference is the focused attention and brain bandwidth to spend. Traditional way is way more efficient but requires more of that - you need to do a relatively long sequence of actions, coordinated to the goal. Using voice, there is no sequence, and it doesn't matter how many times you need to try and to repeat the same simple phrase - you spend no additional bandwidth with every repeat.

The voice way is like writing the simple add-mupltiply loop in C, and UI way is like writing the same in assembly (using vector extensions). Assuming you know how to do it very well, writing assembly code for that loop wouldn't be even longer to do. And you don't have a 100% chance the compiler will do the right thing with unrolling and vectorizing in this particular case, but most of the time you check the output and try another compiler options until it do the right thing, and only after a bunch of tries you finally resort to assembly. That's basic energy-conserving optimization present in people's firmware in their brain.

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Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person by saulrh on Thursday December 20, 2018 @11:44PM (#18731470)

Yep. A garbled duplicate of a reminder or note doesn't cost anything and even alarms aren't a major issue unless they're set for the middle of the night, so if anything hiccups I just retry.

Your analogy touches on another important factor, which is that the human brain has a titanic amount of hardware dedicated to accelerating and reducing the overhead of voice. It's so good that it even participates in basic cognition, so most of the time the note you want to take is already right there and properly formatted for speech. There's a reason that "thinking out loud" is a thing. :P

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Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person by codyb on Friday December 21, 2018 @12:37AM (#18731611)

Although to be fair, this is an emerging technology which should improve over time.

Anyone using a voice assistant now is almost certainly at the forefront of the technology. In five years or maybe ten they'll probably be a lot more impressive.

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Re:Amazon Sends 1,700 Alexa Voice Recordings to a Random Person by glennpratt on Thursday December 20, 2018 @10:53PM (#18731301)

I've never had Google Assistant fail on something that trivial.

And as the type of person who has always struggled with calendars and notes apps, it's really valuable to me.

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