Re:Amazon Says It Has Over 10k Employees Working on Alexa, Echo
by TeMPOraL on Monday January 07, 2019 @02:28AM
(#18843436)
I concur. For me it's similar wrt. annoyance/efficiency factor, but I have the opposite needs in terms of the microphone. I don't use my phone's Google Assistant because there are only two workflows where I would find it useful, and I can get neither of them to work.
Workflow one is leaving it on a desk and having it listen for the hotword all the time. No "screen must be unlocked" or "phone must be charging" nonsense; if I have to come to the desk and fiddle with the phone, I'll do what I need faster with my fingers. Workflow two is always listening when I'm on a Bluetooth headset. I can accept pressing a button on the headset to turn it on, but again, if I have to fiddle with my phone to get it to listen, it defeats the entire purpose of the tool.
(I'm also an old curmudgeon that is convinced speech recognition can be done entirely off-line, and there's no direct reason to send voice data to the mothership. But I guess it's fighting with windmills at this point.)
Workflow one is leaving it on a desk and having it listen for the hotword all the time. No "screen must be unlocked" or "phone must be charging" nonsense; if I have to come to the desk and fiddle with the phone, I'll do what I need faster with my fingers. Workflow two is always listening when I'm on a Bluetooth headset. I can accept pressing a button on the headset to turn it on, but again, if I have to fiddle with my phone to get it to listen, it defeats the entire purpose of the tool.
(I'm also an old curmudgeon that is convinced speech recognition can be done entirely off-line, and there's no direct reason to send voice data to the mothership. But I guess it's fighting with windmills at this point.)