AWS employee here.

We purposely say "ALex-uh" in group calls instead of "uhLEXa", because we talk about the service and devices all the time and using the correct pronunciation would trigger 10-15 Alexas sitting on everyone's desks!

Or you could just throw away those listening devices.

Do you think unrequested snarky comments like this will actually convince anyone?

It's not snark, surely. It's a legitimate option. Ditch the surveillance boxes, they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way.

> they can't possibly augment your life in a meaningful way

Claims like this one seriously undermine the (worthwhile) privacy movement. Convenience and entertainment _are_ worthwhile uses of technology. Those of us with an understanding of privacy and surveillance technology might well make the judgement that certain forms of convenience and entertainment are not justified by the intrusion that they present - but to claim that there is _zero_ benefit to those technologies just makes you look out-of-touch or cranky to the very people who would benefit from more awareness.

Would I give up all my credit card details in order to have a marginally better music playback experience? No. Would I tell a company my birthday if they paid me $1,000,000 for it? Yes. There is a continuum of "privacy/payback evaluation", and different people lie at different points along it.

There's no reason the language model couldn't be stored locally. It doesn't need to be transmitting everything you say all the time to corporate HQ.

I have serious doubts that the storage and computation components necessary to do full TextToIntent locally would result in an economic product - but, regardless, that isn't a refutation of my point that "smart speakers do provide some value to the average user, and to pretend that they don't undermines the legitimate discussion about privacy".

This is so out of touch. If you want people to simply roll their eyes and ignore your words completely, keep on espousing arguments like that.

Alexa, Siri and co. do have legitimate use cases for people, even if they may not be useful for -you-.

What are these legitimate use cases? Controls for people with disabilities?

I 100% support disability augments. I don't see why the processing can't be localized to a device.

Agreed. Those things are useless novelty items that seem to have no genuinely useful function

It reminds me of the web...

New frightening technology.

Can't you just change the prompt for the device to one of the other options? Though I dunno why they can't make it use any wake word you choose.

Because different words have very different best potential performance characteristics when used as wake words.

We would have liked to enable fully custom wake words, but it would have led to bad user experiences with the device either failing to wake up too often (false negatives) or having too many false positives or both.

So we compromised by enabling more than one, but not full choice.

I just wanted to let you know that you have caused great distress to my aunt, my daughter and my wider family through you and your colleagues thoughtless actions.

I hope someday you, and Amazon as a whole, gets its comeuppance.

I'm sorry if that's the case, but our actions (at least with respect to "naming" Alexa) were extremely far from "thoughtless." There were literally thousands of hours of research, analysis, engineering, and "thought" involved.

Please don't personally attack people.

Thanks for the insight.

Is it difficult to fingerprint a sound bite? Have people repeat it several times and again for each user that wants to use the custom wake word?

It's not so much the "fingerprinting" - it's more that there are some words ("type 1") that have many relatively frequent words that sound like them, and there are other words ("type 2") that only have a very few other words (and infrequent ones at that) that sound like them.

Type 2 words make better potential wake words.

(That's not the whole story, but I think it's good model.)

from my observations of the masses that Alexa and co try to cater to, that's too much work or too technical. we have to remember the average joe/jane don't know what a browser is.

It's the same problem having a dog. You can't go mentioning its name willy-nilly or it'll respond. But dogs go one step further and adapt to misuse of their name by unlearning it. I refer to ours as various insulting names even when she's not around, out of habit.

We just say "the echo" when we want to refer to it without triggering it. But you can change the hotword in Echo devices anyway, if you don't like "Alexa".

We use the name Lexi instead.

It's interesting how we twist our behaviour to accomodate the technology and not the other way around.

What worked great for us was not buying the thing in the first place.

Don't worry the wake word will be customizable soon enough;

While not completely customizable, it is already configurable. The Alexa/Echo devices currently support 4 wake words - Alexa, Amazon, Computer, and Echo.

I work with an Aleksa that I refer to frequently during calls, and was quite excited when I stumbled on the wake word setting in the Alexa app.

You can change it to Amazon, Echo, or Computer. None of which are likely to be names of people in your house--other than the Dollhouse exception for Echo. Most people just likely prefer a more personal name which is, almost by definition, an accepted human name.

Computer is great because it reminds me of Star Trek.