Amazon to Lay Off over 17,000 Workers, More Than First Planned

Re:Amazon to Lay Off over 17,000 Workers, More Than First Pl... by CydeWeys on Thursday January 05, 2023 @12:00AM (#34256180)

> Part of that is that people really don't know how to to do voice interfaces well.

Maybe that'll change now with ChatGPT. The problem I have with voice interfaces is you need something at the level of AGI to make it compelling. I could have an hours-long engaging voice-only conversation with a real person, but what the hell am I going to do with a dumb "smart" speaker that will be even a fraction as engaging as, say, a videogame? 99% of my smart speaker use cases are: Setting timers/alarms, querying the weather, turning on/off the lights, playing songs/podcasts/videos. For anything more interesting/interactive than that, you need more intelligence than existing systems actually have.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon to Lay Off over 17,000 Workers, More Than First Pl... by shagie on Thursday January 05, 2023 @12:34AM (#34256435)

I believe that GPT is an enormous step forward for the voice interface. My favorite example is to give a csv of hourly weather data and it comes back with a human-esque interpretation of it. Not just the rules engine approach that you get from websites...

    Summarize the following weather forecast for tomorrow
    
    12 am, 2° F, clear, 15 mph
    1 am, 2° F, clear, 15 mph
    2 am, 1° F, clear, 14 mph

    Tomorrow's forecast will be cold and clear with temperatures dropping from 2°F to 1°F and winds of around 15mph decreasing to 14mph.

That's a small token example - give it the full 24h and its right on.

Give it the proper data in a machine reasonable format and as it to make it into a human summary, and that's where its strength appears to be.

The problem is that GPT would be too expensive for Amazon Alexa right now.

[ Parent | on HN ]