Slashdot Mirror
Google Chirp To Rival Amazon Echo
An anonymous reader writes: Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo, the smart speaker that has proved to be a sleeper hit for Amazon. The device, which will resemble an OnHub router, has not been officially named yet but is internally known as the Chirp. It has long been suspected that Google was working on a voice-controlled speaker that could integrate with Nest, since Google acquired Nest two years ago. While the Chirp isn't ready for release at next week's Google I/O developer conference, it will most likely receive honorable mention as the conference will highlight voice control, personal assistance, and virtual reality.
...you must be the one sleeping. Under a rock.
What? Sleeper hit? I don't know anyone that owns one outside of my office, the one we have in the office is for testing and it sucks. I hear them talking to it all the time and continually repeating themselves trying to get it to figure out what they actually mean.
Voice 'activation' or 'recognition' SUCKS currently. These types of devices ride a VERY SHORT hype train just like Siri did, and then no one at all cares. I suspect that the general public doesn't give a flying fucking about any voice recognition anymore.
Now tell me ... WHY DO I NEED a voice controlled speaker to integrate with my thermostat and fire alarm ... two things that I NEVER touch. You set the temp and you leave it, it heats or cools the house as needed, if you have a good thermostat (note, the Nest devices are actually pretty shitty as far as 'smart devices' go.) it has sensors in each room that detects occupancy and temp and adjusts the temp based on the rooms people are in.
No one cares about voice recognition in its current, almost absolutely useless state. Its nothing more than a broken toy. The only people who are telling you Amazon has a 'hit' is Amazon.
Stop slashvertising and get a cluepon. Echo isn't impressive, if you can find anyone with one of these 'sleeper hits' for more than a week, ask them how much they use it ... and then I dare you to find me the person who doesn't regret wasting the money after the first month is over.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Chirp is software to program Ham Radios.
When will these oversized companies with their own army of lawyers actually CHECK to make sure they aren't stepping on someone else's toes?
I'm sure Google will sue the programmer of the other software.... even though he had it first.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Winston Smith! You can do better than that. Your hands are barely reaching your knees.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I got in early on the Echo and we've yet to find a good use case for it. It's a decent speaker for playing Amazon Prime music and will answer SIMPLE questions. But for the most part, it cannot answer the questions we throw at it. We use Google or Siri in those cases.
Since it listens to everything said in the room, I'd be less comfortable with Google eavesdropping on my life than I am with Amazon.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Let me be the first to second that emotion! America needs more CEO dick fights! Just look around to see how far we've sunk as a nation, nay, as a world! You'll see people working in companies that actually produce physical "goods" instead of financial instruments. How in the world do they expect to survive?! Sure, they may have food to eat, but where are their stock options? Where are their "2 & 20" hedge-fund accounts? People these days seem to have been brainwashed into believing in this mythical beast called a "physical economy". Good grief! Don't they know we've changed all that now? Don't they know the only way to create real wealth is to leverage the shit out of everything in sight, and then foreclose on it later when the markets get a whiff of the vapors?
Just look at these cretins, pining over the loss of 60,000 factories in the last 15 years from American soil. Can't they see that free trade agreements actually help American workers, with strong protections for environmental and workplace concerns? Are they blind to the benefits of mergers & acquisitions that consolidate markets into effective monopolies? Have they not heard that Comcast and AT&T are the most beloved corporations in America?
My heart weeps for America... once the cradle of our "service" economy, which is without doubt the best economic system ever devised by the mind of man. Can they not see that the future lies on the path of everybody delivering pizzas to each other? [sigh!] I am depressed.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
How else are you going to watch your house burn down from 300 miles away unless you've got it crammed to the gills with the latest home automatation gimcrackery?!
These internet-connectimacated micropaphones are obviously the latest HOT product from the NSA. They also are handy for Russian & Chinese haxx0rs to steal your precious secrets.
Now instead of the local miscreants ringing your doorbell and running away, bored global jackaninnies can sonically assault you with Ministry at 3 AM, flick your lights on and off and turn off your beer fridge so your beer gets warm.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Nah, we use our "secure room" in the basement for all of our plotting and conniving.
Apple cash on hand: $216B
Google market cap: $487B
Certainty of DoJ objection on antitrust grounds: 100%
That's probably why.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I brought my Echo into the office, and it's been able to recognize at least 5 separate people with no issues from across the room. At home, it recognized everyone's voice, kids and adults. Three people in the office have bought one after using mine.
So your anecdote, like mine, means nothing overall.
I had to bring my Echo in because my kids were continuously asking Alexa for jokes, which gets unbelievably annoying.
I know the world is streaming, but why, oh, why don't they include a radio receiver? Many stations stream, but almost universally that doesn't include sports broadcasts. My wife uses a radio to listen to baseball when she's doing other things and can't watch the TV.
If not for that one shortcoming, we would probably get one.
Apple sells to people who are the customers and buy products.
Google sells people to its customers as products.
Apple makes copious amounts of money by providing products people actually want.
Google makes money selling adds that people don't want and spying on people via the virus known as Android and its absolutely shitty permissions system that requires you to essentially let google (or any other app) do anything it wants with your device because of stupid permissions and the lack of being able to run an app WITHOUT granting it permissions.
Apple is currently at the top of the food chain. Google is a bottom feeder.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
We have an Echo (which we use quite a bit.... timers, alarms, news, weather, spelling, etc.) but for music.... the built-in speaker is low-fi and not satisfactory to me. So I bought an Echo Dot as soon as they came out, specifically because it had a line-out connection. That one, I use to listen to music here in my office (I have a very nice audio system in here), and I find the dot very satisfactory indeed in that role, although I do use the other features as well.
There do seem to be a lot of user-level haters; which leads me to believe there are a lot of people who've never actually used one. The claims that it has been a marketing failure are laughable; There is some approximate sales information, indications are that the product is doing quite well. Speaking as a user, I can understand why. We (my SO and I) find it very handy.
My objections to Echo / dot are about the developer ecosystem, the voice recognition implementation, and the secure server issues.
The "canned phrase" collection approach to command recognition is the very antithesis of any attempt to reach for "AI." It would have been wonderful if there was either a local interface so you could provide smarter processing, or if Amazon would actually provide smarter processing on their own. Between that, which is really a pretty crippling issue, and the requirement for an secure server with a +$ certificate for anything other than testing, Echo is not appealing to me as a development platform.
I've been watching MyCroft; that looks like it might have some potential.
Both presently suffer from online-only operation; the speech handling is dead if there is no connection. Hopefully that will be resolved in MyCroft's case, as it's actually an open system and they have mentioned that they're interested in pursuing local STT. My cheapo GPS ca. 2013 has reasonable general purpose offline speech recognition. However that was done, I would hope the underlying code would be better today, and I would love to see the capability in MyCroft, or Echo, or whatever. Being tethered to an active network is not a good thing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As you are clearly not very familiar with the Echo, a clarity that arrives due to your ridiculously truncated list of "thing Echo can do", I'll kindly give you two tips you can generalize from:
First, if you want it to answer to "Echo", then change the settings in the control app so it does. Duh. There are other interesting settings and enablments in there too.
Second, actually learn what it can do for you. Others have; so can you.
For instance, you want a good classic rock playlist that isn't a subset of prime music? Then create a playlist from your own library of carefully selected classic rock. If you don't have such a library, then your complaint is wholly ridiculous. MY classic rock playlist is freaking awesome. Because, you know, I built it out of tunes I really like. Depending on prime music... that's depending on some taste metric that will be an amalgam of Other People's Opinions selected from whatever tunes are actually on prime music (read, not the good stuff that might still sell decently) and, like you, that's definitely up for lighting my fire. Unlike you, however, I figured that out by myself and spent ten seconds Googling to see how to remedy the problem. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, we know.
Yeah, I like voice recognition and control for tasks where it's so much quicker than manually clicking through menus to set up a playlist or something.
But I sure as hell don't want it to be always on, always listening.
Eat the rich.