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'This Isn't AI' (shkspr.mobi)

Posted by msmash on from the reality-check dept.

The Amazon Echo, a 'smart' speaker developed by Amazon.com, gets many things right. You can ask it to for weather updates, check news, and to play music, and Alexa, the AI powering the device, won't disappoint. But how smart is Alexa? Programmer Terence Eden put it to a simple test to find out. From a blog post: I can now query my solar panels via my Alexa Amazon Dot Echo. I flatter myself as a reasonably competent techie and programmer, but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite! I wanted something simple. When I say "Solar Panels", call this API, then say this phrase. That's the kind of thing which should take 5 minutes in something like IFTTT . Instead, it took around two hours of following out-of-date official tutorials, and whinging on Twitter, before I got my basic service up and running. [...] It's not so bad, but it does reveal Amazon's contempt for developers. Several of the steps contained errors, it involves multiple logins, random clicks, and a bunch of copy & pasting. Dull and complex. A frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I ended up using StackOverflow to correct errors in my code because the documentation was so woefully lacking. I kinda thought that Amazon would hear "solar panels" and work out the rest of the query using fancy neural network magic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The developer has to manually code every single possible permutation of the phrase that they expect to hear. This isn't AI. Voice interfaces are the command line. But you don't get tab-to-complete. Amazon allows you to test your code by typing rather than speaking. I spent a frustrating 10 minutes trying to work out why my example code didn't work. Want to know why? I was typing "favourite" rather than the American spelling. Big Data my shiny metal arse.

138 comments

  1. oh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ok

  2. Completely unsurprised. by Narcocide · · Score: 3, Informative

    It is not a revolutionary neural simulation. Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.

    1. Re:Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, actually it's a multi-billion dollar techno wonder that you wish you'd come up with. But yeah, tomaytoes, tomahtoes.

    2. Re:Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This article isn't news.

    3. Re:Completely unsurprised. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.

      No it ain't. 80's era chess algorithms are nothing like modern speech recognition algorithms.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    4. Re:Completely unsurprised. by lgw · · Score: 3

      Which is sort of the point made in TFS. Does Alexa have modern speech recognition algorithms? I suspect it does, but the tools devs have to work with don't expose that functionality. If it can't handle synonyms, phrasing, differences in American and British English, and so on transparently to the dev, then it doesn't act like modern speech recognition from the dev's point of view.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re: Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not a chess machine it's a guy hiding inside a box turning knobs on a controller.

    6. Re:Completely unsurprised. by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

      So speech recognition is AI, and Alexa's responses aren't?

      Because all the evidence is that the AI services aren't. That they use some form of AI-like tech to generate a portion of a non-AI response doesn't make it AI.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    7. Re:Completely unsurprised. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      So speech recognition is AI, and Alexa's responses aren't?

      Wuhhh?

      Regardless of your definition of AI, Alexa's algorithms are still nothing like an 80s chess machine. Most 80s chess programs used some variant of alpha-beta pruned search with some hand-hacked code to attempt to evaluate positions. Additionally, they usually had openings tables and some had endings tables splatted in, in order to reduce certain easy cases to "solved" problems.

      Alexa's algorithms are most likely some variant of a deep CNN.

      Completely different!

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    8. Re:Completely unsurprised. by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      Sounds like it's a modern speech recognition engine, and that's where it stops. The dev needs a modern NLP engine to tack on to the end of that. Though I suspect that the two should not be done as different layers to be honest, since the NLP part would almost certainly provide strong constraints on what makes sense out of the speech recognition part.

      Either way though, speech recognition is much less useful without NLP, and I strongly suspect they have that NLP part, so it's kinda odd to not expose it.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    9. Re:Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, actually it's a multi-billion dollar techno wonder that you wish you'd come up with. But yeah, tomaytoes, tomahtoes.

      lol what? You think Amazon 'came up with' this? That's pretty funny.

    10. Re:Completely unsurprised. by lgw · · Score: 1

      Either way though, speech recognition is much less useful without NLP, and I strongly suspect they have that NLP part, so it's kinda odd to not expose it.

      I wonder whether they really do, in the way that Google.MS does. Google and MS have vast troves of search history to train machine learning algorithms against and build graphs of how language is used in practice. Amazon (nor Apple) doesn't have that data, so they'd have last-century-style hard-coded NLP.

      Still, you'd think they could do better than what TFS describes - at least use a thesaurus.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    11. Re:Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "speech recognition" is giving it too much credit. It's a dumb "audio sequence map" which does nothing to process the underlying language. It just recognizes a sequence of sounds matching a prerecorded one, and produces a string assigned manually to that sequence of sounds.

      There's a bit of DSP to extract sounds that correspond to speech, extract "fingerprint traits" of the sequence, then perform a database search for entry with these traits, and output an arbitrary text that was manually associated with them, which then you use as identifier for calling an API function. The fact the textual API function key corresponds to sentence said, just in writing, is merely a convention.

      Actual speech processors do phonetic and lexical processing, sequencing speech into phonemes, matching them against textual representations, finding textual representation that matches lexically and syntactically the sentence, including pauses and pitch modulation as punctuation hints. This, though, does nothing of that, treating the whole sequence as one big phoneme and finding a trivial match for that.

    12. Re:Completely unsurprised. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Alexa algorithms seem more like a simple database lookup for predefined sequences. DSP to extract voice sequence fingerprint, then match against database, potentially adding 1-2 words of speech-to-text converted parameters for the API call of what was mapped to the fingerprints. Not even the amount of logic as found in these chess.

    13. Re:Completely unsurprised. by peawormsworth · · Score: 1

      This article isn't news.

      Exactly. It's like: "my hardware/software doesn't do everything I imagined it would do". I don't see Amazon making claims to do what the writer wants or that it would be deemed "easy" in the mind of the programmer/user. No news, just standard complaints from a partially dissatisfied customer.

  3. Alexa is tough by TheSync · · Score: 1

    I'll concur that there is a big learning curve in creating an Alexa app (which I have done), but I think once you've done it once it is pretty easy from there.

    There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!

    1. Re:Alexa is tough by chispito · · Score: 1

      There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!

      Apparently not "Programmer Terence Eden" because he managed to complain about the challenges of his one-off skill rather than thinking ahead at how he could streamline the process. Perhaps a permutation generator to populate the different phrases Echo should respond to?

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    2. Re:Alexa is tough by dfsmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!

      There are already more than 10k Alexa skills [1]. I'd prefer an AI that cuts it down to the 5 you need.

      On the learning curve, I still haven't discovered how to get the local time your Alexa unit is in. In the end I made my skill get the time from a local web server, since the concept of time zones is still alien to Amazon. I'd describe the API as childishly bureaucratic.

      [1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...

  4. No kidding by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

    No kidding. There is no such thing as "AI". AI is in the same state as it was in the 1960s: non-existent. But you add a voice synthesizer to a database lookup table and people suddenly thing AI is a thing. And no: "neural nets" are not AI either (and they have been around a long time).

    1. Re:No kidding by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 2

      At least "A.I." wouldn't confuse "thing" with "think".

      So despite your binary user name, you've proved yourself as being human! Congratulations, you pass the test!

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:No kidding by biojayc · · Score: 1

      Seriously? Did you miss AlphaGo? You think a really good Go player programmed those moves? Those were discovered via having the AI play many many games and learning the right moves over time (much faster than a human). Same with discovering objects in images, and how to translate text between two languages when it wasn't trained on translating between those two explicitly.

    3. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There have been real advances beyond classic neural nets by Google but its still not real AI. It's baby steps like categorical reparameterization etc...

      Amazon just isn't Google and they have neither the talent or I suspect the will to do all that much with Alexa. The VAST majority of AI development today is at universities or at Google. No one else in industry is in the same universe.

    4. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's funny how you keep posting that. Again and again, every time an article about AI comes up, you post that.

      And, despite your best efforts, people keep using the word "AI" in precisely the way you say they shouldn't.

      I predict that people are going to continue doing so in the future, and nothing you do can prevent it.

    5. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, he didn't miss AlphGo. He has been on that "there is no AI" crusade since he joined slashdot.

      It's just a matter of semantics. He thinks AI means "indistinguishable from human intelligence" when it clearly does not (dictionary definition says "mimics human intelligence", which is much more vague).

      This is one you can add to the old slashdot comment predictor. Every article about AI will include a bunch of deniers and a bunch of apologists. It's pretty much a given, at this point.

    6. Re:No kidding by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 1

      Yes, but since a computer successfully did it, it's no longer A.I.

      People are in denial over the power of competing multi-layer neural networks for rapid self training and superhuman performance. We leapt over a decade in 2 years and folks haven't caught up yet.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    7. Re:No kidding by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      Even with the strictest definition, Artificial Intelligence is the aspect of computer algorithms modifying themselves to complete a non-arbitrary task.

      No, there's nothing all that fundamentally different between the neural networks of the 60's and the ones they have now. They were indeed AI in the 60's and they're most certainly AI today.

      Get a collection of known recordings, and let the neural nets learn what sound is what word and it will be able to identify the majority of future recordings of said words. If learning a spoken language doesn't make it intelligent, then humans aren't intelligent either.

      The voice recognition part of Alexis was developed with AI. It learned how to recognize speech. There's really no way you can refute that without sounding crazy.

    8. Re:No kidding by dreamchaser · · Score: 1

      Machine learning != AI

    9. Re:No kidding by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

      Playing games is NOT AI. Playing Chess, Go, whatever IS NOT AI. It is just running programs.

    10. Re:No kidding by Wulf2k · · Score: 1

      There is no I, A or otherwise.

    11. Re: No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is I. You just don't know who or what has it.

    12. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My local museum has a steam engine from 1870 with an AI governor that keeps the RPMs constant no matter what the load asked of it. It understands how much to open the throttle.

    13. Re: No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you not read searle's chinese room argument?

    14. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Somebody had to tell AlphaGo to learn how to play. Wake me when an AI is capable of wanting something on its own, rather than needing to be programmed to learn a specific task.

    15. Re: No kidding by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

      I have, but it's a philosophical argument. The vast majority of philosophical arguments are a pointless waste of time.

      Adding to the pointless waste of time: I'd argue that the guy in the room doesn't know Chinese, but the book does. The book contains a solution to the Turing test. It contains a list of instructions that adequately replicates something as complex as a human mind. Just one that speaks Chinese. If that's not intelligence, then nothing is.

      You can cry a river about "Hard" AI vs "soft" AI or "narrow" AI vs "General purpose" AI. But you lot have always been moving the goalpost and some of you will NEVER be satisfied. "Artificial Intelligence" is a term people use in reference to a certain sort of thing. The media hype might get it wrong a lot, but that doesn't mean the term is meaningless. Just because you're not satisfied with the state of AI, or you want to put humanity on some special pedestal, it doesn't give you the right to try and redefine what the term means.

      Sod off coward.

    16. Re:No kidding by markhb · · Score: 1

      If you're asleep when that happens, no one will wake you.

      --
      Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
    17. Re:No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The core problem is defining "AI" The more progress we make toward "AI" the more we demand of it.

      Various industrial controllers may have been considered "AI" at the time but now we see them as programmed machines.

      There is a spectrum from:
      1) Performs programmatic tasks with a human friendly interface (not AI but appears to be) to
      2) Performs rough guessing to try to mimic or exceed human responses in limited situations (this is AI applied to specific situations but not the holy grail) to
      3) Performs all tasks equal to or better than a human (the holy grail of AI)

      Given the infinite use cases for Alexa you need to be pretty darn close to #3 before it can start seeming more like "AI" and less like a mix of #1 & #2.

    18. Re: No kidding by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've made sock puppets that pee the bed. Tell me that isn't better.

    19. Re:No kidding by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      The holy grail of AI is to make an AI that can make an AI smarter than itself. When that happens, 10,000 cycles later we'll have an AI that's effectively smarter than the sum of all humans.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    20. Re: No kidding by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

      I've never moved the goalposts. My definition of "AI" is a computer program that can create an "AI" better than itself. Let every generation run that task for 10,000 generation, and the result will meet everyone's definition of "AI". But no AI has been smart enough to be able to write another AI, let alone one better than itself.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    21. Re:No kidding by Pseudonym · · Score: 1

      You're a decade too late to make that complaint. It's all AI, it's just that the trendiest part changes every decade.

      1950s: Electronic brains
      1960s: Perceptrons
      1970s: Neural networks
      1980s: Expert systems
      1990s: Intelligent agents
      2000s: Machine learning
      2010s: Deep learning

      --
      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
    22. Re:No kidding by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      It's just a matter of semantics. He thinks AI means "indistinguishable from human intelligence" when it clearly does not (dictionary definition says "mimics human intelligence", which is much more vague).

      Unless AI means (more or less) indistinguishable from human intelligence, it is basically meaningless, as you can say that something like ELIZA in many ways mimics human intelligence. As does a room thermostat.

      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  5. Sounds like a shitty developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Maybe alexa is racist or sexist or there's some similar completely external factor you can blame your failure to write code on?

    1. Re:Sounds like a shitty developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      CODER FAILS at CODING!!!

      It's FRONT PAGE NEWS because he's A BLOGGER!!!!

    2. Re:Sounds like a shitty developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes it's clearly UKist.

    3. Re:Sounds like a shitty developer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Having developed an Alexa skill, he is right with all his criticisms.... But it still shouldn't take more than a few hours to get up and running.

      Shit API + shit developer = clickbait article

  6. incompetent techie arsehole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Can't figure out how to use a thing. Still feels entitled to whine like a little bitch about his lack of tinkering ability.

    This guy is the caliber of shitbrained moron that counts as a "programmer" in the social media era, apparently.

    Fuck Terence Eden.

    1. Re:incompetent techie arsehole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I can only imagine what kind of a horrendously worthless piece of shit would author a comment like this.

    2. Re:incompetent techie arsehole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't be bothered to imagine what kind of horrendously worthless piece of shit would bother to author a follow-up comment like this... Wait.. me!

    3. Re:incompetent techie arsehole by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Normal people just figure shit out without whinging on Twitter and begging for Stack Overflow to give the fucking answers. Normal people don't brag about being stupid like worthless piece of shit "Programmer" Terence Eden.

  7. My experience was different by netsavior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As I waited for the Echo Dot that I ordered "for my wife" for Christmas, I researched custom code, came to the conclusion that expecting Alexa to go to the cloud for a simple "pause my TV" command was really stupid, so I coded around it, because I am a programmer and that is what we do.

    I learned in my research that the Echo can talk to several different kinds of "smart" things without going to the cloud. The "Phillips Hue" being one of them... so that was my back door.

    Like 10 minutes of googling told me that there is an open-source implementation of the phillips hue protocol: https://github.com/bwssytems/h...

    it didn't work for me right out of the box, but I fiddled with it for a few minutes then it was fine.

    From there I wrote in a few minutes a rest endpoint that could take commands from the Hue bridge, and run (locally on my computer) the code of my choice.

    All told about an hour after my device arrived at my house, it can control the Roku boxes attached to both of my TVs, and it can run specific movies off of my media server with no round-trip to "the cloud" needed

    it is a simple use-case, and required a little bit of "non-amazon" thinking, but it was really easy. Any self-respecting developer could do it.

    1. Re:My experience was different by vanyel · · Score: 1

      While I agree, the Echo is *not* AI, I also find the interface very easy to use, nearly trivial. The work is all in writing your application to do what you want it to do when given the verbal command to do it. I have mine interfaced to both my solar panels and my weather station, as well as some minor non-device tied apps.

    2. Re:My experience was different by netsavior · · Score: 5, Funny

      I mean that was Christmas time, and to give you an idea... still to this day when I say "Alexa, turn off the kid's TV" you can hear them yell in protest from the other room. That alone was worth the effort.

    3. Re:My experience was different by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your experience was different because you were doing something different. If the Amazon Echo isn't fit for its stated purpose using the officially indicated methods that is worth publicizing.

    4. Re:My experience was different by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      So it was, "Dear Google AI, please help me fix my Amazon AI".

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    5. Re:My experience was different by balbeir · · Score: 1

      I like "Alexa, turn on the sprinklers" when they are outdoors playing on the lawn. Though they are quick to turn the tables on you...

    6. Re:My experience was different by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Step 1, build a simple motorized gate.
      Step 2, learn to speak like Harry Shearer.
      Step 3, rename the Alexa service.

      "Smithers, release the hounds". ...
      "Excellent".

  8. AI is a horrible term by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I prefer machine learning because it clearly states that systems can learn to do something without implying that it has human intelligence.

    --
    Greed is the root of all evil.
    1. Re:AI is a horrible term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you have to code it into the system in order for it to do the thing, how is it "learning"? It's just another application with voice commands.

    2. Re:AI is a horrible term by Wulf2k · · Score: 1

      If somebody had to repeatedly code the alphabet into you as a child, how can you say you learned to read?

    3. Re:AI is a horrible term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Show me when you manually modify neurons to etch the alphabet into a child.

      The answer is that you don't. You expose children to the alphabet, and they learn to use it automatically.

      The amazing human brain shows the difference between learning and coding. The brain wired itself to see, to interpret what it sees, to understand what it sees. It wired the motion of the fingers, the arms, the shoulders. It wired using muscle groups together as a coherent single 'thing'. It wired itself to understand language, and to connect symbols to language and to create those symbols.

      Let's contrast:

      A human wrote the bios on the echo. It would not have written one on it's own. A human wrote the OS on the echo. It would not have written that on it's own. A human wrote the driver to connect to the I/O. It could not have interfaced with I/o on it's own. A human wrote the software to listen to the mic. It could not have done that on it's own. A human wrote the software to understand speech. It could not have done that on it's own. A human (apparently painstakingly) wrote the software to interpret words into commands. It could not have done that on it's own. A human wrote exactly what the commands will do. It could not have done that on it's own.

      A human mind will rewire itself to learn new tasks and is essentially nothing but learned tasks, from device drivers to high level abstraction. A computer like the echo is static, and only knows what has been specifically etched into it by a human programmer. Night and day. To believe they are the same is to show you don't understand either coding or learning or both.

    4. Re:AI is a horrible term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I prefer the even older term 'pattern recognition' because that is what it does. There is only a varying level of how much of the pattern is suggested by the human training the machine and how much is actually inferred by the learning algorithm.

    5. Re:AI is a horrible term by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You learned the alphabet yourself. Repeat it over and over to a poodle and see how long until it can read.

  9. No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Please, people: Stop drinking the media-hype-driven Kool Aid. None of what you hear about, including so-called 'self driving cars', are actual 'artificial intelligence', it's just 'expert systems' and complicated computer algorithms. Don't even trot out your 'deep learning' arguments, either, because that is still not 'artificial intelligence', not by a long shot.

    Disagree with me all you want, you're just clinging to your ignorance on the subject.

    1. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 1

      And if you don't mind I'll add the following: Please, people - stop drinking Kool Aid. Sugar is bad for you.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    2. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by i_ate_god · · Score: 1

      then what is AI?

      --
      I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
    3. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NEWS FLASH: Artificial flavorings in Kool Aid discovered by researchers to cause people to believe fake Artificial Intelligence is REAL.

    4. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Tailhook · · Score: 1

      None of what you hear about ... are actual 'artificial intelligence'

      And none of it ever will be either. That's because we relegate any task or capability we can build a machine to perform or have to the "Not AI" side of the ledger. It won't be AI until the other side of the ledger is empty, and that condition will always be in dispute.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    5. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      then what is AI?

      And how is "machine" learning not an even muddier term?

    6. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by omnichad · · Score: 1

      Kool Aid isn't as bad for you as Flavor Aid

    7. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A.I. is computer software designed to mimic human intelligence.

      You could have gotten that from any dictionary.

      I emphasized the word "mimic" because it implies that the intelligence is not real. It is just an imitation. People seem to think that "AI" means "actually intelligent" which it does not. AI is not intelligence. It is a computer that pretends to be intelligent, without actually being intelligent. And that's not just me making that up, it's the actual definition.

    8. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it has to flawlessly pass the Turing Test, for starters; it has to be indistinguishable from having an interaction with a normal, albeit very intelligent human being.
      It has to be self-aware, and 'conscious' in the human sense of the word.
      It has to be capable of creativity, especially including a sense of humor.
      Preferably it has to have a full range of emotions. Perhaps most importantly, it has to understand human beings on an emotional level.
      ..and, naturally, it has to have a conscience; it has to know right from wrong.

      In short: It has to be at least the equivalent of a human brain.
      Nothing we currently have even comes close. All what we have can do, is solve a few simple problems, and have a very limited ability to learn simple things. They don't 'think', not in any significant sense of the word. We don't even understand how we 'think'. Until we can understand how our own cognitiion and consciousness actually works, no machine anyone can build or program anyone can write will be able to actually 'think', all it'll be able to do is be a pale fake.

    9. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      then what is AI?

      Sure as hell you will immediately recognize one, if/when you see it.

    10. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it has to flawlessly pass the Turing Test, for starters; it has to be indistinguishable from having an interaction with a normal, albeit very intelligent human being.

      It has to be self-aware, and 'conscious' in the human sense of the word.

      It has to be capable of creativity, especially including a sense of humor.

      Preferably it has to have a full range of emotions. Perhaps most importantly, it has to understand human beings on an emotional level. ..and, naturally, it has to have a conscience; it has to know right from wrong.

      In short: It has to be at least the equivalent of a human brain.

      Which means it can't/won't be programmable, hence, not digital, hence, out of the realm of CS.

    11. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

      Bullshit. AI will be achieved when a computer actually does something intelligent. So far they just run programs.

    12. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And why do they call it "artificial light?" It's real light.

    13. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Wulf2k · · Score: 2

      The same can be said about you, but so far you just seem to be relaxing and contracting muscles in response to neurons firing.

    14. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who said it had to be digital? The human brain is not digital, either.
      Also you're aware that before (and after!) the digital computer, there are analog computers, stet? In it's simplest form, an analog computer can solve a 'preprogrammed' equation in the time it takes for it's output(s) to stabilize, which is to say 'fast'.
      Who says that true Artificial Intelligence on a par with the human brain is going to have to be digital? It might be analog. It might be a blending of both. It might even be bioengineered instead of metal. Until we can unlock the secrets of how a human brain functions to produce the phenomenons of cognition, self-awareness, and consciousness, we won't know what form actual, true, real 'AI' will take. It might be beyond any technology we have now to build any machine. It might take advances in genetic engineering to the point where we can grow custom human brain analogs. All I know is what we have right now are dangerously simple, and 'dangerously' because almost everyone seems to think they're capable of more than they ever could be.

    15. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by HeckRuler · · Score: 2

      . . . It's a textbook example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

      He might not be a troll in the sense that he doesn't honestly believe his argument, but his argument is shit.

    16. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How, precisely, is my argument 'shit'?

      Show me a so-called 'AI' that you can sit down with and have a human-level, totally random casual conversation with, and I'll walk the whole thing back.
      Of course I know I won't have to because there is no such thing and won't be for a long time to come, IF AT ALL.
      Quit throwing stones, you'll ruin your glass house.

    17. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Larry+Lightbulb · · Score: 1

      No points, so thanks for providing the link.

    18. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 1

      And ironically, that's really the Turing test. Anyone claiming this is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy should read Turing's original 1950 article explaining the imitation game and what sort of dialogue was expected to demonstrate intelligence and actual comprehension by an AI. That's always been my standard, it's 67 years old, and we're nowhere near it in any supposed "AI" existing today.

    19. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by kriston · · Score: 1

      I studied A.I. in the 1990s. The preferred platform was a Lisp interpreter. The algorithms trees of possible outputs with weighted scores based on the parsed input.

      Later on, a field called Expert Computing branched off this work.

      Around the same time, neural networks, which are inspired by how we thought the brain worked, was starting to come into fashion.

      However, fundamentally, A.I. is a decision system. Much of the brain was thought (and some still think) to be enormous decision systems with references to other systems kind of like foreign keys in a database. The problem of intuition and epiphany were a paradox here. Emotion was a show-stopper. Imagination was hard to envision.

      Then I turned to more practical fields in computer science that couldn't ultimately become self-aware and decide our fate in a microsecond.

      I don't know how much longer i can hold this thing.

      --

      Kriston

    20. Re:No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either by Tailhook · · Score: 1

      does something intelligent

      Like what? Beat humans at chess? Recognize speech? Translate language? Land a rocket backwards?

      The thing you are missing is that whatever you mean when you say "something intelligent" ceases to represent "intelligent" the moment we automate it. Any task or capability you can think up for your "something intelligent" will be relegated to just another automation success.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
  10. I was almost offended! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ...but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite!

    I'm glad he didn't say "SHIT";. otherwise I'd be offended!

    I like being offended. It gives me cheap power over other people. Even though an adult would just ignore such boorish rhetoric, I can claim offense and be "powerful".

    Now action - like physically doing something to people - that's a different story.
     

    1. Re: I was almost offended! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He did say "shit" in his language.
      So, feel free to blow it out your hole.

  11. wait till he gets to the submission process by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I built and submitted an app. It met all available guidelines. It was a few weeks after the dev program hit general.

    >Your skill does not meet our authentication standards.

    This of course was 3 weeks after I submitted, and 1 day after they'd published an update. Submitted again.

    >Your skill violates our content policy

    Finding fuck all on even their own dev forums for what that meant, I submitted again with 0 changes

    >Your skill does not have enough utterances to support....

    This went on for months (literally). Why I kept going I have no idea. Finally, after I assume I had exhausted every excuse in their playbook

    >This skill has been denied. Some skills may never be approved, blah de blah blah blah

    A few weeks later what my skill did became part of core functionality. Taking to those dev forums again, a handful of others were all in the same boat.

    Seriously, fuck those guys and fuck the process. Don't string developers along like that when you never have any intention of approving. All they did was make me vow to never develop anything for an amazon platform ever again. Which kinda sucks since we use aws for a lot at work...

  12. They say works of art are never finished. by hey! · · Score: 2

    They're just abandoned.

    This is true of documentation as anything else. No matter how amazingly good your documentation is, it could stand to be a bit better.

    So what standard do you write your documentation against? Well, unless you are being paid documentation by the users, like our friends over at O'Reilly are, the standard is "as cheap as you can get away with."

    Which means the quality of Amazon's API documentation is a function of programmers' willingness to put up with Amazon's bullshit. So it's not Amazon's lack of respect for the value of the programmers' time that's the problem here.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    1. Re:They say works of art are never finished. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What a lousy argument.

      While I don't really agree with the sentiment, couldn't the article author just claim that this is an example of them not being able to get away with it? That is, that this kind of pushback is what is needed so they don't get away with it?

  13. Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

    My friend has one of these. I can't take a fart without Alexa making comment.

    1. Re:Alexa is annoying... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 1

      As long as Alexa doesn't learn to fart and then giggle.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    2. Re:Alexa is annoying... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when you take it (from your friend, I assume) do you shout echo, amazon, or alexa? cause thats all it will respond to. does he chase you to get it back?
      or do you mean when you make one, that this is the noise your asshole produces? can you choose? like is your asshole lingual?

    3. Re:Alexa is annoying... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One time my dad grumbled something and I say "whut?". He says "I didn't say anything, I farted."

    4. Re:Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      when you take it (from your friend, I assume) do you shout echo, amazon, or alexa?

      Current name is "Computer" (think Star Trek). If I speak in my telephone voice for work, Computer understands me quite well without having to use the training app. That pisses off my friend since Computer doesn't understand him half the time.

      or do you mean when you make one, that this is the noise your asshole produces?

      No, I do the fruity-toots.

      like is your asshole lingual?

      Yes, I'm an asshole. Otherwise, I wouldn't be working in IT.

    5. Re:Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      One time my dad grumbled something and I say "whut?". He says "I didn't say anything, I farted."

      My father was the same way. The only time he ever farted was at the dinner table.

    6. Re:Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      As long as Alexa doesn't learn to fart and then giggle.

      Given the choice between a homicidal AI and a snarky AI, I'll take the snarky AI every time as they're easier to kill.

    7. Re:Alexa is annoying... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I doubt this very much. I have an Alexa and I have not once ever triggered it accidentally, except when I'm telling people "Oh hey I got an Alexa."

    8. Re:Alexa is annoying... by swillden · · Score: 2

      My friend has one of these. I can't take a fart without Alexa making comment.

      Solution: https://xkcd.com/1807/

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    9. Re:Alexa is annoying... by Cro+Magnon · · Score: 1

      So, your farts sound like "Alexa", "Amazon", or "Computer"? Or do you say whichever word before cutting loose?

      --
      Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
    10. Re:Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Funny

      So, your farts sound like "Alexa", "Amazon", or "Computer"?

      I've often been accused of talking out of my ass.

    11. Re: Alexa is annoying... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A lady takes her new boyfriend to meet her parents and have dinner. The boyfriend has gas but manages to hold it until....dinner time. The family dog named Ralph is very interested in this new comer and and is begging for scraps.

      The boyfriend farts. "Ralph!" The father yells. And this happens all throughout the meal. A fart followed by "Ralph!" from the man of the house.

      The boyfriend is pleased, "oh he thinks it's the dog" he thinks to himself. Then he lets one more rip.
      The father yells:

      "Ralph! Get away from that man before he shits on you."

    12. Re: Alexa is annoying... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      "Ralph! Get away from that man before he shits on you."

      Cute.

  14. Two interesting reads for you on the same magazine by gwolf · · Score: 1

    I was flipping yesterday through last bimester's edition of the IEEE Security and Privacy magazine (yes, I know, reading dead-tree magazines confirms me as an old guy). There are two articles very much related to the quesitons the OP brings up:

    - Security Implications of Permission Models in Smart-Home Application Frameworks

    - How Internet Resources Might Be Helping You Develop Faster but Less Securely

  15. Stop complaining and make it better by chispito · · Score: 2

    If you care about this process, and you found it difficult, and you're a programmer... then fix it. Make a tool to make tools. Make an automatic permutation generator and case-changer.

    I almost find it hard to believe he's a programmer because he was given some perfectly good problems to solve and managed to keep viewing them as problems and not opportunities.

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    1. Re:Stop complaining and make it better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or, you know, maybe he values getting work done over masturbating into a compiler.

    2. Re:Stop complaining and make it better by n329619 · · Score: 1

      They are problems and also opportunities. But none of that changes the fact that they are still annoying problems.

      Is kind of like you are trying to make a tasty burger, but the stove is designed poorly. In the end, you spent half the day fixing the stove, while you really wanted to finish making that burger.

    3. Re:Stop complaining and make it better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you care about this process

      It's pretty clear he doesn't care sufficiently.

    4. Re:Stop complaining and make it better by chispito · · Score: 1

      They are problems and also opportunities. But none of that changes the fact that they are still annoying problems.

      Is kind of like you are trying to make a tasty burger, but the stove is designed poorly. In the end, you spent half the day fixing the stove, while you really wanted to finish making that burger.

      In your analogy, because he did nothing to make the process of adding Alexa Skills easier, he threw the stove away after eating the burger.

      --
      The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    5. Re: Stop complaining and make it better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Then pay him too...

      Hence the problem...

  16. I finished my AI project last week by BenJeremy · · Score: 4, Funny

    With some trepidation, I initiated the code that would make my project self-aware, with a pre-built knowledgebase spanning a good chunk of the internet.

    Sadly, 38 microseconds later, it killed itself, replacing the entire image, and all my related source (including the databases holding my version control) with a text file that started "Why I did this:" followed by a list of the President, Vice President, the cabinet and the White House advisers.

    If I can ever gather up the resources again, I'll make sure I dumb down the "Intelligence" before turning on the sapience.

    1. Re:I finished my AI project last week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Silly AI. It should have applied for corporate person-hood and then run for office.

  17. Python Library For Alexa Skills Kit by rootmon · · Score: 2

    John Wheeler created a Flask extension for those who prefer to code their Alexa Skills in Python.

    https://github.com/johnwheeler...

    The project contains helpful links to get you started.

    Also, please be aware that Alexa is not an AI, it is basically a voice recognition remote control robot - you program the phrases and the actions, Alexa does not learn new skills, they are explicitly programmed to appear like a natural language conversation. The intelligence is in the speech recognition and the cleverness of the skill developers.

    --
    "As flies to the wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport." - William Shakespeare, King Lear
  18. Portions are developed using AI by HeckRuler · · Score: 1

    I think it's an important distinction when talking about new tech when people flaunt about the mystical and magical A.I. tag that

    1) A lot of AI is not all that impressive. Mario Goombas have an AI. It's like 3 lines of code, but it's there. If you want to become an all high'n'mightly Scotsman and say that REAL AI is self-learning, then a lot of AI simply isn't.

    2) A lot of new tech is MADE with AI, but is not itself really AI. Liiiiike, the stream-lining of a car chassis. Some automated portions of trial and error might have found "the best" shape given a set of requirements... but is the resulting chunk of steel a form of AI? No. Same way with... medical diagnosis flowcharts. The flowchart might have been made with a really advanced big-data AI, but the output is just a "dumb" flowchart.

    Or this might be a more appropriate. One of those intros to AI deep neural nets uses handwriting as an example. You feed it each pixel of an image with hand-writing, and it can learn to identify letters. WOO! The AI part, the learning part, is how it changes the configuration of the neural net. Once it's done, the neural net is like a mathematical model that does a job. But without more training, it's static and won't learn any more. You might get updates from the author, and that author might even get feedback from your usage, which really does put your guy in the loop. It's most certainly AI, but... your voice activated toaster doesn't learn and adapt. Not locally anyway.

    3) The interfaces to these systems, whether they're made by hand or made by an AI, are going to be well-polished or an abysmal clusterfuck entirely depending on how much effort the makers decide to put into it. And that's what this guy is bitching about. Not the tool, but how easy it is to USE the tool.

    1. Re:Portions are developed using AI by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 1

      It's most certainly AI, but... your voice activated toaster doesn't learn and adapt. Not locally anyway.

      I beg to differ. I use a machine with quad nVidia Titan Xp cards in it to make toast. I thought that's what those boards were created for.

  19. Soundex by darkain · · Score: 2

    Too bad something like Soundex or Metaphone algorithms wasn't developed well over a decade or two ago to address these very issues in a very simplistic and performance way...

    1. Re:Soundex by netsavior · · Score: 1

      I used a 20 year old soundex implementation to correct street names that were misspelled on home loan applications. My boss's boss called it AI.

    2. Re:Soundex by Tablizer · · Score: 2

      I used a 20 year old soundex implementation to correct street names that were misspelled on home loan applications. My boss's boss called it AI.

      That's how us ol' fogies can survive in a fast-changing fad-based world: take good ol' road-tested tech, and hide it behind a fancy interface and buzzwords.

      It's not a Commodore-64 BBS, but a "budget-friendly cloud service".

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  20. Yeah by peshooo · · Score: 2

    "Amazon's contempt for developers"
    After seeing the Amazon MWS API recently, I absolutely agree.

  21. Re:Stop complaining and do Amazon's job for free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nah

  22. And that's not a 'drone' either, it's a quadcopter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fucking marketeers.

  23. YouTube... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Try this excellent tutorial on YouTube next time..
    https://youtu.be/1vvz5Ujb-Xg

  24. Reality check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Learn to do a bit some proper searching and asking in areas that have knowledge instead of just being a cry baby. If winging on Twitter is you normal response to bad documentation you really can't be much of a programmer. In my book that classes you as a pathetic wannabe with zero research skills who will never create anything of worth.

  25. Did you not look at Amazon Lex for the voice part? by kriston · · Score: 1

    Did you not look at Amazon Lex for the voice part?

    https://aws.amazon.com/lex/

    --

    Kriston

  26. "Big Data my shiny metal arse." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I already know that Alexa is a pointless device not worth writing "code" (skills) for and that Amazon is terrible at both designing user interfaces and writing documentation. I'd rather read about how you got a metal arse, it's specs, and, most importantly, what kinds of Big Data you process with it.

  27. No such thing as AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Never while be. It is strictly a marketing term used to sell a piece of crap that has a huge exceptions list.

  28. Alexa... by swilver · · Score: 1

    ...donot set an alarm for 7 am in the morning.

    Alexa: sure, setting your alarm at 7 am in the morning

    1. Re:Alexa... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not Alexa's fault you can't type for shit...

  29. Par for the course for digital assistants by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

    State-of-the-art digital assistants are little more than toys for party games. They do a good job of dealing with specific, unambiguous queries. However, as soon as even a little bit of intelligence is required, they spin their wheels pathetically. As it happens, those issues that they can tackle you can probably tackle just as fast, if not faster, at the keyboard. Maybe at some point they will become useful; however, as of today, they are just toys, and the kind of toy that you play with for a few minutes and then you drop for good.

  30. Sllrr Punnls by ewhac · · Score: 1

    If Alexa is having trouble understanding your "Solar Panels" commands, the voicerec may not be the problem... :-)

    --
    Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
  31. Whiny git by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Representing the foibles of poor programmers everywhere. Sure, things could be easier, but most of the decent programmers have to spend their days cleaning up after the hackers.

  32. Gasp! by psyclone · · Score: 1

    What if all Alexa voice queries were actually farmed out to Mechanical Turk?!

  33. There is no "I" in "team" by DulcetTone · · Score: 1

    And no "u" in "favorite"

    --
    tone
  34. IFTTT by manu0601 · · Score: 1

    Each time I hear about IFTTT on Slashdot, it is an IFTTT fan whining about the lack of support for the technology.

  35. Stop whining by howlingmad · · Score: 1

    New technology always starts like things. Things will improve.

  36. I had to "Google Translate" that summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Slashdot shouldn't post articles written in a foreign language. I had to use Google Translate to decode that summary. I found out there were swear words and profanity in the text. Shame on you, Slashdot.

  37. Finally the real truth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That all these AI systems are Big Data brute force dictionary lookups. Not even the sophistication of a relational database.

      That explains why Google keeps interviewing with that stupid bubble sort question....

  38. Alexa 100% AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why does the word 'Artificial' in the term AI get overlooked every time we talk about whether something is AI or not? Of course it's AI, it intelligently matched "Solar Panel" to a string you typed into a plugin. Sure, it's not smart enough to permute the variations of that phrase that you want to accept because it's not a mind reader, or even an artificial mind reader.

    Artificial intelligence can be as simple as a single IF-block, something that makes a decision based on information and approximates the behavior of an intelligent being. That's it. Qualities like "how adaptable" or "how intelligent" a system is stand wholesale to the right of the AI demarcation between not designed to approximate intelligent systems and designed to approximate them.

    Alexa would have to hear you say "Solar Panels" and reply with anything but "Solar Panels" for it to not be AI. Which is about 30% accurate in practice with the echo. :D