Slashdot Mirror
'This Isn't AI' (shkspr.mobi)
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 Instead, it took around two hours of following out-of-date official tutorials, and whinging on Twitter, before I got my basic service up and running.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.
It is not a revolutionary neural simulation. Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
My friend has one of these. I can't take a fart without Alexa making comment.
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!
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.
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
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...
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.
"Amazon's contempt for developers"
After seeing the Amazon MWS API recently, I absolutely agree.
The same can be said about you, but so far you just seem to be relaxing and contracting muscles in response to neurons firing.
. . . 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.
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/...