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5,000 People Are Working On Amazon's Digital Assistant Alexa (geekwire.com)
Amazon said this week at an event unveiling the next generation Echo device that it has the equivalent of a small town of people -- more than 5,000 -- working on the company's digital assistant, Alexa. From a report: And Amazon's not even at full capacity when it comes to Alexa. The company's job site shows close to 1,100 open positions on a variety of Alexa-focused teams. Voice-activated assistants appear to be the Next Big Thing in the tech world, and Amazon is competing with a who's who of tech giants, including Apple, Microsoft, Google and more. Interestingly, Amazon and Microsoft recently formed a pact that will see the two company's digital assistants gain the ability to talk to one another.
... across hardware and software.
It was bound to happen.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
...TV 3D glasses of the computing world.
All of them suck - Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant - all are worthless in somewhat noisy environments.
Got kids living at home? Drive a car with the windows cracked open or even the AC running? Forget about using any of them.
I do admit - I love watching people ask their phones and speakers something 3 or 4 times before getting frustrated and picking up a handheld device. It's comical.
The more engineers working on nonsense like that, the more opportunities there are for the rest of us.
You just described almost every laptop in existence.
Laptops, tablets and phones? Sure.
PCs? Only a few of them.
You also forgot smart TVs.
#DeleteFacebook
You just described almost every laptop in existence.
And all the phones and tablets. And the All In One PCs. Frankly, just about anything but a whitebox PC that you do not have a microphone on...
PCs? Only a few of them.
Not anymore. Any All in One will have them, and many major brands have basic speaker and mic built in.
Let's throw more developers at it! (management)
Seriously? 5,000 on staff for that thing? Something is seriously wrong here because I cannot imagine needing that many people for a project like this. What are all these folks doing? Certainly not just Alexa system development. What else are they doing?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Unless you actually look at it. I sniffed the wire on Alexa. Once a day there is a small packet exchange. Occasionally that small packet exchange will result in a moderately large download. I am assuming checking for updates and occasionally updating. Other then that, it NEVER initiates traffic without the alert keyword (Alexa by default), and every time it does, it is accompanied by the devices saying something, and what it "heard" is saved in the app for you to look at. I can not say it will always be this way, as it self updates, nor can I say that "deleting" the recordings actually deletes anything other then your list...
But from my personal testing, it seems to be playing very fair right now.
So when is the Furby going to be resurrected as a digital assistant? How about Teddyruxpin?
We're not thinking about the same kind of PCs, then. Sure, it applies to iMacs and similar, but I'm thinking about classic "tower-type" PCs. The only built-in speaker will be the internal PC speaker that can go "beep!" or "boop!" but nothing else. No microphones of any kind.
#DeleteFacebook
A billion apes with keyboards are translating the western canon into txt-speak
3.4
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: ``How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?''
``It will take one year,'' said the master promptly.
``But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?''
The master programmer frowned. ``In that case, it will take two years.''
``And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?''
The master programmer shrugged. ``Then the design will never be completed,'' he said.
You'd think Amazon would know better... 5000 people, Sheesh. They'll actually be undesigning it -- "never completed" is nowhere near strong enough.
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
All the new business class HP desktop have speakers built in, and some of them have microphones.
Google has so much data feeding into it's AI and Assistant programs, I'm sure the coders are probably just there to make sure the things don't go sentient on them. Amazon has no such access and Alexa's low quality responses to many requests really show this. We got a Dot for free and use it for exactly two things, adding items to shopping lists and setting reminders for the kids. Nearly every other thing outside of "what'st the weather" gets an "I'm sorry, I don't know".
It's "always listening" for the trigger word. It doesn't record, transmit, or otherwise log the rest of the time that you're not talking directly to Alexa.
My home security cameras don't transmit or store images/video anywhere unless I'm looking at them (on my devices). Otherwise they're on and one does motion detection, but nothing is stored in the cloud anywhere.
Got a smartphone? Because I'm betting you do.
I just received a 1 inch rubber grommet in the mail in a foot long ups express shipping box + bubble wrap bag. Very expensive and wasteful. I have been avoiding Amazon because I refuse to use prime and their shipping is really expensive. Often you can see the retailer selling same item on Ebay with free shipping.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Biological assistants then? Not electronic.
4wdloop
5000k people, with even more being hired - it boggles the mind what so many people could be doing related to voice assistance. It seems like before long you can expect to see Alexa support in nearly everything on earth - from cars (they already have a BWM/MINI integration coming soon), but beyond that probably every home appliance, shower heads, toilets, wallpaper... it must be EVERYTHING.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So in other words, the kinds that we don't buy.
But a lot of businesses love them. With WiFi for network and a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, there is only one wire for the entire PC. Much cleaner.
A piezoelectric speaker that only beeps can be made a microphone. Everything resonates with everything else. Even the POTS ties in with the internet at some point and pay phones are too few and far between. But at least, "Help! I've fallen and I can't get up," will always be heard.
I didn't get that.
See this https://www.youtube.com/watch?... video from The Big Bang Theory. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Well the attempts to be funny then
5K Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, German, Spanish etc... Multi language will take a tremendous effort but once they get critical mass for minor deviations then can scale back development.