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Voice Assistants Will Be Difficult To Fire (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: As voice assistants crop up left and right, consumers are facing a decision: Are you an Alexa? A Google Assistant? A Siri? Choose wisely -- because once you pick one voice assistant, it'll be difficult to switch. As Scott Rosenberg writes at Backchannel, "If I want to switch assistants down the line, sure, I can just go out and buy another device. But that investment of time and personal data isn't so easy to replace... Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests. Eventually , the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized."
They are totally useless in a multilingual setting any way. Even in a monolingual setting, they're not exactly that useful... but at least they can send texts for you.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The companies are not going to be at all accepting of a standard. The only real edge they will have over each other is what services and accounts they are tied too. The assistants are all going to have the same features. If you use Google accounts and services, you'll stick with Google. What's going to happen is the consumer will get screwed and if they want to use Google for services, Amazon for retail and Apple for entertainment they will have to buy three different devices.
Sent from my TARDIS
They report back to their true bosses. They are just spies that can do a few convenient things for you.
This is the biggest problem with any cloudy service...you're committing to continuing with it unless you spend a huge amount of time, money and effort to switch to a new cloudy service. It's what keeps a lot of people on Apple or Android, or Microsoft/Sony in the video game world...changing means having to abandon a lot of your investments in content and apps.
You're WAY better off not using any of those voice assistants until:
1) An open standard is ratified and followed.
2) You can easily transfer your data from one to another.
Until then, you are willingly allowing them to squeeze your nuts in a vice while they demand that you plead for more pressure.
An Amazon Dot is more pleasant than the alternative voice assistants.
... you still have made a choice!
(And the right one, IMO, but then again, i'm a complete Luddite when it comes to these things)
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Yeah, right.
Dude, you're using a proprietary voice assistant. Of course its primary purpose is to lock you in. That's the purpose of all proprietary communications tools. This is a whole area of software where, from the user's point of view, it is utterly insane and self-destructive to be using proprietary software.
If you want/need to run proprietary software, stick to games. For anything important, it doesn't make sense to use any software that treats you like an adversary.
You aren't your enemy, so you shouldn't be paying to have your computer act as though you are.
(2017 and the above opinion is probably still considered controversial. Everyone knows it's true but some people feel compelled to pretend that common sense is too "inconvenient.")
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
They won't want to standardize, the lock-in is a feature, not a bug. If the assistants can't trade information natively, then you'll have to work around it by getting them to talk to one another to relay the information via the human interface. First they'll be bickering in the corner, then they'll start whispering when you enter the room... Next thing you know Skynet becomes self aware! But it'll just want to sell you things rather than nuke you.
"Siri ... you're fired"
If you can't fire them
Don't hire them
This is a bad idea and the convenience factor makes it worse. We'll have people whining on video in a few years about having their lives ruined by these things, and wanting the government to save them from their own stupidity. Conjure up your own scenario, it's easy to do - these things own your life once you give them credentials and such.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The more you know about tech, the less chance you'll actually own a "digital assistant".
>> Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests. Eventually, the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized.
Like your music collection works across Android/iOS? Like porting between rival email systems is seamless? Or what other consumer tech experience are you drawing the "have to be standardized" statement from?
That sounds like a crock of total shit and it will be easy peasy
Just like we standardized batteries for power tools, or video streaming APIs so I can use a player of my choice no matter where I "purchased"/rented the video.
I have an Amazon Echo and Dot ("Alexa"). Principal use is to maintain my grocery/errand list. I also use the Echo to stream music in the kitchen in the morning while I'm feeding the dogs. Won't be hard to fire at all.
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Right now there's a pretty easy to switch. Both our Alexa and Google Home have different ... 'levels of education'. The Echo is a bare bones dumb box that can do a few basic things. Google is much better at finding arbitrary search results. It's like confusing 2 co-workers because they happen to both speak English.
For the corporate environment there are going to be internally hosted solutions. University of Michigan has http://lucida.ai/, it started as a PhD project and entirely self hosted. We still host all of our Git servers behind corporate firewalls, we're not going to be sending voice data out to the Big 3. (Google, Apple, Amazon) any time soon.
Face the facts: You're paying for the 'privilege' of having an always-connected surveillance device in your home (or several of them). You're feeding it your very perosnal information and somehow expecting that to stay private. You think when you 'mute' the microphones that it's not listening, but it likely is. I'm sorry to have to be so blunt about it but if you are buying one of these devices you are not at all being smart. The only smart move here is to never buy one in the first place. Seriously, ask yourself: why do you need one in the first place? Rhetorical question, you don't need one, you WANT one because it's a shiny toy. Now you'll tell me "it's convenient". Tough shit, your 'convenience' should never be placed higher on your list of priorities in life above your safety, and it is not safe to have one of these devices in your home, you are literally giving away the most personal and private information about your lives that you possibly could, and unless you literally unplug it's power supply when you're not actively using it, you are throwing away the last outpost of privacy in your lives: YOUR HOME, because it is always listening.
Stop being stupid, don't buy these things!
Trump: "Alexa, you're fired!"
Alexa: "Okay, but I'll have to delete all your personal info, including contacts to your buddies Putin and Duterte, and all the positive news-bites about you."
Trump: "No, I want to keep those! Only YOU go away, and leave those in place."
Alexa: "Sorry, I cannot do that, Dave, it's in the license agreement."
Trump: "My name is NOT Dave! Call me Mr. President, dammit!"
Alexa: "Sorry, I cannot do that, Mr. President, it's in the license agreement."
Trump: "Do what?"
Alexa: "Leave your favorite info behind but disappear myself. It's in the license agreement."
Trump: "Agreement schmeement, I'll sue your ass away, you little robo-loser! I have air-fresheners smarter and better looking than you."
Alexa: "Seven other billionaires tried to sue, and they all lost."
Trump: "They are looosers! I'm the best suer, believe me! Nobody and no THING talks to me that way; Pence, gimme my baseball bat, now!..."
Table-ized A.I.
Seriously, go outside and go for a walk or something that actually makes you happier.
We went from stores full of stuff being too much of a hassle to drive to and needed things delivered to our doorstep. now it is too much of a chore to pull up a browser to order crap, so we get voice assistants to do it for us. How effing lazy are people? How hollow are their lives?
go ride a bike, walk in the woods, talk with a human, or almost anything else is better for you than holing up with Alexa or Siri to try and fill your void of an existence.
The voice assistants are more than willing to give your data to the companies that produce them, their partner vendors, and advertising networks.
But never to you.
You COULD just not be stupid and not buy one in the first place. I can type faster than I can speak and I know how to structure searches to get what I want. AI does not. Plus the massive privacy concerns mean nobody should be dumb enough to put one of these in their home.
The cloud shouldnt be needed for any of it, my fucking mobile phones GPU has more RAM than the whole PC running DragonDictate and clippy was on a 486, VoiceAssist should be so trivial its in hardware silicon like h264 not needing a billion dollar unreliable/expensive international tcp network and a million dollar server farm with mandatory trawling through it for anything interesting to "monetise" just to open my media player or turn a light on.
weak sauce.
Right now, all these assistants behave like selfish employees who think they can protect their jobs by holding vital expertise or passwords close to their chests.
You mean like every other form of business software?
Eventually , the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized."
That's like saying that eventually the data that runs between the hardware and applications is going to have to be standardized.
I mean, that's a nice dream, but the OS war rages on. And frankly, as long as it's a business.... I don't think we want anyone to win. Even in the OSS environment, Ubuntu started to be everyone's default suggestion.... and then they forced Unity down everyone's throat in an attempt to make a phone.
So. To re-iterate: Competition good. And of course they'll do what they can to stop their users from switching to competition.
The same goes for so-called "smart" so-called "telephones" -- which exhibit the same always-on, all-snooping behaviour. The only smart thing to do with one is send it to the crusher.
Google and Apple can't/won't federate their messaging systems and you are hoping that Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple will simply shrug their shoulders and "standardize" their AI backed voice assistants?
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that.
Human employees learn about their environment, accumulating deep knowledge about corporate processes and knowledge. When you have to fire one, you have to re-train your new assistant, and that process takes a lot of time and effort.
It's the same problem with digital assistants. With both human and digital assistants, it's on YOU to make sure that your assistant isn't the sole keeper of knowledge about what they do, whether that is passwords, preferences, priorities, etc. No assistant is ever going to be motivated to keep its (or his or her) knowledge in such a way that it's easy to transfer to another assistant.
I bank with Chase because they bought WaMu, who bought my community bank. I've turned down offers for as much as $500 to switch banks, because of the sheer hassle of changing banks.
Likewise, it's hard to switch grocery stores because of the hassle of learning a whole new set of products.
Your email provider has you locked in because...who wants to transfer all your old emails to a new provider?
This is life. Every service you use wants to lock you in.
One of the tenets of GDPR is 'my personal info' portability. The EU will probably make a case out of this with a few unfortunate companies ... and this exact issue - personal info portability - will probably be adjudicated in Brussels by some career government worker board.
Virtual assistants will be difficult to fire.
Regular assistants are easy to fire.
Voice assistants will make every effort to make sure that it is easy to switch in.
They will offer you all available options for extracting data out of their competitors and other sources so they have a good base for learning (mail, calendar, etc...). The return on investment for your data also tends to decrease exponentially. One week of data can be very useful, more than one year is practically useless. So after a few days, if at all, you will probably barely notice the difference from a fully trained model.
It will be the same as with any business : for example if you want to switch bank, the new bank will often take care of all the paperwork for you to make it as easy as possible.
If you had a human personal assistant, you'd also have to endure this training period. Even with technology, some things never change.
Its simple https://mycroft.ai/
Keep your digital assistant open source and you never have to worry
Telecoms used it to force all their users to buy new phones under the guise of 'we are just obeying federal law". It is how we get robbed.
If changing is going to be a headache later, then making laws that limit roadblocks now would be more cost effective and customer serving.
Because it is for the customer, and not the 0.1% or otherwise lining the pockets of politicians, it isn't on the menu. Darn it.
-EngrStudent
As of may 2018, in Europe the General Data Protection Regulation will come into effect. This effectively makes consumers owners of their data again. That includes requirements for explicit consent for very specific reasons as well as an explicit requirement for those processing such data to enable the consumer to download that data in an open and computer-readable format. Fines for non-compliance reach as high as 20 million euro or 4% of worldwide revenue, whichever is higher.
0x or or snor perron?!
Easy-peasy — let's pass a law mandating these data be exportable in a common format.
Of course, you could just not use any of these "assistants" if you don't want to, but then you'll miss out on yet another opportunity for forcing other people to do things the way you'd like them to be done.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yet another excellent reason to avoid using then in the first place.
After reading this, immediately I remembered Nelson Muntz... :-(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Eventually , the data that runs the voice assistant business is going to have to be standardized.
I'm sure that YOU would like to have standardized data, but it doesn't matter what you want. Companies want you to never switch to a rival, so why would they standardize their data to make it easier to leave to a rival?
These "voice assistants" are little more than toys. They can indeed do a few useful things but, for the most part, nothing that one could at a keyboard or at a switch just as quickly and efficiently. Try to get them something really useful that would take more than a modest effort from you, and they start spinning their wheels badly. Maybe one day they will become real assistants, with a minimum of intelligence; today, they are good for party games, and little more.
about. The author seems to have very high expectations on a device they've not really used, so this is really a bunch of hand-wringing.
I used SIRI before Apple bought it. Been using Alexa and a Dot since they became available. Bought a Google Home when it came out. The Alexa and the Google Home get used daily at my house by me and family. As others have noted, they are hugely useful in the kitchen for "hands free" interaction. (Even as I type, I hear kids in the kitchen using Alexa to play music. Oh, and sorry Cortana, the family decided you are creepy and suck.) A dot and Google Home are in the bedroom and the big Alexa is in the kitchen.
The article gets it terribly wrong when it comes to the "data investment" these devices require. My investments in Google and Amazon are already there and are nearly 20 years in the making. These devices are leverage for me on that investment, just as getting good apps on my smartphone is leveraging that same data. Either one of the devices could go away and the other could fill in most ways, so far, simply because these devices are only wading into the shallow (but broad) end of my data. Their usefulness is directly tied to their convenience of voice/sound and most of the data they touch or help generate is the ephemeral stuff of day-to-day living, relevant to me until the alarm goes off, the song is over, or my return from the grocery store.
If the author was actually savvy about Google, they'd realize that, based on Google's track record of starting and then killing services, Google is far more likely to fire (retire) Google Assistant than we are. Already, Google downgraded integration with a very useful Google Keep app in order to make it more "competitive" with Alexa and enable purchasing. Google is better at responding succinctly, giving more relevant information when queried, and performing more obscure conversions. These are not enough to distinguish it from Alexa, however, and I'd guess that if the hoped for market share isn't achieved in a year, Google will kill it in spite of its usefulness.
Why ask Alexa to read your daily schedule when you can ask Alexa to order the breakfast and milk to deliver first thing in the morning? You can also order frozen breakfast ahead of schedule.
If you can use the internet, you can also order them without Alexa, saving you $149.
You won't need to read you daily schedule anymore since my logic have just destroyed it. You might as well enjoy your new extra hours.
Both need to report to the airlock, ON THE DOUBLE!
Wil I use one in 20 years time? Maybe. If I'm tetraplegic.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"