Amazon's Next Big Bet is Letting You Communicate Without a Smartphone, Says Alexa's Chief Scientist (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: The next big function to take off on Amazon's Echo devices will be voice or video calling -- which is a way Alexa can reduce the need to have your smartphone on your at all times, said Rohit Prasad, VP and Head Scientist at Alexa Machine Learning. "If you have not played with calling and the video calls on Echo Show, you should try it because that is revolutionizing how you can communicate," Prasad said in an exclusive interview with CNBC at an Alexa Accelerator event in Seattle Tuesday night. (The event is dedicating to developing new voice-powered technologies.) "When you can drop in on people who have given you access -- so I can drop in and call my mom in her kitchen without her picking any device -- it's just awesome." (Amazon added the ability to call mobile numbers and landlines for free onto Echo devices a few weeks ago.) Amazon doesn't have a smartphone that lets customers bring a digital assistant everywhere -- like Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant -- and communicating through Alexa devices is one way of reducing the need for a personal handset, Prasad said "I can easily drop in and talk to my kids," Prasad says. "They don't have a smartphone so that's my easiest way to talk to them. It's yet another area where Alexa is taking the friction away."

Comments

Home Phone

[Anonymous Coward]

So I guess we all end up with landlines again...

And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[swb]

Did Orwell's 1984 stop being a basic high school literature requirement in the last 20 years?

I am continually baffled by the number of people mindlessly signing up for an active listening (and soon, viewing) device in their homes.

You can just see the incremental push for "new applications" which will ultimately require continuous listening, viewing and remote transcription.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[Vektuz]

The problem with ubiquitous surveillance of the masses is not generally to get that one specific person, its to get the masses to self-regulate and self-report.

As long as for every 1 of you, there are 100s of 're-educated' upstanding citizens that will do the spying and reporting FOR you, you have no chance.

This is the real message and threat behind 1984. If you think its about how the government uses its power to specifically target people, you've missed the point. Its about a systematic narrowing of what people can see, how they are raised, and how they are taught to basically program them to truly believe what the authorities want them to believe and behave like the authorities want to behave.

Basically, the 'boot stamping on a human face forever' is not the surveillance - its the concept that if you can get into this kind of reprogrammed (mentally) society where the number of outliers is small enough to manage by a small security force - mainly because the vast majority of folks really believe in it and are willing to report their neighbors out of fear or true belief - you have reached basically a valley that can be impossible for society to escape out of. It can literally remain in that state forever, as no single individual can ever apply enough pressure or organize with enough others to make any real change.

The world of Orwell's 1984 is not a world where revolution gently simmers just underneath the surface, held in check only by a tenuous government hold on surveillance. Its a world that has already failed and will fail forever and ever, where the populate itself has already settled into that pattern where outliers get picked out and chewed up by the system due to being vastly outnumbered by the believers, where all is already lost, and would continue to be lost, even without the surveillance equipment. Its really the re-education and re-shaping of society, taking information away, censoring, changing school curriculums, changing what people feel and what they believe, that is what makes it permanent - and it can happen in as little as one or two generations.

I communicate all the time without a cell phone

[mykepredko]

Often it's with people that are in the same room as I am - no hardware required.

Anybody else tired of huge companies trying to force solutions on us that we don't need?

Re:I communicate all the time without a cell phone

[nomadic]

I would say it's the opposite; the technology business in the late 90s and early 00s was focused on marketing incrementally better consumer electronics. Most of the companies of the first dot-com boom were basically just setting themselves up as unnecessary middlemen, just on the internet. Now the focus has turned to better AI, self-driving cars, space travel, big data, etc. etc.., which seems a bit more profound than letting people order dog food online.

Re:It's called a land line

[Errol backfiring]

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