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...

Here is the thing...

[Zorro]

I WANT distance from Amazon!

I WANT a barrier against impulse buys!

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

[0100010001010011]

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

I'm not. It's convenient. We have an Echo in the house and the shop. I have a Google Home as well that we're trying out.

I also grew up with 1984 but always assumed unless I took precautions otherwise, someone was listening. Always. Maybe it's because I had nutty conspiracy theorist friends in HS (When 'conspiracy theory' was the CIA is listening, not Chemtrail Gay Frogs).

Even if both devices were actually twice as good as they were they're not hard to outsmart and avoid. It also lets our household blend in with the noise. Amazon (and the CIA) is more than welcome to know how many times my son listens to Thomas and Friends theme song, how many kitchen timers we set and when we turn on and off the lights.

IF I was planning something it's not that hard to go off grid. You'd think users of Slashdot would know how to setup a VPS in a foreign country accessed only through TOR. NextCloud, IRC servers. Hell a shared document in /tmp that everyone just typed plans into. Just for fun I've set up hidden TOR services: IMAP mail, nginx website, IRC server, PGP keyserver. If you're not sure if you're being infiltrated setup IRL keysigning parties and setup a web of trust.

So yeah. Hi NSA. Hi CIA. Hi Russia. I know you're listening. I've always thought you were and always lived my life accordingly.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[geekmux]

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

Generation X saw the birth of the internet. They remember and understand the value of privacy. The inherent risks of dismissing privacy and security online were not well known, but as time went on, they became aware. In the early days, dismissing risk was demonstrating ignorance.

Millennials/Gen Z grew up in the internet era. They've seen the repeated hacks and attacks against privacy and security. They are fully aware of the risks and impact. The IDGAF generation simply doesn't care. The younger generation who dismisses risk today is demonstrating willful ignorance.

Not only is Privacy dead, but the demand for Privacy is as well.

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.

I stopped trying to understand the inherent stupidity in willful ignorance. In the immortal words of Vizzini, it's inconceivable. It can be easily defined in two words today, and follows every EULA that is blindly accepted; I Agree.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[drinkypoo]

IF I was planning something it's not that hard to go off grid. You'd think users of Slashdot would know how to setup a VPS in a foreign country accessed only through TOR.

So you're a user who normally engages in a lot of easily-sniffable communications, then suddenly you start using a VPN and traffic analysis shows that you're not visiting any of your usual haunts. You don't think that's going to look suspicious?

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[0100010001010011]

then suddenly you start using a VPN and traffic analysis shows that you're not visiting any of your usual haunts.

Suddenly? I've had one all along and always visit my usual haunts.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[monkeyxpress]

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

Right about the time it became the official establishment instruction manual.

If ultra-liberalism fails, then they fall back to Animal Farm.

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.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[Oceanplexian]

Do you have a Samsung TV? A computer? A smartphone? Then you already ARE being listened to. The thing about Alexa is at least it's honest. It doesn't pretend to be a TV and then spy on you. Amazon goes through great lengths to keep your usage private. If you are really paranoid about it, you can actually monitor the bandwidth to see if it's spying on you (hint: it isn't).

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[lhowaf]

Despite privacy concerns, we bought an Echo for my father-in-law who is over 90 years old and lives alone in another city. It is there so he can say, "Alexa, call whats-his-name," even if he had fallen and couldn't get up (sorry, Clapper).

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[rogoshen1]

the silver lining in 1984 is that the proles were more or less 'free' -- and there were enough of them to start a revolution if they ever organized (which admittedly is what the security forces were trying to prevent) -- but the indoctrination and mass control was limited to party members.

For example: the section where Winston is in a holding tank with a loud and obnoxious prole. The Prole is screaming and yelling at the cops, while the party members are terrified (Winston also picks up on the police officer's being made nervous by the Prole)..

The difference is, and where we're headed is that we're all inside this self-made panopticon. There is no escape from it, and no one is 'free'.

Re:And Amazon gets to drop in on everyone

[WrongMonkey]

A 1984 scenario requires a government that is organized and competent. The average citizen has more reason to be worried about rogue cops and incompetent bureaucrats than systematic oppression. We're much closer to Brazil than 1984.

There is no "need" to have your phone at all times

[enjar]

Needs are things like water, food, shelter and clothing.

This "need" for a smartphone is more accurately described as Fear Of Missing Out. And, like the monster under the bed that little kids are afraid of, is entirely manufactured in your own mind. Humans survived for millions of years without the "need" for a smartphone at all times. It's probably healthier to leave the thing at home from time to time and enjoy a walk outside, a good book, and being out of touch.

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

[swb]

The technology business over the last 10 years seems to have run out of productive innovations and has turned to non-productive pseudo-innovation designed largely to create rent-seeking opportunities.

Even companies traditionally tied to productive innovations like Microsoft are now completely reorienting their business model towards actual rent seeking, as in renting you Azure time, renting you the productivity software to connect to the software they rent to you to run on your rented cloud platform, and soon to come next, renting you the license for the desktop you use to do it on.

Apple is at least as invested in renting you music and movies as they are in selling you a phone that they've strategically incremented very slowly as a means of stringing out hardware purchases.

Facebook is the ultimate example of non-productive pseudo-innovation. Not only is an epic personal time waster, does it generate any kind of productive activity at all besides advertising revenue (advertising being a prime example of pre-technology non-productive business activity).

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:I communicate all the time without a cell phone

[swb]

Business computing advanced by leaps and bounds from the 80s through the mid-2000s on every front, from storage, to computing to operating systems and networking. It wasn't just consumer electronics, and arguably these didn't really advance much until digital computing got cheap enough to embed in them.

AI has been in development forever, and besides expert systems getting slightly more experty, nobody has really seen a payoff from this. There are no self-driving cars that aren't glorified lab experiments or glorified cruise control. Big data is largely an exercise in self promotion and when used, it's principally for marketing and advertising or the surveillance state, not exactly productive payoffs.

Musk's reusable rockets are great, but we have yet to see the payoff on this. The general benefit is about as far away as the Victorian age was from James Watt's first steam engines. A worthwhile advancement, but not exactly broad enough in benefit or application yet to be seen as producing a broad productive leap forward.

Re:I communicate all the time without a cell phone

[Rick Schumann]

Except that the crap they're pushing on us calling it 'AI' isn't even really 'AI', it's what used to be called 'expert systems', they can't actually think and never will, they've just been hyped to death to the point where most people believe that these things can actually talk to them like a human being; they CAN'T. The entire approach of the technology is wrong, no matter how many processors or how much data you throw at these things, they will NEVER be able to 'think', and they'll ALWAYS fall short of the mark; it's a DEAD END.

So-called 'self driving cars' will fall flat on their face too, for the same reasons as the above: wrong approach.

We won't have anything like real 'artificial intelligence' until we solve the riddle of how our own meat brain performs this trick -- and I have it on the best of authority that we're nowhere near figuring that out, not in 5 years, not in 20 years, maybe not in hundreds of years, at the rate we're going.

So far as the rest of your comment goes: 'Big data' has become a cancer on humanity, just being leveraged by greedy and power-hungry people who want to drain our bank accounts and have control of our lives. I've seen nothing that 'big data' has done that really benefits humanity in general. They violate our privacy and steal from us and then expect us to open our wallets and give them our money. 'Big data' needs to go away.

Drop In - Home Security or Big Brother?

[Koreantoast]

So is Amazon trying to position Drop In as a sort of alternative home security solution to check in on your house / spy on your family and tenants? Otherwise, I don't really see the appeal of having someone just connect into your home without a minimal confirmation by the receiving end. If anything, I just see a whole lot of room for creeping control: parents stalking their children, roommates tracking each other, overbearing significant others demanding monitoring access. Of course, there's also the question of hacking or even an easy way for governments to intrude... Seems a bit too much for me. Amazon Echo Show Drop-In Feature is Really Creepy

Millennials

[Comboman]

Yes but Millennials have never had a landline so it's "revolutionary" to be able to make a call from a fixed device without carrying around a smartphone. By the way, have you heard about the new free, wireless music streaming service that doesn't need data called "FM radio"? It's revolutionary!

Re:Com Badge.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, you can already change the name of Alexa to "Computer" if you want to. "Alexa" is really just the device's wake word, and you can change the wake word to one of these four:

• Alexa
• Echo
• Amazon
• Computer

Re:It's called a land line

[spun]

If moms don't have Internet, who the fuck is Facebook for?

Re:There is no "need" to have your phone at all ti

[JohnFen]

Occasional access to a phone, sure, but it's not now, nor has it ever been, a necessity to have one constantly available.

Even now, there are lots of people who have no permanent phone service at all.

Re:Oh I'm sure at&t/Verizon

[JohnFen]

This wouldn't disrupt their business at all, really. Their business is cell service, and this device doesn't actually replace cell phones.

Re:There is no "need" to have your phone at all ti

[Rick Schumann]

I agree with you 100%. Just wanted you to know you're far from being alone in your assessment of smartphones and how unnecessarily addicted to them people are -- even if we do seem to be in the minority.

The person who calls hmself 'Luthair', in his comment, doesn't get it at all:

phones have been pretty necessary for decades. Everything from emergency services to scheduling appointments or contacting customer support.

None of those things require a smartphone, or even a wireless phone. A landline would suffice.

I find that most people find excuses masquerading as 'reasons' why they 'need' a smartphone, but they rarely hold up under scrutiny, eventually being revealed as 'want' and not 'need', and reasons to be lazy.

I do not have nor is it even remotely likely I'll ever have a smartphone. They're a security nightmare, completely incapable of being secured against intrusion in even the most basic ways, due to a complete lockdown of the OS and the software loaded onto the phone. Worse, many of them have been found to be completely compromised right out of the factory. Then there's the documentable fact that wireless companies are constantly logging and spying on everything you do, where you are, and so on, and documentable proof that government agencies, leveraging the aforementioned lack of security, can push spyware onto anyones phone they choose to, and listen in and watch everything you're doing, everywhere you go. Couple all this with the fact that most smartphones can't be completely turned off, can be remotely turned on, and that you can't remove the battery in many of them, and you have a recipe for never having your privacy, and never having anything on your smartphone secure against intrusion. No thanks, I'll pass.

Re:"Picard to Riker..."

[vux984]

1) We've been almost there for a while.
I've been able to dial by voice to a contact forever.

I've been able to set a custom ring tone forever. e.g. if I'm riker and picard is calling, i could have my ringtone set to 'picard to riker'.

I've been able to answer a call by voice forever.

And all the neat stuff about communicating with the broader network, locating my intended recipient, and activating the communicator on their end ... is called a cell phone.

The sum total of the innovation you propose is that instead of me presetting the ringtone recorded ringtone is passed over the network on the fly. It's pretty obvious that would be trivial to implement.

Moreover, its probably undesirable... since it will immediately lead to spam phone calls with ads and messages within the recorded query that you hear before you even answer.

Speaking of undesirable... a phone call that answers itself like this 'drop-in feature' from amazon. WTF. What an obnoxious non-feature...

Re:It's called a land line

[Errol backfiring]

Advertisers.

Re: There is no "need" to have your phone at all t

[enjar]

My phone sat on a table being charged from Friday till Monday morning. I didn't die, I didn't miss anything of importance, and I actually got more done. My wife and I are considering having a phone cutoff of 8PM where we turned them off entirely. I'm also considering leaving my phone in my car during the workday because honestly, it's more of a distraction than something that helps me get work done. I have a desk phone, and my co-workers and important family members know the number, or they could always just call the front desk and get transferred if they really need to find me.

I've also dropped off a lot of social media platforms, too. They consume inordinate amounts of time, take away time I can concentrate on other things, seem to develop into interruption machines one way or another, and have low-quality content and experience. Reading a book, learning a new programming language, woodworking, exercising, playing a game with my kids, sailing/kayaking, riding my bike, snowshoeing, hiking, learning to cook a new dish (from a dead tree cookbook), visiting my library, participating in a community event, taking a photo walk, chatting with a neighbor or mowing my lawn are all examples of richer life experiences than are provided by social media, and none of them require a smartphone. True, there are ways in which a smartphone could augment some of those experiences, but it's by no means a requirement to enjoy them.

I have no quarrel that a smartphone is an amazing device. It quite literally puts the Internet in your hand, plus calendar, email, you can call people, there are useful apps, etc. It's a transformative technology versus the way things were done before and it's very convenient. What I'm getting at is that it's important to realize that it's not necessary to one's existence, despite the millions being spent on advertising to convince us otherwise. I guess I'm at a point in my life when I feel comfortable in telling "society" to go fuck itself while I enjoy some time away from my phone. I'll come back and use my phone again, but on my terms. I'm the master of the phone, not the other way around.

Drop in unannounced - not "awesome".

[fahrbot-bot]

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."

He and I have different definitions of "awesome". For example, I think it's rude to simply drop in on someone at home w/o prearranging it or calling first - not even, or especially, by my mother. So, I would never enable or use this feature - nor would I ever have one of these spy devices in my home.

Revolutionizing how you can communicate?

[hackel]

People already don't make voice calls anymore. How exactly is this supposed to "revolutionize" anything? I'm certainly not going to be more likely to interrupt someone's day with a voice cal (how rude!) simply because I can do it with my voice instead of pressing a few buttons on my phone.

Re:Com Badge.

[Cro Magnon]

"Computer" wouldn't work for me. The Echo would get triggered everytime I yell at my PC. It's a Win10 box, so that happens a lot.

can't ignore Big Brother trend; here's what to do:

[KWTm]

Because it is so convenient to have Alexa-type or "Ok, Google"-type technology, more and more people will adopt it. So, we Slashdotters who are aware of the technological and techno-political implications of the loss of privacy are fighting a losing battle, if we merely ignore this or decide that we won't buy an Amazon Echo or turn off the microphone permissions on our smartphone. Not only do we miss out on rather amazing technology (which, granted, is not that great a sacrifice), but we can't avoid being at least indirectly affected by our society as a whole which is embracing the whole Please-Spy-On-Me trend. It's not practical to refuse to go to your sister-in-law's family dinner just because they have Amazon Echo turned on inside the home.

So, we the technologically literate/elite need to take an active role in shaping the way technology interacts with society. It's going to be hard doing the "society" part, so we should work on the "technology" part.

We are okay with technology that's under our control. When we realized that signing up for email meant some central email server was going to handle a huge chunk of our private communication, we didn't shy away from email; we overlaid PGP on top of it. Wen we saw that syncing our personal devices via iCloud meant giving our data to a big corporation, we ran our own private OwnCloud server instead.

So what we need to do is to replicate, not just the Amazon Echo little microphone thingy, but the server that's behind it doing all these things. We need a FOSS replacement for a speech recognition server. That way, we can still retain the capability of voice command, without giving up our privacy to do so.

I'm not sure that speech recognition ("SpRec" --my own monosyllabic abbreviation) in the FOSS world is all that advanced; after all, sprec makes a lot of money, and I don't think corporations are ready to part with their proprietary research. Fortunately, a quick Google search shows that there is hope: some FOSS sprec programs are out there, though still in their infancy (Simon, Kaldi, CMU Sphinx, HTK sprec).

I would call on all the technorati out there to recognize sprec as one of the areas where we need to develop. Where there is a lot of corporate ingress into a big developing market, FOSS needs to be there as well to counterbalance corporate interests. Witness what happened with the popularization of GNU/Linux, Firefox, etc.

Thanks for your attention. Please spread the word.