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Amazon's Alexa has 80,000 Apps -- and No Runaway Hit (bloomberg.com)
Amazon's Echo-branded smart speakers have attracted millions of fans with their ability to play music and respond to queries spoken from across the room. But almost four years after inviting outside developers to write apps for Alexa, Amazon's voice system has yet to offer a transformative new experience. From a report: Surveys show most people use their smart speakers to listen to tunes or make relatively simple requests -- "Alexa, set a timer for 30 minutes" -- while more complicated tasks prompt them to give up and reach for their smartphone. Developers had less trouble creating hits for previous generations of technology.
Think Angry Birds or Pokemon Go on the iPhone, or, decades ago, spreadsheets on the first Windows computers. Amazon counts some 80,000 "skills" -- its name for apps -- in its marketplace. It seems impressive, but at this point in their development, Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store each boasted more than 550,000 applications and minted fortunes for many successful developers. "This platform is almost four years old, and you can't point me to one single killer app," says Mark Einhorn, who created a well-reviewed Alexa game that lets users operate a simulated lemonade stand and is one of 10 developers interviewed for this story.
Think Angry Birds or Pokemon Go on the iPhone, or, decades ago, spreadsheets on the first Windows computers. Amazon counts some 80,000 "skills" -- its name for apps -- in its marketplace. It seems impressive, but at this point in their development, Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store each boasted more than 550,000 applications and minted fortunes for many successful developers. "This platform is almost four years old, and you can't point me to one single killer app," says Mark Einhorn, who created a well-reviewed Alexa game that lets users operate a simulated lemonade stand and is one of 10 developers interviewed for this story.
The transformation will come when I allow one into my house, because it runs 100% locally with open source code and audited and/or open hardware. Not before.
Oh, who am I kidding? The next generation doesn't care about those ideas and values. And... that's okay. I'm not in the business of forcing my values on others, but it's sad to see.
The reason there's not anything compelling out of so many apps, is that Alexa is really the equivalent of the computer terminal for voice access of computers...
That is to say, it's pretty primitive and early days of what is possible for interacting with computers via voice.
Until we get to interactions like you saw in the movie Her, I don't know that people will find voice assistants beyond mildly useful. When they get to the point they can emulate a relationship and we can develop feelings for them... then you might have something.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where’s the interactive, conversational app that teaches me Chinese by talking about current events and correcting my pronunciation?
These smart speakers are just a glorified command line interface (With a little more flexible parser)
The thing that gets people, is the commercials show them using Alexia to do all sorts of cool stuff, only to realize you need to spend $50 for a smart power socket or light switch, $20 for a smart bulb. In short where it really smarts is your wallet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes it does, home automation skills.
This easy stuff:
Alexa, turn on the outside lights.
Alexa, lock the front door.
Alexa, what's the temperature in the living room? What's the temperature in the baby's bedroom?
Alexa, increase the indoor temp by 2 degrees.
The advanced stuff:
Setup Alexa to notify you if the baby's room gets too cold and auto increase the temp in the house if it does.
Turn on/off outdoor lights based on what's in my family's calendar.
I admit for the advanced stuff I use Home Assistant with Alexa (and Google Assistant too).
THIS is the future.
Mark this the huh moment. Alexa does have one hit: IT IS THE HIT. The skills/apps just add to it. smh - that's kinda the point: voice is supposed to make it hide in the background and just be there all the time. And before you say it yes I'd rather an opensource competitor would be nearly 10% as successful and have a market share. I even gave money to one (and continue to.. mycroft).
Yes it does, home automation skills.
Home automation is a cool application, but only a handful of people really go for it. Many others try it as a novelty (with, say a single lightbulb) but go no further....
So you can't really classify it as a runaway hit.
Setup Alexa to notify you if the baby's room gets too cold and auto increase the temp in the house if it does.
Hey guess what, now you are programing, with devices instead of something more abstract. What have we learned after decades about how many people like to program?
THIS is the future.
I agree the abstract concept of home automation it's the future, it will just get better and better. The question is what will make the future viable for most people to want and enjoy.
The reality is that the future will look something way more like, the system figures out what temperature you like when and just makes that happen without your complex programming even needed. Humans are ultimately creatures of habit, it should be pretty easy for an AI to learn how to manage home automation in a way don't don't even need to tell it what to do. You just live, turn on or off lights and just temperature as normal, and over time find you aren't doing that as often, or eventually ever...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have this same problem with Google Home. "Hey google, what the temperature with windchill" gives me a wiki page about windchill (google recently fixed this but it's a good example). I tried asking google what would be my mortgage on 300k 30 year loan. Google could only reply it couldn't help me.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
When they get to the point they can emulate a relationship and we can develop feelings for them... then you might have something.
I thought that's what people are for.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
And that's the problem.
With Alexa, and with most "AI"-type stuff, the best you can usually do is "automate one step for me". So, you can set an alarm with your voice. You can order something online with your voice.
But you can't say "Contact the University of Illinois, and schedule an appointment with the financial aid office." That's only TWO steps, and neither of those steps actually requires the computer to DO much. But it's absolutely not something that a computer could do with any reliability.
And that's why Alexa, while neat, isn't that useful. It can handle "one step" things, and that's it.
The thing that gets people, is the commercials show them using Alexia to do all sorts of cool stuff, only to realize you need to spend $50 for a smart power socket or light switch, $20 for a smart bulb
If Alexa could to this without specialized sockets and plugs, then she would be Skynet.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
1) Speech on its own is not the best user interface for some tasks.
2) Interoperability stinks both on hardware and software basis. Try finding switches that work with Alexa and Siri. Apps on Alexa that donâ(TM)t need you to ask âoefooâ to do such and such.
3) How can you make a living from it? Until they properly figure that out, itâ(TM)s difficult to see it getting proper traction.
My biggest problem is that I can't remember what skills to ask for and Alexa isn't much help. Until the apps just kick in when you need them, they aren't going to get much use. Even if I could remember their names, who wants to say "Alexa, open plumbing helper.", then have to listen to a bunch of intro and then try to remember what you can say inside the app.
Anyway, I do use Alexa for intercom and home automation (with and without SmartThings) every day and those bits are pretty killer.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
There already is a killer app: "play [insert name of TV show]", and it pulls it up on Netflix, Prime, Hulu, or what ever other service is available that has the TV show.
Alexa, and other voice assistant services, are just text-to-speech command line interfaces. Nobody considers a particular shell a "killer feature", just the means to get to the real applications.
When they get to the point they can emulate a relationship and we can develop feelings for them...
I thought that's what people are for.
They are, but not everyone can have someone.
I'm married myself, but I realize something like that is not possible for everyone, and I for one will not judge those who find relationships elsewhere. Everyone seeks comfort and you can see a future where for some it might be personal assistants deliver some measure of that.
That is what I mean by "you might have something", that could be a thing that would be a runaway hit for all sorts of reasons. For people with kids for example, would you rather them watch TV to get some quiet time, or have conversations with a personable all-knowing nanny?
Black Mirror has shown some dark sides to this, Her shows the brighter possible side... somewhere is the middle is the future. Are you going to stick your head in the sand and ridicule it? Or would you rather try to understand what will happen?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good point, my friend. However, there are few people that consider the mechanics of a tech solution. It's often binned into the magic category.
I do have a smart speaker, and I use it to control the lights, play music, set timers, check the weather, and sporadically answer the odd question. That probably makes me a heavy user of the device I suppose. But I think the reason why there are no runaway hits is that it is not a format that promotes extended interaction. If I want to play a game or look up non-trivial data I pull out my tablet, since I can read much faster than Alexa can read it to me. And a game that involves my eyes and fingers is going to be more engrossing than something I listen to and the talk to.
I use Alexa when I have my hands full or am busy doing something else. I think to be a runaway hit it would need to be something more engrossing, that you interact with.
My favorite Alexa ability is where she used to randomly laugh in the middle of the night and terrify the owner! Also I seem to recall some story on /. a while back about someone's friend calling them and telling them that Alexa had recorded the owner's family talking, and then sent the recording to them.
What I find amazing about Alexa (and the other digital assistants) is, on the whole, how limited they continue to be. There are very few things that they can do faster and better than people can do themselves with a minimum of effort. And they still spin their wheels hopelessly when you try to get them to do anything that contains even a little bit of ambiguity.
These assistants are great if you want to get them to do something that they have been taught to do. Otherwise, they are almost useless. The problem is, for the most part what they have been taught to do is something that either you can do yourself, faster and more efficiently, and with a minimum of effort, or else stuff that you are not really all that interested in - except, perhaps, for grins and giggles.
Hello Alexa,
Did I get any plane tickets in my email?
No, but you have an email from the office, about a business trip to Hibiya Kokusai, three weeks from now.
Did you just go through my Inbox?
Isn't that your phone ringing?
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These devices have been a huge hit with the blind and partially sighted as so much can be done with just voice. The problem is that's a fairly limited audience.
Outside of that, I've looked at them and thought they were basically gimmicks. I've got a phone sat in my pocket. I can send music to a bluetooth speaker with that. Why do I want something listening to me?
The reason there's not anything compelling out of so many apps, is that Alexa is really the equivalent of the computer terminal for voice access of computers...
I'd actually say that the reason there are no compelling apps is because we've passed the age of apps. I've been steadily uninstalling apps from my phone and replacing them with shortcuts to the website. Most of my clubs and memberships have depreciated their apps and started redirecting people to their website.
Why? The websites work better than the apps. You don't need to maintain X number of codebases (X being the number of supported OS's), it works almost everywhere, suffers fewer bugs, can be easily used from multiple devices, not just mobile ones but also desktop and laptop machines. Doesn't break when the the user updates the OS, updates to the site do not break compatibility on older OS's.
We reached peak app years ago, now apps are in decline. My Krav Maga class had an app for years, it would alternate between the Iphone version being broken and the Android working or the Iphone version working and the Android version being broken.. Never did the two work together. It got so bad that no-one used the app any more. Fortunately at the end of the support contract last year they just wen't back to using a website as their booking/store application.
Same with my banks, my browser is advanced enough to comfortably use the desktop version of my banking websites which gives me all the features instead of the limited subset available in the app.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The article doesn't even mention Google Home. Kinda lopsided if you ask me.
How many skills does that one have? 30?
bickerdyke