To a point yes, but also comprehension isn't there - I have alexa and a goodly amount of automation in my home, and it's job 99% of the time? Let me turn the lights off after I'm cozy in bed, set timers for the kitchen, and tell me the weather forecast for the day. Things where its interface is the appeal, I can do all those things without pulling out my phone, getting up for a switch, or stopping from getting dressed.
That is the value, not in having conversations with the bot -- google got closer with its assistants, but only because it has a creepily deep profile on its users, so conversations with google had more 'context' than alexa ever could.
I tried to ask alexa for the weather yesterday (I wanted to know if it had rained overnight to decide which shoes to wear to walk the dog), and it first gave me todays weather, then told me it only knew weather for the next 14 days - yesterday was too hard to predict I guess?
But that's the point - simple tasks where the interface is circumstantially superior? Awesome. But if I want to just chat with my computer, that novelty wore out with Eliza & Dr. SBATSO. The conversations with ChatGPT are deeper, but no more meaningful.
So what can alexa do to make my life simpler? Don't read me wikipedia pages in response to -anything-, if you can't summarize it in two sentences, say it's a long answer and you can send it to my phone if I'd prefer. Make the interactions short and sweet. Control the lights, make me coffee, walk my dog, order more coke. I don't need it to have "new skills" - I just want it to be better at the ones I actually want to use.
One of their best devices appears to in the "Temporarily out of stock" category now. The echo wall clock. It pairs with an echo device and provides a visual representation of the count down timer.
This reminds me of Ambient in the design philosophy.
With push (notifications), it's interrupting. Alexa isn't too bad about that since it's a ring color / icon on a screen. With pull, it's "I need to fetch this data". With ambient, it's there if you want it when you want it.
I don't need to ask how much longer on the timer with the clock - it's there at a glance.
Unfortunately, Amazon has been making the devices (especially ones with a screen) into an advertising channel to the point I'm looking at replacing the various echo show devices with just echos (and a clock if they ever come back into stock).
On reading Wikipedia... Alexa used to have a knowledge engine somewhere in its code. You could ask it what color a black cat was and get back "a black cat is black." You could ask "what color is a light red flower" and get back "a pink flower is pink." Asking "what color is a blue bird" gets back "a blue bird is blue, brown, and white." That hinted at a deeper knowledge engine. There was also an inventor <-> invention knowledge base. One time I even had it return back part of the query language by asking it if two people (who were born on the same day) were born on the same day. The knowledge base functionality appears to have been delegated to "search Alexa answers".
It has gotten decidedly worse over the years as useful functionality that had no revenue associated with it got removed while "revenue enacting" features (pushing fire tv, product advertisements and such) have been prioritized.
Many of my echo shows are now "face down" because the screen cycle of stuff I do not care about is out of the corner of my eye distractingly fast. Time and weather are better served by my watch now.
It still does timers and reminders acceptably well.
That is the value, not in having conversations with the bot -- google got closer with its assistants, but only because it has a creepily deep profile on its users, so conversations with google had more 'context' than alexa ever could.
I tried to ask alexa for the weather yesterday (I wanted to know if it had rained overnight to decide which shoes to wear to walk the dog), and it first gave me todays weather, then told me it only knew weather for the next 14 days - yesterday was too hard to predict I guess?
But that's the point - simple tasks where the interface is circumstantially superior? Awesome. But if I want to just chat with my computer, that novelty wore out with Eliza & Dr. SBATSO. The conversations with ChatGPT are deeper, but no more meaningful.
So what can alexa do to make my life simpler? Don't read me wikipedia pages in response to -anything-, if you can't summarize it in two sentences, say it's a long answer and you can send it to my phone if I'd prefer. Make the interactions short and sweet. Control the lights, make me coffee, walk my dog, order more coke. I don't need it to have "new skills" - I just want it to be better at the ones I actually want to use.