Nice! I like where this is going. Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to building a real-life jarvis-like AI... But, this may be closer to reality.
Nice! I like where this is going. Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to building a real-life jarvis-like AI... But, this may be closer to reality.
My wife just got me one of these for my birthday today. It is pretty goddamn awesome, and I totally feel like I'm living in the future.
Sounds like the main thing it needs, which hopefully can be done via software, is push notifications (with appropriate safeguards) and async operations.
Not sure how the Uber thing works without async, as that's a very long-running operation, generally.
Push notifications like a 3rd party tells Alexa to tell you something?
The main one was push notifications in relation to async operations. The example that I saw was a way to do Uber/Lyft type things.
You say "Alexa, find me a Lyft". It immediately responds with "Finding you a Lyft." Then starts an async operation. While looking, every couple of minutes it'll let you know "I'm still trying to find you a Lyft." When it finds it, it says "I've found you a Lyft. The driver is 5 minutes away." Then, with a minute left, "Your Lyft is one minute away in a Honda Accord."
Right now, there's no way to get Echo/Alexa to do anything unprompted and all of it is synchronous. Other than timers/alarms, it can't offer up anything without you asking it first.
I also like the idea of teaching it context. Say, "Who plays Westley on the Princess Bride"...it answers, then be able to follow up with "And when was he born?" It loses context.
In other news, I got IFTTT and got it synced to my Harmony remote, so now I can walk into the house and say "Alexa, trigger watch TV" and my TV, HDMI switch, and Tivo all start up and set themselves to the correct inputs.
The future is cool.
And now we just linked it to my wife's premium Spotify account and I love making it do my bidding while asking for vaguely offensive Dead Milkmen songs, though I'm not sure any of them live up to telling it "Alexa, play Chainsaw Gutsfuck"
I've used IFTTT and Todoist to give an easy way to add items to the shopping list, sync them to Todoist, and that gets shared between my wife's phone and mine. However, it doesn't look like I can sync the other way, e.g., if I add/remote an item from Todoist, I can't send that into Alexa's app to remove the item there. That's irritating. I guess we'll have to use it as a one-way sync where Todoist is the source of truth and Alexa is just a triggering mechanism.
Ah, yes. Understood. I am not sure how valuable that would truly be, as Alexa has no way to know when you're around. If she just started blurting things out, she could tell nobody or the wrong person. I think it's probably better to err on the safe side here and not announce things until there's a way to know who's receiving it.Originally Posted by Tom Servo
I think because Alexa doesn't really do any speech analysis but rather just does speech to text and vice versa. If she had real analytical capability and could figure out what the actual subject of a conversation was, then she could infer context, but she can't. She passes along whatever you said to a search engine, then reads the result back to you. She seems really sophisticated, but she's not.I also like the idea of teaching it context. Say, "Who plays Westley on the Princess Bride"...it answers, then be able to follow up with "And when was he born?" It loses context.
Still love her. So much.
And, I'd add, you're doing it exactly right. Integrating Alexa with a little hardware and a little software and she becomes a powerful ally! She isn't radically changing my life, but not having to fumble for light switches or set my beer & burrito down to turn on the TV is what murica is all about. She streamlines my life!
Was handy using her as a kitchen timer while grilling some corn and steaks last night. Turn the corn over, say "Alex, set a timer for four minutes", and then wait for the chimes.
Pretty handy having it wired up to my wife's premium Spotify account now. I'm assuming it's basically an impossibility that we'll get Google Music integrated, and I don't really want to pay to let Amazon host my music for me beyond 250 songs.
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