I still can't get over how bad Alexa is, how it barely even works to do the simplest tasks, gets so confused so easily, etc. They have spent so much money. They have so many developers. They have so much compute available. The technology to make it way better is just lying around and open source now, and has been for the past 1.5 years at least. If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working. It's just mind boggling how poorly managed the whole thing has been, and I think it's a real indictment of top management for letting it get so bad after so much effort and money.
>If I were put in charge of Alexa, I really think I would lay everyone off and start with a tiny group of really good devs and move as fast as possible to get something approaching the voice version of ChatGPT with all the integrations working
OTOH, it's the most perfect device for our household. I have tried other devices - they all do gimmicky stuff and slow down the primary use-case because someone arbitrarily decided what I should ask (or worse, they ask for feedback after getting everything wrong - like I am a free human training sample to their massive dataset)
My use cases are: play songs via bluetooth, turn on/off things (it's almost scary how fast it is), and set kitchen timers.
It's perfect, fast and gets to the point (just says 'Okay' as a response).
No gimmicky answers to stuff like 'meaning of life, universe and everything' or 'how many tennis balls would cover the surface of Mars etc'. Just. Gets. The. Job. Done. No need for fancy LLMs here.
I've got some of the Google ones, and I quite like them, but it weirds me out how many common things they just can't do. For me (and for other people, I suspect), the #1 use case for these things is kitchen timers, and they can do that, and they have fun custom animations for different and sounds for different things I'm timing, but then I ask for it to take a minute off the timer, and it can't, or I ask to rename a timer, and it can't.
