560
Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
560 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
59357 readers
5179 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is why I'm so confused by Amazon's approach. I know they've already sunk millions if not billions of dollars into this, so why has the user experience not improved in the last 8 years?
I'm not going to buy things with my voice when just getting the lights to turn off or music to play can be an infuriating endeavor. Speech recognition has stagnated.
The third party integrations are just so clunky too. They could have made money by selling licenses to businesses in order to access the service, but again, they haven't improved that experience at all.
The "Alexa, let me talk to dominos." or "Alexa, ask LG to turn off the TV" is just stupidly cumbersome. Why can't you set up preferred providers? I don't have to say "ask Spotify to play music" I just say "play music", so we know it's possible. It would be trivial to implement other preferred service providers compared to the overall scale of Alexa.
I don't know if you're in IT at all, but the really crazy thing is that as half baked as Alexa stuff feels...a ton of AWS's offerings feel the exact same way. Their marketing material is great, and I do believe their engineers are passionate and have the right intentions. But none of it feels "finished". It all feels like an elaborate beta test. Things don't work, documentation is out of date or just plain wrong, it's impossible to get actual expert support from Amazon directly.
AWS is their biggest money maker and even that is a cobbled together, confusing pile half the time. Sometimes feels like everything is a house of cards.
It's weird to me that a company of this size is just that inept. It's like once they have enough momentum, nothing can stop them.
The same goes for Google, and to some degree MS.
It's really true. I'm actually annoyed that MS is starting to feel this way, particularly with some Azure related services. MS was always the one you could count on to at least be stable, well tested internally, and predictable. At least in comparison to Google and Amazon. But it feels like they have been leaving some of that behind with their cloud stuff as CI/CD becomes more prevalent.