I bought an Amazon Echo Dot. Here's what Alexa said next
- Summary:
- After a month living with an Amazon Echo Dot, here's what I and two mischievous 12-year-olds have made of its AI-powered Alexa virtual assistant.
Last month I got fed up with our kitchen timer and decided to order an Amazon Echo Dot. It was reduced by a tenner for Black Friday and I reasoned that you could easily pay £40 ($50) for an upmarket timer anyway, so why not get one that might do some other stuff too?
From the ads, it seemed as though Alexa, Amazon's voice-activated digital assistant, is pretty versatile. The wifi-connected Echo's array of built-in microphones and voice recognition is so sensitive that you just have to ask, and Alexa will tell you the latest news, deliver facts, find any music you request, or even tell you a joke. If you have smart lights, a smart thermostat, or smart TV or audio system, it lets you control them by voice, too. You can even use it to time your breakfast eggs to perfection.
I was curious to see how well all of this would work. But even if it only did half of what was promised, it seemed like the perfect kitchen companion. It would be like having a personal radio station on tap, where you could be your own hands-free disc jockey and program editor.
Growing up with Alexa
I also wanted to see what my twelve-year-old twins would make of Alexa. Uber’s developer experience chief Chris Messina recently spoke of how his "seven- and eleven-year-old at home ... talk to Alexa and Siri like they’re good friends." My boys are not so congenial with digital devices. They've grown up with what I would call a healthy disrespect for technology — and having seen how they treat Siri, I was curious what they would do to Alexa.
Where previous generations might have pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with a magnifying glass, today's children get to learn about their world by torturing virtual assistants to destruction.
Here's what happened when they discovered you can use Alexa to make a shopping list. The items display a mixture of misapprehension, puerile satire and sibling rivalry. Alexa, what's on my shopping list?
You have 24 items on your shopping list. Here are the five most recent:
— Play shout out little mix
— Pen pineapple apple pen
— New brother
— Pen pineapple apple ten
— Better voice recognition
Would you like to hear the next five items?
Where Alexa falls short
There are two versions of the Echo. The ads focus on the full-size device, which includes its own built-in speaker. But the Dot, at a third of the price, is much better value in my view (especially the second-generation model, which is what has just launched in the UK). It still has its own audio but is designed to pair with an external speaker, over Bluetooth or wire — most of us have a suitable speaker lying around. If you want to spend more, buy a multipack of Echo Dots and put them in different rooms.
But back to our kitchen, where we have just the one. I have to say, it works great as a timer, so mission accomplished. The rest, not so great. When it works, it's a delight to be able to just casually ask for something and get an immediate response — today's weather, driving times to a destination, any music you can think of to ask for by song title, artist or playlist. Those, like Messina, who argue that this is the future of how we interact with computers, are absolutely right. But we're not all the way there just yet.
Here's where I find Alexa falls short:
- Misunderstands often very simple instructions or questions. That may yet improve as Alexa learns to interpret British accents (the service only launched in the UK this October). Also it's important to keep the unit at least eight inches (20cm) away from any obstructions, while close enough to plug the power cord into an outlet. Get your family into the habit of not moving it around or plonking stuff down next to it.
- Only as good as the services it connects to. For example, I can connect to National Rail to get train times, but I've found it's not as up-to-date with live running information as my local train operator's website, which doesn't connect to Alexa. When your son depends on the massively unreliable Southern Rail to get to school, up-to-the-minute train updates are essential. So we still laboriously call up the website on the iPad.
- Doesn't recognize individual voices. This is my biggest wishlist item. When I say, "Alexa, what's on my shopping list?" I don't want to discover someone else has been adding to it — they should have their own. I'd like to be able to tell Alexa not to respond to the children after 8pm (or at all, sometimes, frankly) but still answer to my wife and I. Nor should Alexa wake up when an Amazon Echo ad is playing on the TV and it hears its name spoken in the ad.
- Can't sustain a conversation. Alexa has the attention span of a goldfish. Alexa doesn't retain any of the context of the last thing you did, unless you're following through a structure that the virtual assistant expects — for example, asking a follow-up question that's built into a specific service. To call this a 'conversational interface' is an exaggeration of its current capabilities. It certainly fails the Turing test.
- Too much tinkering to set up a service. There's a rapidly growing list of third-party services, called 'skills', that work with Alexa. But the audio interface gives too little feedback to help you get started, so you have to go digging around in the app on your tablet or smartphone to set them up. That means it's often more trouble figuring out how to get them working than they're worth — many of them are first-generation proofs-of-concept and turn out to have limited value.
Destined to improve
But these shortcomings may prove short-lived. One of the great strengths of a service like Alexa is that it runs in the cloud, and therefore it's destined to improve over time. Most of my complaints may well be resolved as the system learns more from people using it, and as Amazon and its third-party partners upgrade the functionality.
That could all happen very fast, because Alexa is learning from all its interactions. As more and more Echos are sold, the volume and variety of interactions it can learn from increases geometrically. For a system that's driven by machine learning, that's crucial, and will enable surprisingly rapid advances.
In just a couple of years' time, my children and I may turn to each other and say, 'Do you remember how stupid Alexa used to be?' But I'm pleased they've grown up knowing that it is just a machine and recognizing that it has its limitations.
For now, all too often, what Alexa said next just sums it up:
Sorry, I couldn't find the answer to your question.