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Alexa+ And Its AI Brain Improvements
Alexa has gotten some upgrades, but it's been rocky going forward:
The good news is that the new Alexa+ is, in fact, more fun to talk to than the old one, with more realistic synthetic voices and a more humanlike cadence. (There are eight voices to choose from; I used the default setting, an upbeat female voice.)
And I liked some of Alexa+’s new capabilities, such as booking a table at a restaurant and generating long stories and reading them to my 3-year-old...
The bad news is that despite its new capabilities, Alexa+ is too buggy and unreliable for me to recommend. In my testing, it not only lagged behind ChatGPT’s voice mode and other A.I. voice assistants I’ve tried, but was noticeably worse than the original Alexa at some basic tasks...
[Daniel Rausch, the Amazon vice president who oversees Alexa and Echo] said the biggest challenge in building generative A.I. models into Alexa was that they were fundamentally different types of systems...
The old Alexa, he said, was built on a complicated web of rule-based, deterministic algorithms...Adding generative A.I. to Alexa forced Amazon to rebuild many of these processes, Mr. Rausch said. Large language models, he said, are “stochastic,” meaning they operate on probabilities rather than a strict set of rules. That made Alexa more creative, but less reliable.
(Via NYTimes.)
Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick was way out ahead of all of us in his 1965 story The Zap Gun (Project Plowshare). He describes an elaborate computerized guidance system that is altered for civilian use as "Orville":
Maren called back cheerfully, “That’s from 202.”
“My sketch?” He stared at the object. Plowshared. This was the product for the retail market derived from the decision of one concomody on the Board. “What’s it do?” he asked, finding no switches.
“It amuses.”
“How?”
Maren appeared in the doorway briefly, wearing nothing. “Say something to it.”
...In Lars’ hand, forgotten, 0l’ Orville stirred and spoke.
It was uncanny; he blinked as its telepathic verbal response croaked at him, its answer to a question he had already forgotten asking. “Mr. Lars.”
“Yes,” he said, hypnotized.
Ol’ Orville creakily unwound its long-Iabored-for results. Toy though it was, Ol’ Orville was not facile. Too many components had gone into its make-up for it to be merely glib. “Mr. Lars, you have posed an ontological query. The Indo-European linguistic structure involved defeats a fair analysis; would you rephrase your question?”
After a moment of thought he said, “No, I wouldn’t.”
Ol’ Orville was silent and then it responded, “Mr. Lars, you are a forked radish.”
For the life of him he did not know whether to laugh. “Shakespeare,” he said, speaking to Maren who, now reasonably fully dressed, had joined him, was listening, too. “It’s quoting.”
“Of course. It relies on its enormous data-bank. What did you expect, a brand-new sonnet? It can only retail what it’s been fed. It can only select, not invent.”
For the last few years, the company has been working feverishly to upgrade the A.I. inside Alexa. It has been a slog. Replacing the A.I. technology inside a voice assistant isn’t as easy as swapping in a new model, and the Alexa remodel was reportedly delayed by internal struggles and technical challenges along the way. L.L.M.s also aren’t a perfect match for this kind of product, which not only needs to work with tons of pre-existing services and millions of Alexa-enabled devices, but also needs to reliably perform basic tasks...
(Amazon Echo)
The bedroom door was partly open. “What’s this?” he called. He could see her dim, underwear-clad form as she traveled back and forth between the bed and closet. “This thing that looks like a human head with no features. The size of a baseball.”
(The Orville from "The Zap Gun" by Philip K. Dick)
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