[Greed]

As an (incidental) user I can tell you that Alexa is of middling usefulness at best, even for someone with a high degree of home-automation type stuff. The voice recognition is quite good compared to similar services, but that's about the only thing it has going for it really.

Most of the 'skills' (an appstore with absolutely zero quality control) are useless or extremely limited shovelware hidden behind archaic verbal rituals. I say verbal rituals because what you might consider a normal request, such as "Alexa, how much is Tesla stock selling for?", turns into the complex "Alexa, ask Cool ACME Stock Master what the current buying price of Tesla stock is".

It very much appears that instead of being able to infer what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely specific strings to extremely specific corresponding processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely frustrating as a user.

Using Alexa becomes natural. Re-phrasing the same thing thirty times until you get the intended result with the required phrasing moreso.

Really the only reason to buy it is so that you can control your Lifx lights and listen to streaming music on demand. The latter is quite good as long as you don't mind mediocre speakers or sound quality.

All of that said...there is, however, something to be said about the novelty factor of being able to ask for very basic dictionary / wikipedia lookups.

[michaelt]

  It very much appears that instead of being able to infer
  what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely
  specific strings to extremely specific corresponding
  processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely
  frustrating as a user.

I think getting this right, and especially getting it right while allowing third-party skills and preserving user privacy, is probably very difficult.

If someone says "Alexa, we need more bread" how do you figure out which skill to delegate that to when the 'amazon', 'ebay', 'ocado', and 'asda' skills all report they can order products matching that query, the 'music' and 'video' skills report they can stream content matching that query, and the 'grocery list' skill reports it can add that to a grocery list?

If I say that, what I really mean is "Look at Ocado and Asda, if I have a delivery coming in the near future add my most-ordered full size loaf of bread to the order if it's not already present, otherwise add it to my grocery list and remind me when I'm leaving work tomorrow"

And that behaviour is bread-specific. If I'm ordering beer I want different behaviour - and if I'm ordering something personal, maybe I don't want my search broadcast to every retailer just to check if they can help with it.

[icebraining]

The full behaviour may be a bit too much for now, but deciding which to use seems simple: it's how Android Intents already work. Apps register themselves for which kinds of actions they can handle, then the user gets asked which one to use, and can set a default.

> Alexa, we need more bread

< Should I order it through Ocado, Asda, Ebay or Amazon?

> Always use Asda for bread ("unless I tell you otherwise" is implied)

[Eridrus]

I expect Google Home is much better with things like asking for Tesla stock since it already does this kind of thing for search. I tried your exact queries on my phone and they worked. People have also noticed that the Home device also remembers context, so you don't always have to repeat yourself.

So I don't think we can really generalize Alexa's failings to the entire space.