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by atdt
2726 days ago
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I'll give you a concrete example. The primary light fixture in my small apartment is a standing lamp in the corner of the living room. I bought a smart plug for the lamp and during set-up I chose the name "lamp", since that is what we call it (in our household you don't have to say /which/ lamp, since it's obvious). Now, Alexa doesn't know what to do if I ask it to "turn off the light", which is disappointing enough, but it also fails to understand "turn off the lamp" -- instead I have to remember to drop the 'the' and say "turn off lamp", which is so unnatural. It feels like I have to bend and deform natural language into something Alexa can parse, which is the exact opposite of what assistants promise to do. |
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I've got one that gets used everyday. It's named "Breakfast Table". 'Alexa, turn on Breakfast Table' works quite reliably. Now, am I actually turning on the table? No, of course not, but that rolls off the tongue a lot better than "Alexa, turn off pendant lamp over the breakfast table". Or recessed ceiling cans as opposed to just "living room ceiling". We really don't have many devices with 'lamp' or 'light' as part of their name. Because we're not really asking for control over a light, we're asking for light for an activity at a location.
But there still ends up being a few that are clunky. "Family room endtable" for a reading lamp near that end of the sectional, or 'Family room sofa" for the two on a console table behind the other part. Haven't hit upon better names for those. Activity naming is an option but we really don't call for lighting in a scene oriented kind of way. Some folks seem to like that, go figure.
Bearing in mind with an open floorplan just about everything on a level is within line of sight and earshot. The placing of multiple Alexa devices took a little fine tuning to overcome reflection from lots of wood and drywall surfaces. That allows for unexpected pickup. Oh, the units handle avoiding overlap with each other, but sometimes facing one way in a room leads to the sound being picked up by the one in that direction. As you'd expect sound waves would travel. But without a LOT more intrusive sensors (cameras, motion, position) it's handling things remarkably well just with voice.
The great tragedy is the leap to conclusions people make. "Promise to do".... where? By whom?
Oh, you want a TV cartoon equivalent of Rosie the Robot... we're not there yet. But given the hilariously low price point for these devices, we're getting quite a lot of bang for the buck in the meanwhile.