[feintruled]

I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal, though it's funny. It was only a £1.99 a month and there was a 7-day free trial anyway. Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation. I think the issue it shows is how you can't trust voice control for anything important. It's just a bad interface for buying stuff particularly. If I am buying some dog food, I search dog food, glance over the options, check prices and delivery dates and reviews then plump for one. Thinking of doing the same by voice drains me.

"Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow". Could that work? Would I trust that it had worked, if Alexa just said "ok" without me running off to a computer to check the order details and defeating the whole object? More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.

(I actually tried that sentence just now. Alexa remained in a stunned silence.)

[kabdib]

> I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal

Entering into a subscription with no knowledge of that, let alone any up-front information about price or other terms, is very scummy behavior. The after-the-fact email attempts to claw back a moral high ground, but it's not difficult to see it for what it is. This combines the convenience of a smart speaker with the rapacity of a cold caller who already has your credit card number. It's thinly disguised fraud, and pernicious.

I doubt anyone would be happy with "Alexa, what's the weather?" entering them into an unannounced dollar-a-day contract with The Weather Company, or if asking about soccer scores got them automatically hooked up with a $7.99 Sportsball Channel add-on to their cable bill.

[ghaff]

Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK.

But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss.

Voice assistants have gotten marginally better over the years. But I really wouldn't miss them much if they all went away tomorrow. The vision was/is that they could match at least a marginally competent personal assistant over the phone. And they're nowhere even near the ballpark.

[piva00]

> playing an album

Only if the album you want is titled in English (or some recognised language and with actual words).

I listen to a lot of music that have unpronounceable song and album titles. Hell, even artists, how could I ever tell a voice assistant to play "STRGTHS by SHXCXCHCXSH"? An extreme example but not too far from some of the top 10 recently played stuff on my Spotify: "sch.mefd 2" by Autechre, "JNSN CODE GL16 / spl47" an album/EP by the same Autechre, "Hygh 2k12" by SCNTST.

It's a technology on that uncanny valley of working and simplifying some use-cases, and frustrating enough for some edge cases that you end up not trusting it, in my case making me avoid it.

Even for some basic alarms/timers it can be frustrating when it misinterprets your accent and sets timers for 50 minutes instead of 15. The pain of having to fix the failure and then re-add a timer/alarm is enough to push me away.

[LorenPechtel]

I use Alexa's announce capability to tell my wife to answer the phone--but what I actually tell her to say is in her native language, not in English. The announcement works fine but my phone tries to render it as English text. Never the same thing twice.

And she definitely does the 50/15 thing to me, although generally the other way around. Everything from 30/13 to 90/19 is vulnerable to being misunderstood. My wife has a lot more trouble with it--she learned her first word of English at 43 and so she still has a fair accent.

[supermatt]

In many cases it doesn’t matter even if the word is in English. When choosing an audiobook, I’ve had to make some leaps in phonetics to get Alexa to understand certain words in the title.

[philistine]

> Hey Siri, start the last podcast I was listening to in Overcast.

> I can't let you do that, Dave. Overcast has done its best to set up a shortcut, but you need to say exactly or else I'm punishing you with the enunciation of useless web searches.

[iggldiggl]

https://ia800806.us.archive.org/8/items/TheBurkissWay/S03E03...

[jsjohnst]

> But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like driving--not so much.

I’ve tried Alexa, Google, and Siri multiple times over the years while driving and it’s just embarrassing how over hyped all of them are and yet simple questions which a human could potentially easily answer in seconds doing a search (if not driving of course), but none of them even get close.

- How far away is that storm?

- How many miles to the state line?

- What timezone is Omaha in?

- Where’s the closest gas station that has diesel?

- What’s the top rated BBQ place in town?

[harvey9]

You can easily search how far away is that storm?

The others really ought to be voice searchable, but the diesel one would need to be timely in my area, where a couple of places have not had diesel available for several days.

[ghaff]

>You can easily search how far away is that storm?

Pull up radar on Weather Underground (and/or look at the hourly forecast) and you should have a pretty good idea.

Whether or not that's the best example, the point is that there are a bunch of things I might want to know/do while driving that I can't look up without pulling off the road someplace. And even if I could theoretically look them up by voice, it would probably be an exercise in frustration to try to do so.

[NoSorryCannot]

It's an interesting example because the question is very easy for a person to understand but giving an actual answer would take some time, but you can invert those for an AI.

But at least a human would give a reasonable answer, like "looks like at least thirty miles" or even just "I don't know". Your phone will instead say, oops, I didn't quite get that, try again later ( goodbye chime ). Which is terrible.

[jsjohnst]

> You can easily search how far away is that storm?

Yes, I have two apps I use for that depending on what form of “how far away” I’m looking for, Dark Sky (time) and RadarScope (distance).

[Agentlien]

I tried using Google Assistant a few years ago and it was so frustrating in some dumb ways.

A notable example was when I tried using it to make a call. I told it to call my wife, by name, and it couldn't understand her name at all. So I said "call my wife" and it asked who my wife is. I couldn't answer with voice, because it still didn't understand her name. But it did give me a popup to select her from my address book. So I did and the popup went away... No call. So I tell it "call my wife" and it replies "who is your wife?".

[feintruled]

I had the same problem funny enough! My wife has an Irish name that Google cannot pronounce (Alexa is much better in this one area) so I can't message her unless I try to match the mispronunciation (which I balk at out of self-respect) but it allows you to set nicknames for people. So I gave my wife, the nickname 'my wife'. I had to use the UI to do that, and even then, do I really trust Google to message the right person?

[LorenPechtel]

Is she confused because you're a polygamist? :)

[jacquesm]

> Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing.

That's because you interact with it as though it is a person, so your expectation levels are corresponding to the mode of communication used.

[ghaff]

>That's because you interact with it as though it is a person

Well, that was sort of the pitch and it's certainly implied by "virtual/voice assistant." Certainly Amazon wasn't pitching Alexa as a voice-operated kitchen timer. To be honest, I'm probably better with them now because I know they mostly don't work but can be used for some simple tasks for which I know an incantation that mostly gives me the result I want.

[jacquesm]

Fair enough, but anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch. All I saw was an always on microphone with a line to Apple, Google or Amazon and for me that was reason enough to bar that stuff from crossing the threshold at the front door here.

[ghaff]

>anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch.

That probably was--or should have been the case. But it's one of those things that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. After all, if a fairly young child can do something, it seems like a computer wired up to the Internet could. And in fact, voice recognition has gotten quite good--at least for English speakers without a strong accent. But actually carrying on a conversation in natural language is a really hard problem, even if children can do so from a fairly young age.

[dr_dshiv]

Yeah, but otter is friggin awesome. Could it have more commands in it? Like “email those items to me” or “make a to do list”

[danpalmer]

> order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow

That's 2 continuous axes and one discrete option. What if the cheapest one is the worst reviewed? What if the most expensive one is the best reviewed? What if the middle price is only slightly above the worst review? What if there's a clearly cheapest, best option that is only available in 2 days?

How do you "trust" an answer to this? What does a single choice answer even mean?

I'm not sure I'd trust a shopkeeper to make this decision for me, as they could easily rationalise not telling me about the cheap and great option if it's not in stock, or falling more on the quality than the price because they make more margin. And Amazon is in this position on this one.

I can see a market for "Alexa, order me cheap dogfood for tomorrow", but pretty much anything more complex than that I just don't think people would give the decision to a biased third party to make for them, let alone a non-human one.

[harvey9]

I think it's almost achievable if you say 'cheapest with 4 or more stars and delivery tomorrow'. Problem remains that cheapest could be the smallest pack size or cheapest per pound, and Amazon is not good at the latter anyway.

[danpalmer]

It is, but it means engineering your formulations carefully before giving them to the computer. Computers taking things literally isn't new, but there's normally less on the line when we do it.

Also I would imagine that as often as not there would be an opportunity for human judgement. Maybe there's a _much_ cheaper one at 3.98 stars, or the 4+ star and next day delivery options are 3x more expensive than the next available option. In both of these cases a human with the right intentions would likely stop and do something different.

[RileyJames]

> “Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation.“

The elderly woman stated she didn’t own a computer, or know how to use one.

Yes, it’s an edge case.

[actionablefiber]

It's a pretty big edge case. In my family we also got an Alexa for my aging grandmother who was already shaky on computer literacy and developed serious motor/vision problems preventing her from using a computer. She learned just enough about Siri and Alexa to make phone calls, play music, and change the channel. There are definitely more old/disabled people out there for whom voice-activated assistants are not just a fun luxury gadget but are essential to performing everyday tasks like calling family members. We had to monitor her account to make sure she wasn't signing up for things without her understanding.

[kube-system]

It’s disgusting that these types of devices have potentially an obvious use as a accessibility device, and yet, that’s completely being ignored in lieu of mass-market sales gimmicks.

We need an ADA that has teeth in the digital age. This is like a brick and mortar store building a ramp into their store for the convenience of people who can walk, and making it an inch too narrow for a wheelchair.

Real corporate social responsibility would be to tackle some of this low hanging fruit in their own area of expertise. But instead, everyone just promises to buy some carbon credits by 2030.

[LorenPechtel]

You can turn off voice purchasing entirely.

[kube-system]

I’m not saying that Amazon should simply avoid harming people with disabilities. I’m going one step further and saying that they should actively help them.

Voice assistants are an obvious solution for people who can’t use other input devices because disability. Yet, Amazon has designed the device as a solution for people who choose not to use other input devices out of mild inconvenience, without any thought to accommodating the former.

They could improve people’s lives with very little marginal effort, yet, they choose not to. This is illegal when you’re building accommodations in the physical world, but sadly, mostly legal in the digital world.

[ghaff]

I don't see the conspiracy to create voice assistants that don't work very well which is what you seem to be complaining about and which, as far as I can see, pretty much everyone on the thread agrees with. Voice assistants just aren't very good so they're mostly mildly useful for people who don't need them for anything important. I'm not sure what you would necessarily do differently to make it more useful for people with disabilities other than making it better, in which case maybe I could actually use it for something useful in my car.

[mdp2021]

> an edge case

Not really: that person could have easily assumed that she "did not need to own a computer, nor know how to use one", as she may have easily assumed that no random "rambling" uttered into a computerized microphone could ever trigger expenses. It's a justifiable expectation.

[Ekaros]

How was the account setup in first place? Did she go to store, pick up device. Go home and read it her information and credit card number to create an account?

[feintruled]

Update.. I tried just "order dog food" and it picked a decent choice based off my order history and then I could have said "buy this". So to be fair (with a device with a screen) it performed quite well.

[marcosdumay]

Good that you tried it.

There are plenty of ways to make the interface very usable and reliable. Fixating on the voice UI is absolutely the wrong way to see it. The real problem is that your "assistant" doesn't actually work for you.

[pessimizer]

> More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.

It's a recommendation engine at that point, so what I assume it will do is buy you the products that Amazon is pushing or that have paid to be recommended. Does Alexa handle the website's small print to the effect of "there may be other vendors selling this product for a lower price than the vendor we're recommending."

[vidarh]

If you have FireTV, then I'd be happy to use voice to do searches to show on it (the same way you can tell Alex to "show me comedy movies" or "search for X on Youtube" and have it show up on a FireTV device), but yeah, I can't imagine I'll ever use it to order something. Reordering something I've ordered before maybe, as long as I can be sure it will actually re-order the exact same thing.

[amluto]

> "Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow"

This is Amazon we’re talking about. The cheapest best reviewed dog food probably has 4K excellent reviews saying it’s the best cheap coat hangar anyone has ever seen.