[dmix]

Mine usually goes:

"alexa lights" (works 50% of the time)

"ALEXA lights"

"ALEXA TURN LIGHTS ON"

I still love Alexa though, or more accurately, voice assistants in the home. It's just brutally out of date speech recognition and answering.

Always been a mystery why they didn't make it any better in the last 5yrs.

I've long wondered what the Alexa team does all day, but I've had friends who worked at Amazon as devs and I'm pretty sure it's "find as many ways to do nothing as possible".

[SavageBeast]

What they did in the last 5 years was deprecate to death the Alexa web interface as well as totally ruin the Alexa mobile app such that there was really no great way to administrate my condo full of Echos.

[alxathrow]

What if I were to tell you that the Echo team spent all their time building not one, not two, but three entirely separate embedded tech stacks, for which all features had to be ported over, that all had to be supported because there's 25+ different devices because people got promoted for shipping 4 different ones every year?

[SavageBeast]

I always wondered (being a developer myself) how a team at a well financed FAANG could fuck this up so badly. It seemed to me as if they were intentionally trying to ruin the product. Changes for no benefit month to month and this month doesn't work like it did last month, etc. Every night all 6 devices get reset to the same broken configuration I just changed yet again that day. What you describe here would do it easily and I'd absolutely believe you. I envisioned there had to be some reason but I'd have never guessed this was it.

[notyourwork]

The mobile app is utterly terrible.

[htrp]

just like Google they fired the entire speech flow teams