[Arthanos]

>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.

[Marsymars]

SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're targeting.

[kridsdale1]

Basilisk-flattery embedded in your site.

[gunian]

the basilisk died in the chamber of secrets plus the reds won so not a good time to be a slytherin

[TeMPOraL]

It's not that basilisk. It's the retrocausal one. Like the dead Cthulhu that waits dreaming, except with more math.

[VWWHFSfQ]

It's just SEO. Just targeted specifically at AlexaBot instead of GoogleBot.

[acdha]

It’s worse than that because SEO excreta is still shown to the user, who at least has a chance to question it. With this style of assistant, the user doesn’t even see what the bot saw and that opens up new areas for abuse which is harder to detect.

[jhp123]

This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.

> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...

[serial_dev]

Just like nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, you can find a handyman and schedule an appointment with a voice assistant / chatbot in 6 months, and everyone will use self driving cars in 5 years.

[jarsin]

I was a little kid when a local university came out with news that they had a big breakthrough in Cold Fusion. I remember my mom telling me it was going to change everything and we would travel around the world on invisible rails.

Many years later the worlds richest man is digging short tunnels to drive electric vehicles in.

[qingcharles]

My father always joked about the statements they made when they opened the first fission power plants, "Energy that's too cheap to meter!"

[sevensor]

My house, not too far from Three Mile Island, was built between its commissioning and the incident with reactor 2. As a result, its builders installed the most insane heating system known to man: resistive heating in the ceiling. Crank it all you want, your feet will still be cold. It’s a system that could only possibly be acceptable if electricity doesn’t cost anything.

[TeMPOraL]

They weren't unreasonable - they just didn't predict the whole world going collectively insane after Chernobyl, and choosing to pay for being slowly suffocated and cooked to death instead.

[dangus]

It also seems like it's ripe for just being an outright lie. People will pay Amazon to be ranked as the preferred service provider. You won't get the best service provider, you'll get the one that paid Amazon the most money.

[codebje]

That’s the best service provider, by Amazon’s criteria.

[OneDeuxTriSeiGo]

I can already see Alexa+ acting like this when someone says they are hungry:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oa8s07agHeY

[bttrpll]

I remember when Alexa in a household appliances (e.g., microwaves) and nearly burned people's houses down. This should be interesting.

[vrighter]

They already failed at this. Adding something to a shopping cart is just one of the steps the mentioned example states. And consumers have already indicated that they don't trust it, because they prefer to know just what they're buying. So this project, by doubling down on that, is DOA

[rurp]

Yeah there's roughly zero chance that works reliably. It's so prone to bad failure cases I'm skeptical that they'll even ship something that tries to do that automatically.

On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"

[schnable]

I'd expect this to be like when you call the bank and go through the phone tree, enter your account, birth date, SSN, zip code, etc. Finally get connected to the rep and the first questions are "What's your name and birth date?"

[brewdad]

"I backed the trailer part way up the driveway. I hope that's ok, sir."

"You'll want to feed him some oats unless you're ready to butcher him in the next two hours."

[CamperBob2]

And you don't want to know what will happen if you tell it to invest in oil futures.

[WheatMillington]

>Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

I'm not aware of any failures that could reasonably be described as "catastrophic".

[theamk]

well, what's the worst thing that can happen when summarizing? The summary is grossly incorrect, opposite of the text being summarized.

This is exactly what happened, multiple times.

[GrzegorzWidla]

> Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

Unsurprisingly this human-made summary of Apple’s missteps is grossly incorrect as well. There were no catastrophic failures and the feature being poorly implemented does not warrant the hyperbole.

[sbfeibish]

Your home might have a single provider you've previously contracted with for fixing your fridge, air conditioner,... We had such a service.

[smcleod]

Especially not one owned by Bezos

[david422]

Imagine being on the support team trying to troubleshoot when something goes wrong for a customer. Maybe that's the catch ... there is no support.

[seb1204]

I thought that is a given. Support is limited to a website with some superficial FAQ and a link to a live chat that never is available.

[pengaru]

> link to a live chat that never is available

In a world of widely available generative bullshitters, Live™ chat is always available.

[1oooqooq]

i can picture your ancestor saying "what? i will go to one mega store and buy something made in asia instead of getting a suit made to measure by Giovanni across the street?"

or your mom complaining about "buying shoes online without trying then" (or maybe that's you if born before 2000)

AI slop will define your identity tomorrow, doesn't matter what you think

[scarface_74]

Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.

[MattJ100]

I don't think you can say that is the problem. It may have exacerbated the issue, but problems exist when summarising full news content too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko

[rs186]

Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.