<story><title>Amazon’s plan for Alexa</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614676/amazon-alexa-will-run-your-life-data-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buzzkillington</author><text>&amp;gt; If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never interacted with Alexa, you’re both missing out and not really missing out.&lt;p&gt;I must be officially old, because I see no reason to give voice commands to things. If I did I&amp;#x27;d just attach a microphone to the server I run at home and connect it to things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>p1necone</author><text>I still don&amp;#x27;t find voice activation to be very good in the cases I&amp;#x27;ve used it. The problem of transcribing what you&amp;#x27;re saying seems to be solved pretty well, but (at least in the applications I&amp;#x27;ve used it in - which is just navigation via google maps on my phone) there still seems to be an inherent problem of discoverability.&lt;p&gt;It took me a fair bit of trial and error to work out the exact magic words to say to get google maps to launch navigation to a given address by car without requiring me to use the touch screen at all.&lt;p&gt;My natural inclination was to say &amp;quot;Hey Google, give me directions to 123 fake street&amp;quot; but this would bring up a route (or if you&amp;#x27;re especially unlucky a list of different places for you to choose from) but require you to press a &amp;quot;start&amp;quot; button with your finger, and often also require you to switch the navigation type from bus&amp;#x2F;walk&amp;#x2F;cycle to car manually too.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Give me directions to 123 fake street by car&amp;quot; would skip the navigation type selection, but still require you to manually press a &amp;quot;start&amp;quot; button (various variations of &amp;quot;ok google, begin&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ok google, start&amp;quot; etc didn&amp;#x27;t seem to do anything&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;After a long period (months) of having to press a tiny button manually while driving to start navigation I finally discovered that if you say &amp;quot;Navigate to&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;Give me directions to&amp;quot; it would skip past the start button screen and jump straight to giving you directions.&lt;p&gt;So now it works great, but I hope I don&amp;#x27;t have to go through tedious trial and error with everything voice activated to work out the exact phrasing it wants.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon’s plan for Alexa</title><url>https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614676/amazon-alexa-will-run-your-life-data-privacy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>buzzkillington</author><text>&amp;gt; If you’re one of the eight or nine people on the planet who has never interacted with Alexa, you’re both missing out and not really missing out.&lt;p&gt;I must be officially old, because I see no reason to give voice commands to things. If I did I&amp;#x27;d just attach a microphone to the server I run at home and connect it to things.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>glup</author><text>The sentence you highlighted struck me as simultaneously remarkably vacuous as well as easily falsified.</text></comment>