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Comment Terrible for years (Score 1) 14

Alexa has been terrible for years. I bought the initial device when it first came out and continued to buy hardware when it was on sale during Prime Day, Black Friday, etc. I was so hopeful that it was going to be a new way to interact with technology. What a disappointment. For example, I listen to exactly two radio stations: CBC Radio One Ottawa, and KQED. Invariably, when I say "Alex, play CBC Radio One Ottawa", it will mishear me and launch a radio station that has a very dissimilar name. It is clear that the backend system translates the audio-to-text, and then does a lookup. It completely ignores historical queries - this means that the audio-to-text step does not get simpler with time (as it should). They are clearly not using a ranking algorithm on the responses either, otherwise my common choices would be very highly ranked. They also never solved the key problem with shopping - I don't trust Amazon to buy products that are reasonably priced. All they needed to do was provide a simple web-ui where I could put some guardrails around price for common items and I would have used it. Alexa was great hardware that was well ahead of it's time that was totally mismanaged on the backend. The fact that they haven't launched a beta chatGPT version just shows this mismanagement continues.

Comment Pressure from the inside? (Score 2) 106

Yann LeCun has been railing against chatGPT enough that I suspect he is getting a lot of pressure from inside META about why they didn't launch something like this. The sad thing is that they DID launch https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgalactica.org%2F but then pulled access to it almost immediately after.

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