Amazon Alexa: What Happened? Who Knew?
November 26, 2019
I read a somewhat disingenuous tale of Amazon’s Alexa. Navigate to “We Never Anticipated Alexa to Have Such a Profound Impact on Society” and make your own determination. Note: You will need to disable your ad blocker to view this article from Hindu Business Line. Lucky you! Extra work. Surprises abound.
The main idea in the story is that Amazon created Alexa. Everything that took place was a bit of a shock. That includes, I suppose, the surveillance potential, the data stream value, and the willingness of people to put Jeff Bezos’ ear in their homes and offices. Yep, a surprise. Wow.
The write up includes a statement or two from an Amazonian, who remains surprised; for instance:
We have onboarded a lot of such training data. Hindi seemed like the next logical step. We’ll keep pushing the envelope. What has really caught our attention in India is the fact that Alexa and Echo devices are used by a lot of schools to teach kids English, general knowledge and other subjects. This is really inspiring and we will try bringing services and skills to enhance this process. We never anticipated this device which started off as a fancy geeky Star Trek-inspired tool to have such a profound impact on the society. Today, we are trying to make it more useful to students, teachers, people with vision challenges and so on.
Ah, surprise.
Stephen E Arnold, November 26, 2019
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
