Gadgetory

and good morning on Tuesday August 29th its episode 275 of the 359 podcast I'm the ultimate man behind the curtain BVG and here we are with Ben Fox Ruben and Roger Chang good morning guys morning morning what are we talking about no I Samsung not Samsung Samsung not Apple true there's that well we have some Amazon news we've got a lot of Amazon news CNET's new hashtag keeping it fresh yeah so we've got a big story from been on Amazon's efforts to make Alexa more human we'll talk a little bit about Amazon's takeover of Whole Foods which was official yesterday right which meant cheaper avocados right and other stuff all I care about the avocados well we'll run through that and there was also some news this morning about Amazon launching multi-room music playback that night Chris wrote about so all right people have questions about that we'll try to get through that it's an all Amazon day so if you have any questions about the retailing giant leave them in the comment section we'll get to them in three minutes in 59 seconds stick around from the recording of the podcast we'll be back in four minutes from three to welcome to the 359 I'm Roger Chang I'm Ben Fox Ruben it's all about Amazon today Ben you've got a fantastic profile of Alexa really the effort that Amazon is putting to make Alexa more human aw shucks think that's the only compliment I'll give you further so then tell me more about this story why should people read this so it's interesting to consider what exactly voice assistants are going to become not that far from now into the future I think a lot of people that watch the movie her by Spike Jonze see this idea of us having voice assistants being much more integrated into our lives us developing relationships with them and we it was really fun to kind of delve into this piece to understand how Amazon and Alexa are getting us closer to that as a possibility right and there was this this principle is Casa principle right there's this really so this is an idea back from the 90s called computers or social actors paradigm it essentially describes the fact that even though people know computers aren't human obviously they still treat computers like they are human they say thank you they say thank you yeah or if I like yellow Siri for getting something wrong like I kind of feel bad about it afterwards I mean like Syria doesn't have feelings so casa explains that or at least it tries to I will say I so yesterday I was the first time finally set up a smart home switch for my AC and when I finally did I might Thank You Alexa and Alexa didn't say no yeah like that's rude so but but that's interesting to think about because like if Alexa was actually gonna say you're welcome it would mean that Alexa was yeah it would respond without the wake word which would creep people out and would create privacy concerns but at the same time how exactly are Amazon Google Apple Samsung how are they going to try to figure out different ways to make these things more human-like and in making them more human-like increase engagement increased discovery make them more useful but at the same time potentially create this like creep out factor of we're talking to these robots right now they're acting more like people and you actually went up to Princeton to visit a team of students who actually they're participating the competition to make Alexa more human right right they're creating a social bot named pixie that the primary concept of it is to be able to just chew the fat and talk to you about fashion or travel or not all the challenges to have pixie hold a conversation for what's 20 minutes 20 minutes that's a long time yeah I mean like you can barely stand talking to me for four minutes I know it's it's and and it's really cool to think about how much actually goes into any given conversation among two people for 20 minutes yes so it's a super complicated very difficult unsolved problem in the AI world to actually create an artificial intelligence that could carry on a conversation for 20 minutes really really hard all right well there's plenty to unpack here but you know definitely take a look at then store it's fantastic peace as I said uh next up or lastly I guess we have to talk about the Whole Foods takeover Amazon officially took over the grocery store chain on Monday what did it mean yeah it's it's a first of all what it means for Amazon is is that it's the biggest acquisition ever it's 13.7 billion dollars this is also their their first major foray into brick-and-mortar there's already questions as to who are they gonna buy up next are they gonna get Nordstrom are they get beyond that for the for our viewer is really that I think the immediate impact you started seeing echoes at the store right we seemed a little tacky I was surprised they they right off the bat and and we got discounts on special items right select items yeah they got and and select is really the operative word here it's really just a handful of bestsellers and they lowered the prices on you know avocados responsibly farm tilapia all stuff are mine like yeah like brown eggs buy you know between 7% and 43% Bloomberg you know crunch the numbers on this and so they're planning on doing more of that but at the same time they got a lot of excitement and positive press about cutting just a handful now and this was this eligible for like these discounts were for everyone for just prime customer for everyone prime is going to become the rewards program eventually but they still need to do the integration got it okay and I take that back I'm not into farm tilapia okay Wildman well there's nothing all right okay plenty of Amazon user day that's all the time we have a more lease ownership goes on Cena I'm Rutger Chang I'm Ben Fox Ruben thanks for listening how dare you say alex is not intelligent Alexis intelligence she's an AI she's intelligent she salted her she still gets things wrong sometimes all the time she gets things wrong a lot you get things wrong a lot I do I do I do but they're not selling me at Whole Foods okay putting me in a farm-fresh stance and Ruben that would be weird have a conversation have a 20-minute long conversation with Ben five each other like imagining how difficult it is for an AI to do it just a human to keep it between minute conversation like I'll get bored before our twenty minutes goes violent yeah wait what yeah exactly right and one of the one of the cooler things to think about just about how fascinating people are is it's it's already like they could they could put basically almost all the world's knowledge into an AI it's not gonna make it be able to talk right you know you put every single news story that ever happened today or any day over the last couple months into an AI it still doesn't have the necessary context to actually understand all those I think the last episode of Rick and Morty prove that right no actually I would say that's not sure I think like this like stream of consciousness TVs were walking around us robot yells at clouds yeah and that's one of the aspects that like I talked to one of the you know the heads of AI science at a from the Alexa team and he talked about the idea of like what what would like a robot takeover look like yeah and he said that like look this isn't this isn't really that likely that we're gonna end up with something like Skynet because they're gonna grow and develop in our world they're gonna learn from us so the idea that they learned that were terrible people and must be like wiped out the face of the earth that's like words or a little feel bad for us you know and try to handle the only way to solve this problem suppose our misery right but that was one of my for all of us Roger right the only way to save humans is to kill them all exactly right that's been saying that for years all right let's go jump into the chat I'll pimp says maybe we should give the computer system a kind of acknowledgment when they do get it right maybe that will help the process of them getting better right I think I don't do that well the computers need positive reinforcement but you can do that within the Alexa app if you open up the Alexa app it does ask you did we get this right or is this what you actually are whether it's like to ask first yeah part of it just saying good job yeah no I didn't really have to like there is something in there to give some sort of reinforcement to show the other thing is is that Amazon knows that if you ask for the same thing over and over and over again you probably didn't get it right so even if you're not gonna do that reinforcement through the app or you are in fact so in tune I don't mean to make light of the situation but if you're obsessive-compulsive into a certain extent and that is something that you are pursuing frequently what how is that going to differentiate is it one of two extremes what if you do want to order pizza every single night um I mean like you put up a good point that humans are super complicated and trying to chain train a bot to live in our world and talk to us is very very difficult and you don't have to just train like Brian's but you have to train a bot that's gonna talk to millions and millions of people so it's they just certain concepts about like what what you take for granted and what somebody else takes for granted as like just the fact in your world it's entirely different and Alexa is gonna have to thread that needle I think it's entirely more likely that before the robots take us over they're just gonna get sick of us and leave did watch the movie her right I haven't seen it's okay I've seen movies no spoilers AI which wasn't great but no that was terrible and potential yeah I wanted it to be good there was the right idea there but it just visually it's cool it's gorgeous yeah yeah the thing with that one is is that that's like a boy that looks like a boy I mean it was Pinocchio yes just Pio to me this this concept with the like said this was Y to me it was fun to like write about this is that it's almost entirely cerebral in that it really just targets voice as like a very natural medium as opposed to trying to convince somebody that this robot is a human because it looks like a human you know you're talking to you know a cylinder like a plastic cylinder let's talking back to you right back into the chat Danny Green shout out Danny Green hey what's up yo Alexa needs to work on understanding southern lect she doesn't understand me half the time I'm working on like linguistic variances too at the same time though yeah I think any kind of like multiple accents last I checked Alexis still has a hard time understanding the elderly understanding young people like little kids all right so it makes perfect sense that it wouldn't understand a southern dialect either the more you use Alexa the more it should be able to actually understand what it is that you Danny are saying but it's still limited just keep talking to Alexis yeah it's a chance to like learn more about that algorithm and how they actually learn language because I myself I often admittedly struggle with some accents it's difficult maybe I'm a bad listener I don't know but I'd be interested to know how they do that on a mechanical sense a lot of it is brute force machine learning where just if you feed it enough recordings it's gonna get better but even after years of the echo being out in the market and millions of people using it it's an enormous amount of work and training that's still required yeah I mean like my I've lived with echo basically since the get-go and it it still gets things wrong so a lot echo from the get-go I go from the get-go putting that on the t-shirt imagine soggy and you already kind of brushed on this earlier when we kind of had the breeze through the whole foods integration but any thoughts on the large Amazon product presence in Whole Foods looking at the pictures of displays yesterday seems like they may be in danger of ruining the organic ambiance oh that's a good point yeah I agree I think that it felt to me that it was a little tacky a little forced do you think that's gonna be a permit thing is that like a whole picture like the Amazon area I mean look it's it's a easy way for them to get real estate right rather than having to rent out or open up their own stores you know they've got an established location right how many stores are there 20,000 locations about 460 I was I was on our way I don't think there are 20,000 sours about anything I just threw a number out there all right so a couple hundred stories so it's like a couple hundred locations that yeah they have no real stated they fit much better in one of those Amazon book stores yeah also seldom I believe in Best Buy and Target I don't think this is the best place to really position those but you think they'll create like a little coffee shop book thing kind of the corner that might fit a little bit better Oh barista yeah well I mean like almost like a borders Barnes & Noble type thing like in a Whole Foods with that fit I don't I don't even know it's possible I think that this was a little bit more force than people were making fun of it on Twitter so but I think Amazon was interested in just kind of putting their stamp on the whole food saying like hey you know we sort of like the Prime logo yeah that thing was a real hey I believe that was real and it was pretty gross yes yeah yeah you should kind of let Whole Foods be Whole Foods cut the prices make people happy that way but overdoing it with the Amazon integrations the tech stuff makes dawns taking a lot of the credit for the price cuts but the Whole Foods was already on its way to cutting its prices cuz it needed to cut prices it was it found himself it is yeah found it something basically in a sea of other markets offering the same kinds of organic goods for a lot cheaper so that is exactly right I mean that's that was kind of the issue before Whole Foods got in trouble we've both been business reporters we know that more often than not if a company that's been around that long ends up getting acquired there's a reason for it yeah and Whole Foods was a bit on down cycle I'm not saying that they were about to go bankrupt that obviously was not the case but they were struggling and they were having a hard time really trying to represent themselves in the market after everybody jumped on the natural and organic buzz yo all right back into the chat Jackie touchwood says why are these computer assistants always women so I asked the Alexa personality head in in Seattle when I went out there why is Alexis voice female and I got a somewhat unsatisfying answer which was we surveyed a bunch of different voices and this was the one that did best in the surveys so that's that's the answer it wasn't it wasn't some weird like matronly type appeal to it I'm sure there yeah I'm sure there's something a subconscious level that people respond to yeah okay so there isn't there is one this is it there's one study that I read that I kind of feel like the conclusions are somewhat controversial but it ultimately said that certain computer voices can be more persuasive than others and it ultimately found that male voices attempted to be the more persuasive ones because people took their biases and stereotypes from the human world and applied them to the computer world so the argument is is that in a shopping environment according to the study it would be better off to have a male voice according to the study according to the son reinforce that yes according to the study by so Amazon is creating Alexa not simply to sell you things that seemed pretty obvious to me so there were a lot of different aspects that came into it but yeah I guess from a survey perspective that was Siri you can technically have you can have a male voice yeah Cortana is obviously a woman wasn't that was based on that was based off the Haley laughter yeah that was just kind of a big speed bixby is supposed to be gender neutral they chose the Bixby name because and I associate with Bill Bixby though sorry right what is that it's their male and female voices for bed space you know what I've tried Bixby kind of hard to find a phone that would actually use it right so the complication here is that also according to that study that I referenced is that even if you had a completely tor mechanical computer voice in the study they found that people still gendered that voice regardless so there's no there's no such thing as like a non-gendered computer voice and it also I think we've been trained to think that way it also it also takes away from the experience we're likely to respond to it if it has a more human voice Star Trek episodes the computer is always a woman mm-hmm but the og was Hal 9000 sure how try to kill us yeah maybe that's why they're leaving from Isis last time we had a male digital assistant great yeah all right we are just about out of time we got time for one maybe two more questions Scott Myatt says 3d TVs died out before they really got going even though all the major companies got behind it do you reckon AI might die out in a few years as well no I I think that's I feel like 3d TVs struggled to be useful totally gimmicky it's very gimmicky there wasn't a lot of content for it was expensive to produce content for it AI you can see immediately right off the bat there are uses for a are talking about voice assistance specifically or I mean like AI is really broad trend well if you want clarify our officials artificial intelligence or visual assistance I mean either way I don't think either these trends are going away right like the mean they're both huge huge initiatives for basically every tech company that's out there right now yeah broadly I think most companies most major tech companies these days see a huge opportunity to both melt in AI with humans you make both better and the expectation is is that that's going to and I think in a lot of fields the 3d TV analogy well kind of make sense on paper breaks down when you think about the fact that 3d TVs is hardware is expensive to produce hardware and the content cost of produce you know AI is mostly software the software can be put into anything whether it's a phone whether it's a computer whether it's your washing machine it can be there are way more applications for AI and for digital assistants than there are 3d TVs right that being said the the primary aspect of that question is like is this actually gonna remain a thing or is it gonna get short-circuited at some point and I think it's always good to consider that yes sir any time we talk about tack a number of people comparing contrasting VR to 3d TV including Jeff er who thinks AI might have some potential behind it more so than VR itself he also expands and asks going back to the whole foods topic whole foods being relabeled as pantries thoughts on that Oh like Amazon pantry um I think talking about some of the smaller Whole Foods like they they have like some if I thought they were called the 365 total ripoff of us not just the brand of Whole Foods food that's sold in stores yes yeah like brand right all right admittedly I don't know a ton about this question so I'll try to research it a little bit more yeah well thanks for stopping Ben before we wrap it up for the day let's go down through a line of who we think really really great celebrity AI voices might be Josh Boyd a submits bender from Futurama and I'm gonna go ahead and second that who else do we think okay I was gonna say sir Stallone would be just hilarious no no it's let's put robots in the suit in in the place oh I can actual like Johnny number 5 I'm going steal it that's a great oh crap KITT KITT from Knight Rider I'm surprised nobody's done that yeah yeah that would be great yeah kind of like yet that man just had a very subtle it was more like Stewie from Family Guy kind of yeah aristocrat Ian arrest yes is very aristocratic I like that voice yeah then I I don't even have any other ones we already mentioned how 9000 like I think could be how it knows that would be unnerving I got one more I got one more than me the absolute most annoying robot voice to put into AI that would ruin everybody's life you would smash your echo punky from pee-wee's Playhouse I don't that would be horrible right cooking complete full sentences oh my god be awful that would be a lot of fun I really I really a minute I have to dig that for a second remember what the hell that was but make a like a high in the kinda honey hole all right let's get out of here before I ruin anything else yeah Oh before we do go Alexa subscribe to the 3:59 podcast ooh does that even work I don't know we'll find this it works we'll see anyways you like to Athey you saw or heard hear chicks on a sea net our podcasts also available in iTunes tune in stitcher SoundCloud feedburner and Google Play Music than seen it I'll see you all tomorrow bye everybody bye periscope