Gadgetory

so last week was weird there was reports of Amazon's Alexa kind of laughing by itself randomly randomly what was that about a and B what does this kind of teach us about the entire digital voice assistant and the technology and where we're headed with that yeah so so just to catch people up on this Alexa was just starting to like cackle for no reason or people thought for no reason Amazon came out afterwards and said if you say Alexa laughs that was it and it was in rare circumstances where it thought it heard you say Alexa laughs even though maybe you didn't it would just start laughing getting like a full spa like unprompted we're just unprompted say Alexa laughs so Amazon changed that we're now you have to say Alexa can you laugh and then she'll say oh yeah I'll laugh here's my laugh whatever isn't that they're gonna make it like preface the left with actual English because by itself I mean yeah we laugh at it was kind of creepy and kind of funny by itself it was sort of like oh my god something's laughing this is right but it's it's so the engineers we're probably looking at this and the writers you know Amazon has like thousands of people working on Alexa they were thinking how do we humanize Alexa more thoroughly well what do people do all the time that's actually like fun and interesting and quirky well people laugh will be more interesting than trying to get Alexa to cry which by the way I should try to do I don't I've never asked a like for me it's pretty strange as it is bizarre but I obviously blew up in their face they were like trying to do this humanizing thing with Alexa and this is this is the kernel here is that this really conveys how complicated it is to try to get a machine to like interact with humans and to create human conversation and that's like people tend to forget that Alexa is really only about like three years old yeah and we have a ways to go for these machines to actually fully realize and fully understand what it's like to communicate with people so you know the story that happened last week it was a one-off it's it's funny got hurt it's funny no I got heard it's funny it's creepy but I think it speaks to a much bigger degree of like what is going on with the nation see a voice recognition and where it's sort of headed I think people look at voice recognition and they think it's the future and then like we have this amazing technology from the future but in reality we're sort of just in the nation see of this yeah absolutely I mean the thing that's fascinating to me about writing about this stuff is just thinking about this conversation regular conversation when you have with your mom where you're not even paying attention the level of complexity in the nuances of the conversation the dialect that you use the words you use the total the tone all that stuff is so difficult to actually train a machine on they're just two people regularly talking it's way more complicated than you could ever actually realize and you know cramming that into code and shoving it into a machine it could take years and years for it to actually work and that's why it's this great you know scientific effort that a lot of these major companies are trying to do right now right go go a little more into that because right now Alexa and Google home and all these assistants they can really only detect voice like actual voice matching they don't understand any sort of sarcasm or obviously or any sort of tone or the pitch in which you're talking I mean maybe surface level sort of stuff but what does that mean for the challenges ahead and what are they trying to do ultimately because right now it's sort of like okay I could buy more diapers using my voice but where are we really headed with the sort of stuff I haven't seen a lot of this out of Amazon or Google but for some of these small is some smaller companies they really are trying to add emotional recognition and emotional understanding into voice assistance because like when you say something whether you say like shut up or I can't deal with this or that's really funny your tone has so much to do with that and for a machine to like fully understand you fully has to understand your tone again it's like to layer that on top of everything else it's gonna take a long time yeah we got a way to go yeah all right cool man we're done