Living with Alexa
The amount of free stuff being handed out at AWS re:invent last year was unbelievable. It seemed that every-time you turned around someone was ready to give you a t-shirt or a pen or a usb drive (all in exchange for your email address of course, for future spam). I’m pretty well stocked for t-shirts and pens so I politely refused. However, the one thing I did come home with was an Amazon Echo Dot. Everyone who registered got one of these and in comparison to most other things on offer, it was a nice touch.
The Echo Dot itself is small hockey puk shaped device with a 3.5mm output jack and a small inbuilt speaker (and blue tooth if you want to connect it to your sound system). The Dot has a big brother called the Echo which essentially is a taller version of the Dot with a more powerful built in speaker. Personally I prefer the smaller, simpler Dot which gives me the ability to connect it to my sound system. The magic however is delivered by Alexa, the charming digital voice assistant who is patiently listening to your every word (more on that later) and ready to help you out whenever you need her.
Out of the box Alexa comes with a few tricks (called Skills). She can tell you the weather, she can play music for you (linked to your Spotify or Amazon Music account, but frustratingly not Apple Music), and if you are interested she will even tell you some jokes. But this is just the start and the power of Alexa comes by finding the Skills that help with your everyday life.
The biggest thing I needed to get my head around when I starting using the Dot is that this is a device with absolutely no screen. Yes, there is an Alexa app and there is a concept of Cards to provide visual interaction within the app, but this is voice-first system, which is something that is very new to me. To date I have been used to things like Siri to supplement what I’m doing on my phone, so going to a voice-first model takes a bit of getting used to and its fair to say that it works better for some Skills than others. Things like music, the news or the weather all work well, but (and my wife tells me this) if you are asking Jamie Oliver for a recipe then things become more tricky and the iPad comes straight out.
Beyond the simple things mentioned above the Echo starts to come into its own if you have a smart home. On a scale of zero to smart my home is about a three. I can turn my heating up and down using a Nest Skill but not a huge amount more. The Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas is closer to a ten on the smart scale and has recently announced that all its rooms will soon be equipped with an Echo allowing guests to control every aspect of lighting, audio-visual and temperature. So you if your home is more like a suite at the Wynne then good news, you’ll love the Dot.
Having these skills is all well and good but what is the future for Alexa? Will it be able to move beyond simple household tasks and telling me the weather to a mainstream ubiquitous platform not only used in the home but beyond and into the enterprise? From my time using Alexa so for it certainly has a few things going for it;
- Developer ecosystem — You can think of Skills much like Apps and Amazon are trying to replicate the success of app stores like Google and Apple with Alexa. To date there are over 5000 skills in the Alexa store and this is continuing to grow on a daily basis. As I started to use Alexa within my home I started to think of other potential use cases outside of the home and I wanted to understand more about what the developer experience was like so I recently started working on my first skill to help me understand more. I’ll write up my thoughts in a separate piece but to date my experience has been very simple and straightforward and all the signs are there for Amazon to replicate the App Store success of iOS for Alexa. As we know, developers are key to adoption of platforms so this is important.
- Ease of use — One of the best things about Alexa is how simple it is to use. It is always on, there are no buttons to press and simply saying “Alexa” even from quite a distance away or in noisy rooms will waken Alexa up. Once you are engaged with Alexa the quality of the voice recognition is genuinely second to none but more importantly Alexa is showing signs of having context about a dialog and chaining commands together. If this voice-first platform is to transition to dominance this ability needs to extend further to a point where you can have long and significant conversational exchanges with Alexa.
- Embedding — currently Alexa is mainly accessible using an Echo or an Echo Dot but as I mentioned above Alexa is where the magic is, not the Echo devices. In the future we will see Alexa embedded in many more appliances evidenced by a number of announcements that were made during AWS re:invent. We heard about enhancements to Alexa Skills Kit that will allow Alexa to be embedded in cars or household appliances and then there was the announcement about the partnership with Intel combining Alexa and the Intel Smart Home Hub. These partnerships and ease of embedding by other thirds parties could support the transition of Alexa to a mainstream platform.
And in contrast there challenges that will need to be overcome;
- Privacy — In order to provide the ease of use I talk about above, by default Alexa is always on, listening to your every word. For the security conscious you can choose to turn the microphones off and only trigger Alexa by pressing a button on the device but the standard setup is to use a wake work (either Amazon, Alexa or Echo). Amazon say they store only the last 60 seconds of data on the device and when Alexa is triggered the information captured a “fraction of a second” before the trigger command all the way through to the request being completed is sent up to the Amazon cloud. So there are two things here — the data that is sent up the Amazon cloud when Alexa is triggered and the data that is stored on the device itself. The data that is sent up is what you are consciously telling Alexa, so assuming you only tell Alexa things you are happy to be transmitted and stored in the Amazon cloud the risk is the data captured “a fraction of a second” before you trigger Alexa. There is a risk that this “fraction” is longer than you would hope and that the information is sensitive and not something you would choose to share. Regarding the second point about the data stored on the device, Jeff Bezos was quizzed on this recently and his argument was there is little difference between the risk of an Echo being hacked and the fact most of us are carrying smartphones in our pockets with software controlled microphones, which are equally open to attack. Personally, neither of these points concern me as a citizen using Alexa within my home, but could Alexa be used within a more private setting such as a doctors surgery or an emergency room? I would hope the answer can be yes as there are lots of great use cases but I still need more information in order to properly access the risk, something I will be picking up with our friends in Amazon.
- Intelligence — I have already mentioned that this is a voice only device and how this brings it own set of challenges — Jamie Oliver is an example of a skill that is difficult to use but there are frustrations outside of the actual skills and it can sometimes be hard to remember all the skills you have installed or to discover new skills. If Alexa is to truly succeed it will need to move from having short simple structured exchanges to more long and meaningful conversations, helping to eliminate some of these issues on usability and discoverability. Clearly machine learning will play a huge part of this and Amazon are as well placed as anyone to deliver on this but if they come up short the risk is Alexa will not grow out of the “useful house hold tool” category and other competing products such as Google Home will take its crown.
Overall I have been very impressed with the Echo Dot and Alexa, much more than I was expecting to be. For me, I would still class Alexa in the “nice to have” category but I definitely can see the potential for it grow beyond this and if the security and privacy concerns are more clearly understood and addressed I think we will be seeing a lot more Alexa not only within our homes but much further beyond.
