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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

It's like an extra word...

It sounds like you just don't like voice assistants, which is fine but don't pretend that the words "shopping cart" are insurmountably larger than "buy".

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It's not just an extra word. It's many extra syllables, when compared to: "Alexa, buy ___".

I don't like existing voice assistants, but for different reasons - mainly related to being online-only, and not giving ability to add commands at top-level. I want to say "Alexa, X" instead of "Alexa, ask SomeCommercialBrand to do X", ad nauseam.

Exactly. With a real life (human) assistant, you don't need to be so explicit with delegation.

I'd have thought you could specify the verb to use and how to action the verb use, at least to some extent -- eg 'buy' means add items to my shopping list from the list of past-purchased items, flagging new items; 'checkout' means buy the current list.

How many commands to Alexa at this point are at least 3+ words, though. I would think the majority. Alexa, set an alarm, reminder, timer for... Alexa play ___album/song by ___. Alexa, play ___ on TuneIn.

> I want to say "Alexa, X" instead of "Alexa, ask SomeCommercialBrand to do X", ad nauseam.

Isn't that exactly what the Alexa skills are for? If you want a skill that's not available you can make your own, which is exactly what you want to be able to do.

The skills (usually) must follow a specific syntax involving the word "ask". So, for example, if you're using the Domino's skill to buy pizza, you say something like "Alexa, open [pizza brand] and place my Easy Order", or "Alexa, ask [pizza brand] to track my order." which are significantly more unwieldy (and more importantly, hard to remember) than "Alexa, order a pizza."

I frequently have to chain several, distinct "Alexa" commands together to achieve my desired end state. For example, if I want to turn on all the lights in my house, set their brightnesses to 100%, and set their colors to soft white, I have to send that as three distinct commands. Being able to create a shortcut, such as "Alexa, Lumos" or whatever would save roughly 30 seconds per instance.

Edit: I forgot to mention that some larger skills are exempt from this, once Amazon has added additional integrations. For example, for my thermostat, I can say "Alexa, set the AC to 78" rather than "Alexa, ask [brand] to set the temperature to 78". I still haven't discovered the special syntax to set the AC to Away mode yet.

> which are significantly more unwieldy (and more importantly, hard to remember)

And also, they're kind of brainwashing users as well. You find yourself repeating a commercial brand's name out loud, all the time. I'm sure third parties love it.

> Being able to create a shortcut, such as "Alexa, Lumos"

You can do exactly this. I have several set up for my house. They're called 'routines' and can be triggered either with 'Alexa, [keyword]' or at a specific time of day.

You can also chain multiple commands together without saying the wakeword each time. For example 'Alexa, turn on downstairs lights. Downstairs lights white.' You have to enable this feature in the settings so that it will continue to listen briefly after the previous command.

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