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It reminds me of something odd I heard recently. There seems to be a growing consensus that the Turing test is not an adequate measure of intelligence, and many argue Turing was misunderstood; that too much significance was given to the test.

Now the Amazon folks came along with the "Alexa prize". Whoever creates a bot, that people want to spend the longest duration of time with, wins. So maximal user engagement is seen as measure of intelligence.

I find it really weird that our tools seem to seek to waste the largest amount of time for us. I would've thought, that the ideal assistant would minimize engagement time, while maximizing utility; and it also seemed to me like a product like that would easily blow the time-wasting competition out of the water.

But it doesn't seem so. Maybe too early in the development...

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I am curious if you ever worked retail before moving into tech? I did and the experience was very much out of a hollywood comedy sometimes. We had all kinds of labels for the buckets of customers but by and large the biggest one was the chatters. Mostly "old" (though now that I myself am "old" I would reclassify them as middle aged) people that wanted to talk to you. About their family, about their hobbies, about their doctors appointment, about every single possible option for their purchase decision, and then they would MAYBE buy a diet coke before leaving.

It was infuriating as a teenager just trying to get the job done so I could slack off with the cute crewmembers or read the backs of the video game boxes for the umpteenth time, but now that my social circle has dwindled to wife, children, acquaintances, and work I get it. A deep creeping loneliness when you have no one to talk to and in my case all the money in the world that younger me never could have imagined.

It doesn't shock me at all that Amazon would want a way to engage older, generally more wealthy, people and I am sure their expectation is that if successful it would lead to significant sales increases or at least mind share capture for their platform over their competitors. Here's to hoping that they are successful for the sake of the lonely in the world and that they enjoy their 1000% increase in diet coke sales.

Agree with all.

Yes and:

I'm mostly against voice tech. Just feels weird. Still frustrating to use, after 30+ years.

My skepticism that voice would ever become a normal thing was mooted by observing my son play a Living Books CD-ROM adaptation of a Mercer Meyer's Little Critter book. https://archive.org/details/littlecrittergames

Critter asked a question. My son answered. Then nothing happened. My son was hurt, disappointed, confused. No different than if a human child ignored him.

My totally obvious prediction:

Voice UI will become normal for the generation that grows up with a Critter that understands verbal responses.

And to your point, those Alexa style agents will remain their life long companions (pacifiers) into old age. Just like my 84 yo mom's relationship with the TV.

I'm sure I speak for a lot of people, old and otherwise, when I say this:

I fcking hate* those "voice assistants" that companies use on their "support" lines, to avoid hiring actual people. Almost everyone would rather punch "1" or "2" to avoid them.

And I doubt that anyone calls them "just to chat" although maybe if I listened to the call logs, I'd be shocked.

I see what you mean, and I agree. But it's doubtful to me that we're close to a point where people would feel like a voice assistant is an entity worth having meaningful conversation with. It's still a dumb machine, but I'm sure that will change in the future - for some people.

Or perhaps I'm overestimating what people know about current 'AI' systems. The less you know about or understand a subject, the more mystical and sometimes interesting it appears.

Maybe the goal isn't to have people waste time talking to the voice assistant; rather, the goal is to use the voice assistant to discourage the chatters from burning human support agent time by making them navigate a machine system that filters for "real" issues.

Customer support is a cost center for most companies, so I can see where the strategy of a) minimize costs and b) provide just enough support that the FTC doesn't get involved while making the experience frustrating enough (including the cancellation experience) that most users accept crappy service.

For some reason we all enjoyed these experiences at my store. I think it helped that local management had just fundamentally given up, so we knew that as long as some somebody from the larger company hadn't scheduled a visit, we'd have plenty of time to slack off later. Which probably improved customer service, and we did have plenty of regulars, so good job management.

"Just get the truck done" could probably have been our motto.

> our tools seem to seek to waste the largest amount of time for us

Yeah and it might seem fun initially, yet in the long term shit like Alexa and striving for artificial ‘human-like interaction’ just creates more alienation.

...and alienation and isolation, and an atomized society, only benefits capital. Our current mode of production aims to keep workers easily replaceable, with projects siloed and in rigid knowledge hierarchies that make workers dependent (and keeps the propertied class propertied), instead of enabling and fostering the individual and collective intellectual and emotional growth and skills of humanity.

Instead of AI to keep us ‘company’, we need systems that enable humans to have maximum transparency, agency and participation [1].

Platform cooperativism and ‘protocol cooperativism’ (through projects like http://valueflo.ws and holochain) are imo the most important shifts of our time.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/j...

That article was brilliant, thanks! Probably deserves it's own post

I love how little I desire to use my Alexa Dot simply because of how much she babbles on and on. I flipped on “brief response” mode and still it will be “hey Alexa play this song” and she’ll play it then go “did you know with Amazon you can blah blah blah spend more money with us…”

A longer Alexa sentence != longer engagement time, which I don’t think they’ve figured out yet.

Jesus christ! I didn't need another reason to never buy an Amazon device, but you sure gave me one!

Wow that's rich. I already thought the purely functional action confirmations of the Google home are too annoying, but Amazon Alexa straight up tries to re-engage their users and people put up with it?

Google Home does it too. Every once in a while, it gives me the action confirmation and then proceeds to give me advice along the lines of "and by the way, if you ever want me to [do this or that]". If I try to interrupt that charter, it cancels the whole command. I can't find a way to disable that behavior.

Heard from support that replying with negative responses are likely to shut it up.

They track the rate of negative feedback and high negative feedback will kill it over time.

Tangentially: are there any good non-ecosystem-oriented (i.e. not built by someone who wants you to spend more time in their ecosystem; doesn't necessarily have to be free or open source) voice assistants for home automation (not arbitrary phone tasks; stuff like reminders and playing music in a house, perhaps hosted in said house as well)?

I'm assuming not, both because hard, missing corpus of training data for high quality q&a understanding, and minimal demand. But maybe I'd be surprised!

Mycroft - https://mycroft.ai/

and

Voice2json - http://voice2json.org/

I've been playing with lately. Mycroft is pretty solid out of the box (or at least, promising)

Isn't Apple's Siri close to what you want? I've never had my iPhone or MacBook try to sell me anything or show me any ads. (I'm in France, so maybe it's location dependent?)

It works well with HomeAssistant to change the lights, etc.

Home Assistant has a lot of plugins but I haven't checked in a while. I seem to remember something about an AI/ML plugin for voice either coming soon or starting development. Everything for Home Assistant, I think, needs to be able to run air-gapped, too.

Edit: Should have included a link: https://www.home-assistant.io/

I recall that one of the early metrics at Google was actually how short a time the user spent at their site.

The idea (absolutely correct, IMO) was that the shorter the visit, the more successful the search was. I.e., if they provide exactly the desired result at the top of the list, the user would promptly click off to their desired destination, whereas if they gave poor results, there would be many more search actions.

However, they have long since strayed away from such sound reasoning.

> So maximal user engagement is seen as measure of intelligence.

Yeah, I think that we already have maximizing for user engagement in social networks. That didn't turn out that great so far, at least in my opinion. Now we'll have have bots actively spreading most polarizing, rage inducing topics so that engagement is high.

> maximal user engagement is seen as measure of intelligence.

Where do they state this? It seems like maximal user engagement = maximal profits and that's all Amazon cares about.

Well, maybe they did't state it like that. My memory mixed that up a little.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90590042/turing-test-obsolete-ai...

The ideal assistant, and the corporate strategy of capitalist behemoths, is clearly at odds. The longer we give them attention the more money they make.

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