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No matter how good the LLM features are, I just want to turn my lights on and off and check the time. A perfect LLM could maybe perform on par with a simple deterministic command system for these tasks, but not better. All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Also, one of my first interactions with this Alexa+ thing was “how long is it until 8:45am”, one of only a few commands I use it for to work out how much sleep I’m getting, and it proceeded to ask me what the current time was… I immediately turned it off after that

> All an LLM does is introduce the possibility that a command that worked fine yesterday will randomly not work

Aren't hallucinations part of GenAI? I would assume that "AI" voice recognition doesn't have that baked in, but I'm not working in either of those spaces so maybe I'm missing the details. So many things are being looped into the "AI" umbrella that would have just been called machine learning or pattern recognition a decade ago (e.g. "facial recognition" vs "AI" at a time when "AI" also means chatbots like ChatGPT).

The point is Amazon is adding an “Alexa+” mode that uses LLMs. The plain voice recognition + keyword matching or however the old version works is more reliable (I assume, I didn’t use the new mode much because it immediately failed at what I wanted)

> that tried it at the start and then gave up because of a bad experience

I've had enough bad experiences with products that never got better, or just got worse (Exhibit A: Windows 11). Like most primates, I am capable of learning, and I've learned that once a consumer product/service goes bad there's little hope of a turn-around. I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better, but of the people I know IRL who also use an Echo, none of them have told me that Alexa+ is worth trying, let alone committing to.

Yes, it's on me for not giving Alexa+ a second chance, but I'm not willing to give Alexa+ a second chance because, as a technology product/service customer, I just don't feel respected by the industry I work for (...lol); if Amazon, Microsoft, Google, et al won't respect me, why should I venture outside my comfort-zone for... what benefit, exactly?

The current photos app on Win 11 has accumulated a whopping one gigabyte of - what actually?

I don't run Windows 11 so I haven't taken a look, but I speculate it's because it contains a bunch of ML blobs for Windows Photo's image-classification and photo subject/contents keyword search.

On Windows 10, the Photos app package is about ~140MB on my computer. A good chunk of that is because the package includes a lot of dependencies - including platform deps that I'd expect would be part of the UWP runtime in the OS - kinda like how since the introduction of Swift/UIKit/etc in iOS the IPA packages all bundle their platform dependencies, even though they're demonstrably redundant, because UIKit isn't an OS-provided framework anymore... I'm not up-to-date in the iOS dev scene so I'm unsure why Apple went with that approach.

> I accept that you're telling me that it's gotten better,

I'm not telling you this. I'm basically saying that with Alexa/Alexa+ and with Google's Gemini vs Goole Now(?) I've seen many posts like this. Where someone complains about the AI version, but then there are other posts that come in and claim how much better it is. Even for things like Claude Code you get people complaining about how many mistakes it makes, and then people coming in and saying that it's because they are "doing it wrong". Either "Claude has improved by 10x in the last 6 months. It's so amazing! If you used it a year or so ago it doesn't even compare!" or "You aren't using the most expensive tier of Claude which increases context and thinking abilities that are hobbled in the cheaper versions!"

I never really see a comparison on the same level and it sounds like people talking past each other or some people having legitimate complaints and then others coming in to shill for a product.

I'm not in anyway implying that "You should totally try this out now that they fixed everything" or anything of the sort. I even stated that I don't use any of these tools, and I was commenting as something more akin to an "outsider."

I'm not an Alexa user myself but I have watched my wife interact with it for around 5years now.

The new Alexa powered by an LLM is objectively better that previous Alexa in a few ways. This much was apparently from day one and has only gotten smoother.

1. It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.

2. Speech recognition seems better (less instances of 5x round trips)

3. Conversational with multi-turn --- my wife can have a back and forth clarifying a topic.

4. Seems to understand intent a bit better. (user asked A so they are probably thinking about B)

Those may seem small but they were a tremendous source of annoyance for her -- and thus for me -- "Alexa is not listening, do something!"

> It can reliably execute direct or vague-ish commands "play X movie in app Y" or "play x show" and can infer X movie is only available in app Z so use that.

...how does that work, exactly? (or rather: what's the context here?); there's no possible way for an Alexa+-powered Amazon Echo to control my AppleTV or interface with VLC on my desktop.

Presumably, FireTV?

It's not the early 2000s where just messing around and wasting time on this stuff is cool in itself. None of that time wasted turned into much long term apps that stuck with me. Maybe a banking app and a trail running app.

I ruined multiple dinners with timers that didn't work (with a time/labor cost).

I had to get out of bed in the freezing to turn the lights out. It's easy to hit the lights when I go to bed but annoying having the tool fail and getting back out.

Music stuff didn't work well because I used Youtube Music not Spotify.

Those were my 3 use cases for Google voice, and it failed them all enough I just stopped using it all together. Who cares if it works today if in another month they just change something and break it again? They've shown it's not a tool to use for tool things, it's a 'gee wow' thing. I don't need to be impressed. I need not burnt food.