Hi Terence. I share your pain, but I put up with it.
I'd say this is the 'Agile' world we now live in. Ship MVP and iterate based on feedback. Yeah it sucks to be an early adopter, but what's the alternative? Yeah, Amazon could have polished it a lot more, but a lot of that polish might have been wasted if they eventually found out they were madly just polishing the dark, undesirable corners of the proverbial turd...
It will improve... Voice Assistants are going to be huge (as much as Siri/Apple tried to ruin it for us all...). Screens and keyboards are a horrible, crippled interface for a large number of short interactions, just not many people realise it yet...
I've been in Speech Tech for 23 years, and waiting for this era most of that time...
And P.S. - Yes, the term "AI" has been re-purposed (OK, abused!) in recent times. There is often not a lot of 'I' in the 'AI'. It ain't classic, historical 'academic AI', that's for sure. It seems to be widely used now with anything that vaguely mimics a human-to-human interaction. I guess we just gotta get with the program... Although that also means I developed a Voice AI back in 2001 - An OpenMenu system understanding spontaneous query utterances spoken to a banks up-front IVR.
That's it, "Voice AI in 2001" is going on my CV...
I'd say this is the 'Agile' world we now live in. Ship MVP and iterate based on feedback. Yeah it sucks to be an early adopter, but what's the alternative? Yeah, Amazon could have polished it a lot more, but a lot of that polish might have been wasted if they eventually found out they were madly just polishing the dark, undesirable corners of the proverbial turd...
It will improve... Voice Assistants are going to be huge (as much as Siri/Apple tried to ruin it for us all...). Screens and keyboards are a horrible, crippled interface for a large number of short interactions, just not many people realise it yet...
I've been in Speech Tech for 23 years, and waiting for this era most of that time...
And P.S. - Yes, the term "AI" has been re-purposed (OK, abused!) in recent times. There is often not a lot of 'I' in the 'AI'. It ain't classic, historical 'academic AI', that's for sure. It seems to be widely used now with anything that vaguely mimics a human-to-human interaction. I guess we just gotta get with the program... Although that also means I developed a Voice AI back in 2001 - An OpenMenu system understanding spontaneous query utterances spoken to a banks up-front IVR.
That's it, "Voice AI in 2001" is going on my CV...