Here’s one of my favorite features of Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem is the notification system. For the small price of letting Bezocorp access to all aspects of my life, my Amazon dots chime whenever Alexa believes I’ll want to know about something. Then I simply mute the input for my current conference call and say, “Computer, what was that last notification?”
(“‘Computer’ is my wake-up word for the Alexa world. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea; I tend to use “computer” quite frequently in other contexts, which plays havoc with my home automation.)
Usually Alex replies with some pretty solid information. However, her explanation yesterday left me thinking that if the responses are purely algorithm driven, some programmer totally missed the mark. More likely they’re now AI-driven, in which case Alexa could use a lot more “I” in this use case scenario.
Alexa’s response was, “A book by an author you enjoy was just marked down 30%. Do you want me to add it to your shopping card and have it delivered to your Kindle?”
Sweet. This is the kind of efficiency I need for my leisure reading time. So I ask, “What’s the book?”
Alexa: “You can find out on Amazon.com.”
Okay. “Who’s the author?”
Alexa: “You can find more information on Amazon.com.”
If bad data is worse than no data, incomplete data is somewhere in between. A few days later I still have no idea which author and which book Alexa was trying to tell me about. Hopefully it wasn’t the next Game of Thrones novel…