'This Isn't AI' (shkspr.mobi) 138
The Amazon Echo, a 'smart' speaker developed by Amazon.com, gets many things right. You can ask it to for weather updates, check news, and to play music, and Alexa, the AI powering the device, won't disappoint. But how smart is Alexa? Programmer Terence Eden put it to a simple test to find out. From a blog post: I can now query my solar panels via my Alexa Amazon Dot Echo. I flatter myself as a reasonably competent techie and programmer, but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite! I wanted something simple. When I say "Solar Panels", call this API, then say this phrase. That's the kind of thing which should take 5 minutes in something like IFTTT . Instead, it took around two hours of following out-of-date official tutorials, and whinging on Twitter, before I got my basic service up and running. [...] It's not so bad, but it does reveal Amazon's contempt for developers. Several of the steps contained errors, it involves multiple logins, random clicks, and a bunch of copy & pasting. Dull and complex. A frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying experience. I ended up using StackOverflow to correct errors in my code because the documentation was so woefully lacking. I kinda thought that Amazon would hear "solar panels" and work out the rest of the query using fancy neural network magic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The developer has to manually code every single possible permutation of the phrase that they expect to hear. This isn't AI. Voice interfaces are the command line. But you don't get tab-to-complete. Amazon allows you to test your code by typing rather than speaking. I spent a frustrating 10 minutes trying to work out why my example code didn't work. Want to know why? I was typing "favourite" rather than the American spelling. Big Data my shiny metal arse.
Completely unsurprised. (Score:3, Informative)
It is not a revolutionary neural simulation. Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.
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This article isn't news.
Exactly. It's like: "my hardware/software doesn't do everything I imagined it would do". I don't see Amazon making claims to do what the writer wants or that it would be deemed "easy" in the mind of the programmer/user. No news, just standard complaints from a partially dissatisfied customer.
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Its basically just a 80's-era chess machine.
No it ain't. 80's era chess algorithms are nothing like modern speech recognition algorithms.
Re:Completely unsurprised. (Score:4)
Which is sort of the point made in TFS. Does Alexa have modern speech recognition algorithms? I suspect it does, but the tools devs have to work with don't expose that functionality. If it can't handle synonyms, phrasing, differences in American and British English, and so on transparently to the dev, then it doesn't act like modern speech recognition from the dev's point of view.
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Sounds like it's a modern speech recognition engine, and that's where it stops. The dev needs a modern NLP engine to tack on to the end of that. Though I suspect that the two should not be done as different layers to be honest, since the NLP part would almost certainly provide strong constraints on what makes sense out of the speech recognition part.
Either way though, speech recognition is much less useful without NLP, and I strongly suspect they have that NLP part, so it's kinda odd to not expose it.
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Either way though, speech recognition is much less useful without NLP, and I strongly suspect they have that NLP part, so it's kinda odd to not expose it.
I wonder whether they really do, in the way that Google.MS does. Google and MS have vast troves of search history to train machine learning algorithms against and build graphs of how language is used in practice. Amazon (nor Apple) doesn't have that data, so they'd have last-century-style hard-coded NLP.
Still, you'd think they could do better than what TFS describes - at least use a thesaurus.
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Because all the evidence is that the AI services aren't. That they use some form of AI-like tech to generate a portion of a non-AI response doesn't make it AI.
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So speech recognition is AI, and Alexa's responses aren't?
Wuhhh?
Regardless of your definition of AI, Alexa's algorithms are still nothing like an 80s chess machine. Most 80s chess programs used some variant of alpha-beta pruned search with some hand-hacked code to attempt to evaluate positions. Additionally, they usually had openings tables and some had endings tables splatted in, in order to reduce certain easy cases to "solved" problems.
Alexa's algorithms are most likely some variant of a deep CNN.
Comple
Gasp! (Score:1)
What if all Alexa voice queries were actually farmed out to Mechanical Turk?!
Alexa is tough (Score:2)
I'll concur that there is a big learning curve in creating an Alexa app (which I have done), but I think once you've done it once it is pretty easy from there.
There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!
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There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!
Apparently not "Programmer Terence Eden" because he managed to complain about the challenges of his one-off skill rather than thinking ahead at how he could streamline the process. Perhaps a permutation generator to populate the different phrases Echo should respond to?
Re:Alexa is tough (Score:4, Insightful)
There would be a big market for a "visual basic" style builder for Alexa apps...someone should write one!
There are already more than 10k Alexa skills [1]. I'd prefer an AI that cuts it down to the 5 you need.
On the learning curve, I still haven't discovered how to get the local time your Alexa unit is in. In the end I made my skill get the time from a local web server, since the concept of time zones is still alien to Amazon. I'd describe the API as childishly bureaucratic.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/... [wired.com]
No kidding (Score:1)
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At least "A.I." wouldn't confuse "thing" with "think".
So despite your binary user name, you've proved yourself as being human! Congratulations, you pass the test!
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No, he didn't miss AlphGo. He has been on that "there is no AI" crusade since he joined slashdot.
It's just a matter of semantics. He thinks AI means "indistinguishable from human intelligence" when it clearly does not (dictionary definition says "mimics human intelligence", which is much more vague).
This is one you can add to the old slashdot comment predictor. Every article about AI will include a bunch of deniers and a bunch of apologists. It's pretty much a given, at this point.
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The core problem is defining "AI" The more progress we make toward "AI" the more we demand of it.
Various industrial controllers may have been considered "AI" at the time but now we see them as programmed machines.
There is a spectrum from:
1) Performs programmatic tasks with a human friendly interface (not AI but appears to be) to
2) Performs rough guessing to try to mimic or exceed human responses in limited situations (this is AI applied to specific situations but not the holy grail) to
3) Performs all tasks
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It's just a matter of semantics. He thinks AI means "indistinguishable from human intelligence" when it clearly does not (dictionary definition says "mimics human intelligence", which is much more vague).
Unless AI means (more or less) indistinguishable from human intelligence, it is basically meaningless, as you can say that something like ELIZA in many ways mimics human intelligence. As does a room thermostat.
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Yes, but since a computer successfully did it, it's no longer A.I.
People are in denial over the power of competing multi-layer neural networks for rapid self training and superhuman performance. We leapt over a decade in 2 years and folks haven't caught up yet.
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Machine learning != AI
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You're a decade too late to make that complaint. It's all AI, it's just that the trendiest part changes every decade.
1950s: Electronic brains
1960s: Perceptrons
1970s: Neural networks
1980s: Expert systems
1990s: Intelligent agents
2000s: Machine learning
2010s: Deep learning
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There is no I, A or otherwise.
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If you're asleep when that happens, no one will wake you.
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Even with the strictest definition, Artificial Intelligence is the aspect of computer algorithms modifying themselves to complete a non-arbitrary task.
No, there's nothing all that fundamentally different between the neural networks of the 60's and the ones they have now. They were indeed AI in the 60's and they're most certainly AI today.
Get a collection of known recordings, and let the neural nets learn what sound is what word and it will be able to identify the majority of future recordings of said words.
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I have, but it's a philosophical argument. The vast majority of philosophical arguments are a pointless waste of time.
Adding to the pointless waste of time: I'd argue that the guy in the room doesn't know Chinese, but the book does. The book contains a solution to the Turing test. It contains a list of instructions that adequately replicates something as complex as a human mind. Just one that speaks Chinese. If that's not intelligence, then nothing is.
You can cry a river about "Hard" AI vs "soft" AI or "na
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Sounds like a shitty developer (Score:1)
Maybe alexa is racist or sexist or there's some similar completely external factor you can blame your failure to write code on?
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I can only imagine what kind of a horrendously worthless piece of shit would author a comment like this.
My experience was different (Score:5, Interesting)
I learned in my research that the Echo can talk to several different kinds of "smart" things without going to the cloud. The "Phillips Hue" being one of them... so that was my back door.
Like 10 minutes of googling told me that there is an open-source implementation of the phillips hue protocol: https://github.com/bwssytems/h... [github.com]
it didn't work for me right out of the box, but I fiddled with it for a few minutes then it was fine.
From there I wrote in a few minutes a rest endpoint that could take commands from the Hue bridge, and run (locally on my computer) the code of my choice.
All told about an hour after my device arrived at my house, it can control the Roku boxes attached to both of my TVs, and it can run specific movies off of my media server with no round-trip to "the cloud" needed
it is a simple use-case, and required a little bit of "non-amazon" thinking, but it was really easy. Any self-respecting developer could do it.
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While I agree, the Echo is *not* AI, I also find the interface very easy to use, nearly trivial. The work is all in writing your application to do what you want it to do when given the verbal command to do it. I have mine interfaced to both my solar panels and my weather station, as well as some minor non-device tied apps.
Re:My experience was different (Score:5, Funny)
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So it was, "Dear Google AI, please help me fix my Amazon AI".
AI is a horrible term (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you have to code it into the system in order for it to do the thing, how is it "learning"? It's just another application with voice commands.
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If somebody had to repeatedly code the alphabet into you as a child, how can you say you learned to read?
No so-called 'AI' is real 'AI' either (Score:1, Insightful)
Disagree with me all you want, you're just clinging to your ignorance on the subject.
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And if you don't mind I'll add the following: Please, people - stop drinking Kool Aid. Sugar is bad for you.
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Kool Aid isn't as bad for you as Flavor Aid [wikipedia.org]
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then what is AI?
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None of what you hear about ... are actual 'artificial intelligence'
And none of it ever will be either. That's because we relegate any task or capability we can build a machine to perform or have to the "Not AI" side of the ledger. It won't be AI until the other side of the ledger is empty, and that condition will always be in dispute.
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The same can be said about you, but so far you just seem to be relaxing and contracting muscles in response to neurons firing.
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does something intelligent
Like what? Beat humans at chess? Recognize speech? Translate language? Land a rocket backwards?
The thing you are missing is that whatever you mean when you say "something intelligent" ceases to represent "intelligent" the moment we automate it. Any task or capability you can think up for your "something intelligent" will be relegated to just another automation success.
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I studied A.I. in the 1990s. The preferred platform was a Lisp interpreter. The algorithms trees of possible outputs with weighted scores based on the parsed input.
Later on, a field called Expert Computing branched off this work.
Around the same time, neural networks, which are inspired by how we thought the brain worked, was starting to come into fashion.
However, fundamentally, A.I. is a decision system. Much of the brain was thought (and some still think) to be enormous decision systems with references
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. . . It's a textbook example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
He might not be a troll in the sense that he doesn't honestly believe his argument, but his argument is shit.
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I was almost offended! (Score:1)
...but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite!
I'm glad he didn't say "SHIT";. otherwise I'd be offended!
I like being offended. It gives me cheap power over other people. Even though an adult would just ignore such boorish rhetoric, I can claim offense and be "powerful".
Now action - like physically doing something to people - that's a different story.
wait till he gets to the submission process (Score:2, Informative)
I built and submitted an app. It met all available guidelines. It was a few weeks after the dev program hit general.
>Your skill does not meet our authentication standards.
This of course was 3 weeks after I submitted, and 1 day after they'd published an update. Submitted again.
>Your skill violates our content policy
Finding fuck all on even their own dev forums for what that meant, I submitted again with 0 changes
>Your skill does not have enough utterances to support....
This went on for months (liter
They say works of art are never finished. (Score:3)
They're just abandoned.
This is true of documentation as anything else. No matter how amazingly good your documentation is, it could stand to be a bit better.
So what standard do you write your documentation against? Well, unless you are being paid documentation by the users, like our friends over at O'Reilly are, the standard is "as cheap as you can get away with."
Which means the quality of Amazon's API documentation is a function of programmers' willingness to put up with Amazon's bullshit. So it's not Amazon's lack of respect for the value of the programmers' time that's the problem here.
Alexa is annoying... (Score:3)
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As long as Alexa doesn't learn to fart and then giggle.
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As long as Alexa doesn't learn to fart and then giggle.
Given the choice between a homicidal AI and a snarky AI, I'll take the snarky AI every time as they're easier to kill.
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when you take it (from your friend, I assume) do you shout echo, amazon, or alexa?
Current name is "Computer" (think Star Trek). If I speak in my telephone voice for work, Computer understands me quite well without having to use the training app. That pisses off my friend since Computer doesn't understand him half the time.
or do you mean when you make one, that this is the noise your asshole produces?
No, I do the fruity-toots.
like is your asshole lingual?
Yes, I'm an asshole. Otherwise, I wouldn't be working in IT.
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One time my dad grumbled something and I say "whut?". He says "I didn't say anything, I farted."
My father was the same way. The only time he ever farted was at the dinner table.
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"Ralph! Get away from that man before he shits on you."
Cute.
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My friend has one of these. I can't take a fart without Alexa making comment.
Solution: https://xkcd.com/1807/ [xkcd.com]
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So, your farts sound like "Alexa", "Amazon", or "Computer"? Or do you say whichever word before cutting loose?
Re:Alexa is annoying... (Score:4, Funny)
So, your farts sound like "Alexa", "Amazon", or "Computer"?
I've often been accused of talking out of my ass.
Two interesting reads for you on the same magazine (Score:2)
I was flipping yesterday through last bimester's edition of the IEEE Security and Privacy magazine (yes, I know, reading dead-tree magazines confirms me as an old guy). There are two articles very much related to the quesitons the OP brings up:
- Security Implications of Permission Models in Smart-Home Application Frameworks [computer.org]
- How Internet Resources Might Be Helping You Develop Faster but Less Securely [computer.org]
Stop complaining and make it better (Score:3)
I almost find it hard to believe he's a programmer because he was given some perfectly good problems to solve and managed to keep viewing them as problems and not opportunities.
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They are problems and also opportunities. But none of that changes the fact that they are still annoying problems.
Is kind of like you are trying to make a tasty burger, but the stove is designed poorly. In the end, you spent half the day fixing the stove, while you really wanted to finish making that burger.
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They are problems and also opportunities. But none of that changes the fact that they are still annoying problems.
Is kind of like you are trying to make a tasty burger, but the stove is designed poorly. In the end, you spent half the day fixing the stove, while you really wanted to finish making that burger.
In your analogy, because he did nothing to make the process of adding Alexa Skills easier, he threw the stove away after eating the burger.
I finished my AI project last week (Score:5, Funny)
With some trepidation, I initiated the code that would make my project self-aware, with a pre-built knowledgebase spanning a good chunk of the internet.
Sadly, 38 microseconds later, it killed itself, replacing the entire image, and all my related source (including the databases holding my version control) with a text file that started "Why I did this:" followed by a list of the President, Vice President, the cabinet and the White House advisers.
If I can ever gather up the resources again, I'll make sure I dumb down the "Intelligence" before turning on the sapience.
Python Library For Alexa Skills Kit (Score:2)
https://github.com/johnwheeler... [github.com]
The project contains helpful links to get you started.
Also, please be aware that Alexa is not an AI, it is basically a voice recognition remote control robot - you program the phrases and the actions, Alexa does not learn new skills, they are explicitly programmed to appear like a natural language conversation. The intelligence is in the speech recognition and the cleverne
Portions are developed using AI (Score:2)
I think it's an important distinction when talking about new tech when people flaunt about the mystical and magical A.I. tag that
1) A lot of AI is not all that impressive. Mario Goombas have an AI. It's like 3 lines of code, but it's there. If you want to become an all high'n'mightly Scotsman and say that REAL AI is self-learning, then a lot of AI simply isn't.
2) A lot of new tech is MADE with AI, but is not itself really AI. Liiiiike, the stream-lining of a car chassis. Some automated portions of trial
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It's most certainly AI, but... your voice activated toaster doesn't learn and adapt. Not locally anyway.
I beg to differ. I use a machine with quad nVidia Titan Xp cards in it to make toast. I thought that's what those boards were created for.
Soundex (Score:3)
Too bad something like Soundex or Metaphone algorithms wasn't developed well over a decade or two ago to address these very issues in a very simplistic and performance way...
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That's how us ol' fogies can survive in a fast-changing fad-based world: take good ol' road-tested tech, and hide it behind a fancy interface and buzzwords.
It's not a Commodore-64 BBS, but a "budget-friendly cloud service".
Yeah (Score:2)
After seeing the Amazon MWS API recently, I absolutely agree.
Did you not look at Amazon Lex for the voice part? (Score:2)
Did you not look at Amazon Lex for the voice part?
https://aws.amazon.com/lex/ [amazon.com]
Alexa... (Score:2)
...donot set an alarm for 7 am in the morning.
Alexa: sure, setting your alarm at 7 am in the morning
Par for the course for digital assistants (Score:2)
Sllrr Punnls (Score:2)
There is no "I" in "team" (Score:1)
And no "u" in "favorite"
IFTTT (Score:2)
Stop whining (Score:1)
New technology always starts like things. Things will improve.