As we head unto an AI dominated future, the Turing test will probably become less like a Voight-Kampff test and more like a warzone Shibboleth. Yesterday, I asked the Alexa to set a timer. "What do you want to name your timer?" She It asked. "Bow," I replied. "Bow timer set," it said. Except… that isn't quite right. I wanted a timer for my bāo buns (包). That's pronounced /baʊ/ - as in to bow one's head. So Alexa translated my speech to text and stored it as "bow". When it came to read back…
Continue reading →
Amazon Alexa is losing billions of dollars. Self Driving Cars are losing billions of dollars. The Metaverse is losing billions of dollars. Are we about to witness the biggest crash in technological progress? I'm particularly fond of the Rule of Credibility which states: The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. How true is that! If you've…
Continue reading →
I speak English. My Amazon account is set to English. My Alexa listens to my English commands and replies in English. Except for new book notifications. I saw a pulsing yellow light on the dot. I've memorised all of the various signs and portents the accurs'd device can summon up, so I asked it (in English) what notifications it had for me. It replied, naturally, in German. I couldn't grab an audio recording in time, and I've no idea which command invokes a repetition. But the Alexa app…
Continue reading →
"Alexa… timer for fifteen minutes." The problem with the English language is that it is full of homophones, or semi-homophones. 15 and 50 sound basically the same. Humans have a hard time distinguishing them. So there's no wonder that voice assistants also have difficulty. Recently, I've noticed that my wife and I have adopted a very specific accent when talking to our Alexa. Certain constants are emphasised, phonemes are executed with precision, and pauses between words subtly lengthened - a…
Continue reading →
This morning, my wife noticed that Alexa was insistently flashing its little blue lights. "Alexa... Notifications?" "You have one notification. An item on your wishlist has dropped in price. The … is now only £…" And that's how my wife found out what I planned to get her for her birthday! What happened to cause this? I maintain several Amazon Wishlists® of things I want to buy. One of those is for presents I might want to buy my wife - and it is set to private. If you want to buy me a prese…
Continue reading →
A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions s…
Continue reading →
A few years ago I wrote an Alexa skill to see what bin day it was. The skill only worked with my local council - Oxford. I've since moved house and wanted to recreate the service for my new council - Bexley. Demo Terence Eden is on Mastodon @edent Replying to @edent @AgileAppsGroup Success! Blog post coming soon for my Alexa powered bin day thing. pic.x.com/eCoHMii0nI ❤️ 3💬 3🔁 007:58 - Mon 14 October 2019 Brilliant, eh? The API Bexley Council don't publish an API. I initially thought…
Continue reading →
I hate creating Alexa skills. What should be a 3-click process inevitably ends up requiring trips to multiple websites, to set up weird parameters, and reading outdated tutorials for obsolete libraries. So this is how to create a self-hosted Skill, using PHP. It runs on your own server and doesn't require any interaction. The Skill At a basic level, all your website has to do is spit out a piece of JSON for Alexa to read out. // Set the correct header for JSON data header('Content-Type:…
Continue reading →
Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete. So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a custom slot. Here's the code, with a fuller explanation afterwards. from flask import Flask, render_template, request from flask_ask import Ask, statement, question, session app =…
Continue reading →
One evening, my wife turned to me in bed and said, "Winter is coming..." Well, what she actually said was "Get your frozen feet away from me, you cold-blooded monster!" The only way to save our marriage? HOOK OUR BED UP TO THE INTERNET! I couldn't find an electric blanket with IoT connectivity - so I built my own. Why? As a person with cold feet, I want to yell at my robot servant to pre-heat the bed, so that it is toasty warm by the time I've finished my evening ablutions. The Blanket …
Continue reading →
Optical Illusions trick your brain into seeing something that isn't there. Whether it is spirals which don't exist, movements which don't occur, or faces in curved lines - our optic centres are trivially easy to fool. Humans are not alone in this cognitive deficiency. Other animals are also conned into believing something which isn't true. This tomfoolery is not restricted to animals - computers can also be mesmerised. I've written before about AI suffering from Pareidolia. Specially…
Continue reading →
Amazon Alexa is a fun little bit of kit. But it can be tricky getting it to work with all your smart devices. Not every company has an Alexa skill - just like not every company has an app. Using Flask-Ask it is possible to bring Alexa smarts to a range of previously mute devices. Alexa coding works on "intents" - the following is a simple intent. That is, you can only ask the skill one thing. No state is maintained, no multiple commands to get right, no complexity. This gets information…
Continue reading →
· AI alexa · 3 comments · 250 words · read ~250 times.