Alexa is, for many of us, the best voice assistant among all that we have available today. And we do not detract from Google Assistant or Siri, the latter improves every day a little more, but the naturalness and above all how well it understands most of what is asked or said make Alexa to another level . The problem is that the upcoming changes could make Alexa very irritating.
Alexa wants to guess what you want before you ask
One of the great values of Alexa , in addition to how its platform is implemented, its skills and compatibility with a large number of third-party devices and accessories, is the ability it offers to understand what we are asking for and its ability to respond correctly to what is said.
And no, with this we are not saying that it is perfect. There are times when it also messes it up and it comes out where it shouldn’t. But in general terms, the effort that Amazon has made over all these years has obtained a great result in terms of general user experience. That is why it is logical that many bet on it when it comes to betting on smart devices such as the Amazon Echo or other compatible models.
Now Alexa wants to go a little further and look for a way to be able to anticipate your requests. How would you do this? Well, very easy, thanks to the use of machine learning , Amazon’s voice assistant would be able to deduce what might interest you and propose it to you . That is, have a much more productive attitude than what you already offer.
On the Amazon website, where they have announced all these news, different types of cases and how Alexa would react are explained. Thus, for example, a situation they describe is one that places you in the kitchen preparing a tea, an infusion or any other recipe or meal. At that point you need to know something like how long it takes to cook an egg and you ask Alexa. The assistant will answer you and immediately suggest if you want to create a timer with that time.
Of course, this is just an example, if you ask about other topics it is likely that it will tell you if you want me to tell you something more related or even invite you to check how your knowledge is on that topic.
Amazon, be careful how you implement it
That first sounds interesting, because it would make Alexa more natural, but it could also be quite irritating . Because imagine that for each thing you ask him he releases a related proposal. It would be like the typical coworker who keeps asking questions without knowing whether or not you really want to talk about it or if you just wanted to know something on time and that’s it.
Therefore, although obtaining new skills that help the user to know even better everything that Alexa is capable of is great, if they are not implemented well they can make everything they have won during these years go to the ruin. We hope that does not happen, but if right off the bat that Alexa is a bit more inquisitive than before, that she proposes things that you have never heard from her, etc., you know why.
Luckily (or unfortunately) all these novelties reach the English market first. So if the experience is not satisfactory there, they will not implement them for other languages in which Alexa can speak. Something good had to have not be the first, right?
