3PO-LABS: ALEXA, ECHO AND VOICE INTERFACE
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3PO-Labs: Alexa, Echo and Voice Interface

Thoughts after the Alexa + Smarthome Event

2/18/2016

2 Comments

 
So, tonight Amazon held an Alexa + Smarthome tech talk at one of their new buildings in Seattle (which is awesome, btw).  The talk itself was fairly uninteresting for the existing development community, as it was targeted at an audience new to the tech.  The good thing about the event (aside from free food and drink), was that there were a ton of Alexa team members there for us to pester.  And boy did I ever.  Recap after the break...
A quick overview of the event.  There were three speakers: Amir Aslani, who does product management for Alexa; Frederic Deramat, who is a principal architect for the product; and Charlie Kindel (@ckindel), who is a director of the Alexa Smarthome initiative.  Each spoke fairly briefly (maybe 15 min each?), the topics being Alexa 101, the Alexa Platform, and Alexa + Smarthome, respectively.  Beforehand and afterwards there was ample time to mill around, snack on some appetizers, and chat with the dev team, a few of whom had some hardware set up.
Some snacks...
I feel like they missed an opportunity for Alexa-themed desserts here.

Out of my interactions with the team, there were two that were notable: I had a good conversation with a really intelligent and well spoken employee on the VUI team, and then afterwards I stuck around long enough to have a nice 15 min chat with Frederic.  Almost all of the insights below come from these two interaction.  Among the things I learned:
  • There are some undocumented SSML features that are live today.  Upon returning home, I immediately tried them out and confirmed that at least one of them works.  Watch for a follow up post on that topic...
  • There are some surprisingly good reasons that some of the top-requested features haven't been implemented.  A topic that came up in several of my conversations was the question of geolocation, and why we can't know the location of the device triggering the call.  Rather than just "because there's no access", everyone I talked to was able to give me a pretty good treatise on the complications of that type of feature, while also assuring me that it's not something they've written off as unsolvable.  I'm now less inclined to question the reasoning behind some of these things.
  • On the topic of geolocation, I wasn't able to get a direct answer out of anyone on whether Uber or Dominos got special backdoors for location awareness, but it was pretty clear based on the way they spoke around the questions that yes, they did.
  • I did, however, learn that they have a program for "managed" partner skills (of which Uber and Dominos are examples).  This isn't really surprising, most any large, broad platform is gonna have something like this, but now we have confirmation.
  • The certification team definitely works in conjunction with the development teams - they are not an isolated island.  I asked this question, and got direct answers that there are people on each team whose job it is to work with the certification org.
  • As might be expected, the questions from the attendees mirrored the questions on the forums.  Lots of "Why can't we do push notifications?", etc.
  • If they keep holding events like this and convincing just a few percent of the attendees to start developing, the platform is going to rapidly balloon...
Packed Auditorium
Standing room only, half an hour before it kicked off...

Finally, lest I be berated by those who couldn't make it, I'll say that I did put in plugs with Frederic for them to work on some of the things that are of most concern to the community (monetization, cross-skill user ids, etc).  In the heat of the moment, I did unfortunately forget a few of my hot topics, though. Simplification of their security model will have to wait for another day.

All things considered, I definitely came away from the event with a good feeling about the direction things are going, both short-term and long-term.  I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to Charlie or Amir - maybe next time!  All in all, though, great event.

​Did anyone else have a chance to make it out to the event?  What did you think?
2 Comments
Matt Buck link
2/23/2016 07:51:39 am

Thanks for the recap! Really enjoying the blog so far.

I'm glad y'all are pushing Amazon on the monetization issue. I'm also concerned that users seem to think of the skills as installed "apps," not realizing that they represent an ongoing cost to developers as they are used. The folks that recently released a Nest integration skill got a lot of pushback from users around the idea of a subscription-based model, so I'm wondering what it will take to make users accept something like that.

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Eric
2/23/2016 06:01:19 pm

You bring up an interesting flipside to something that's come up quite a bit recently (and which I've raised with a few people), which is the topic of who should be supporting the infrastructure for these skills. Most everyone thus far has been building these things and running the services that back them for free, and the thinking to this point seems to be whether we can convince Amazon to help support things from a financial perspective. This sort of makes sense, given that:

1. We're building free things for them at cost to ourselves,
2. We're almost all using their AWS tools to build these things
3. They've yet to provide any sort of monetization structure.

And, to their credit, Amazon has actually responded to some degree, starting the Alexa Fund, and giving out AWS promotional credits to some of the early developers.

But eventually, the platform will be mature enough that the question will need to shift from "how does Amazon support its early adopters?" to "how do you make your skill self-sustaining?", and at that point your question is going to be a major one.

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