The Pain of Being Alexa
- By Stefan Hammond
- December 12, 2022
There's a shared delusion that inanimate objects respond in human fashion to spoken commands. You see it in films: the protagonist's car won't start as the zombie horde approaches, so she yells at it (with a salty epithet), and hey presto, the engine roars into life.
We, humans, tend to anthropomorphize, and perhaps that's the impetus for virtual assistants: cutely named software serfs that live on our smartphones and other devices. But cheeky digital lackeys like Siri and Alexa evolved from technologies designed to assist computer users with disabilities.
Virtual assistance is a boon for computer accessibility — Microsoft, for example, uses the term “assistive technology products,” and Apple's Siri also presents its accessibility credentials.
These technologies drive many aspects of computer use for people with different abilities in different languages. Virtual assistants offer advantages for users with difficulty with audio/visual cues many of us take for granted.
But there is, as ever, a fly in the ointment.
Genesis
Virtual assistants were nurtured in the atmosphere of Silicon Valley, and DARPA informed their evolution. “The first modern digital virtual assistant installed on a smartphone was Siri, which was introduced as a feature of the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011,” according to Wikipedia. “Apple Inc developed Siri following the 2010 acquisition of Siri Inc, a spin-off of SRI International, which is a research institute financed by DARPA and the United States Department of Defense.”
Wikipedia: “Cortana is a virtual assistant developed by Microsoft that uses the Bing search engine to perform tasks” — leveraging a search engine seems a powerful asset for Redmond's unseen digital helper. It was launched at the 2014 Build conference, where Engadget's Dana Wollman wrote, “the star of the show was a husky-voiced lady (fembot?) named Cortana, Microsoft's new Siri-like personal assistant.”
Cutely named software serfs live on our smartphones
“Cortana in particular is emblematic of this idea about how individual and how smart the smartphone can be,” said Microsoft's Greg Sullivan in a report on NBC. “The name alone was really exciting — that we're calling it Cortana [after an artificial-intelligence character in the video game Halo].”
Despite this, “on March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app was shut down globally,” said Wikipedia.
“In November 2014, Amazon announced Alexa alongside the Echo,” says Wikipedia. The Echo is “connect[s] to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service Alexa, which will respond when a user says 'Alexa'.”
And for some, that's a problem.
Name game
Last year, in an article titled “Hey Siri, Bone Apple Teeth!” about the trials and tribulations of Siri,
I wrote: "Amazon has already encountered flak from people named “Alexa,” but fortunately, the name is relatively rare." “Relatively” is of perennially relative, but after reading an article by Washington Post journalist Alexa Juliana Ard titled “Amazon, can we have our name back?”, I should have rewritten that sentence.
“Nearly 130,000 people in the United States have the name Alexa,” wrote Ard, who added that she “interviewed more than 25 women and girls named Alexa and several parents of Alexas to see how the voice assistant’s rapid takeover of workplaces and homes had altered their feelings about their name and identity.”
Ard gives a voice to those named Alexa long before the virtual assistant was a gleam in Amazon's collective eye. “For me, this was highly personal,” wrote Ard, who added that she's “experienced uncomfortable encounters after Amazon made the name a wake word, including being given commands as if I were the bot.”
Ard added that she started introducing herself by her middle name and was not alone. “In virtual classes, business meetings, and at auditions, Alexas said they have been instructed to avoid saying their name or arbitrarily assigned new names,” she wrote.
Profit motive
Whatever the name, a virtual assistant hopefully adds functionality to a platform and provides room for growth. But Alexa's profit potential seems suspect, according to a November 2022 article in Business Insider.
Amazon “created an app store, Alexa Skills, hoping to spark the same wild innovation Apple saw when developers were allowed into its App Store in 2008,” said the article. And it launched first-party products like microwave ovens and TVs with Alexa built in.”
But as ever, ointment-meets-fly: “One of the critical weaknesses for Amazon's ambitions to be in the business of nearly everything is that it doesn't own a platform. It doesn't control a PC operating system like Microsoft or Apple and doesn't have a mobile platform like Google's Android or Apple's iOS (even Amazon Fire tablets just run a modified version of Android).”
The financial incentives don't add up. “A recent report indicating that Amazon's Alexa division is on track to lose USD10 billion this year is raising questions about the future of the entire voice-assistant industry,” said an article on CBC. "'I think there is a next-generation battle for voice assistance that will require very, very deep pockets to survive,' said Andy Wu, an assistant professor of business administration in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School.”
"'The investment in AI technology is tremendously expensive, and then the server space needed to process all this stuff is huge',” added Wu. “'Even at the level of the device itself, they're definitely taking a loss on the bill of materials for a long time,' he said.”
Might Alexa be eventually doomed to the scrapyard like her digital sister Cortana?
Stefan Hammond is a contributing editor to CDOTrends. Best practices, the IoT, payment gateways, robotics, and the ongoing battle against cyberpirates pique his interest. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Antonio_Diaz