Yesterday, Amazon hosted its 3rd annual Alexa Live event for its 900,000+ developers and countless Alexa device users. Last year’s Alexa Live event had many big changes that plotted the future for the Alexa ecosystem. Alexa Live is joined by developers, device makers, startups, entrepreneurs, press, and analysts to see what Alexa has next for its community.
One statistic that Amazon threw out that caught my attention is that one in four Alexa Smart Home interactions are now initiated by Alexa rather than the customer. This statistic reveals the direction of the future of voice, and I believe Amazon hit it right on the money when giving its vision statement. Jeff Blankenburg, Chief Technology Evangelist, said Alexa’s vision statement, “to be an ambient assistant that is proactive, personal, and predictable, everywhere customers what her to be.” In the background, Alexa is made to be ambient while also naturally assisting customers and not being the next distraction. The unique challenge with Alexa is to traffic and guide information to the user from end-to-end without compromising ambiance. To do this, Amazon says it is working to make Alexa’s ambient experience ubiquitous, multimodal, and smarter.
Making Alexa ubiquitous
Amazon announced new interactive and customer-engaging features (Alexa Presentation Language), APL Widgets, and Featured Skill Cards. APL Widgets lets customers interact with content on the home screen with glanceable, self-updating views of skill content. Featured Skills lets developers put their skills on the home screen alongside what is already shown on the Echo Show home screen. These are great features that enhance the multimodal experience of the user and developer. Users should be able to engage with the skills used most and discover new Skills in a seamless interaction on the home screen.
Amazon announced its Name Free Interaction Toolkit (NFI) at last year’s Alexa Live event, and this year it has made some striding improvements to the toolkit. The toolkit helps developers get their skills out to users by flagging or signaling a skill based on a user’s request. Amazon says the toolkit has boosted traffic and doubling it in some cases for useful skills.
NFI Toolkit has a new feature that lets skills be the responses to Alexa’s popular discovery-oriented utterances like “Alexa, tell me a story” or “Alexa, I need a workout.” The NFI Toolkit also has a new personalized skill suggestion feature for users to frequent skills users find most helpful. An example Amazon gave was a customer asking, “Alexa, how did the Nasdaq do today?” and it responds with, “You’ve previously used CNBC skill. Would you like to use it again?” I highlight this example because it brings a personal and ubiquitous experience to skills without being overwhelming.
Amazon is also extending its Name Free Interactions feature to support extra discovery of skills in interactions that can use multiple skills. I think this feature is another great way to enhance customer interaction and increase discoverability.
An Alexa device displaying the time
Amazon
Another interactive feature Amazon added to Alexa is the Spotlight feature on Amazon Music. Amazon says users can now connect directly with fans by uploading messages to promote new music and interact with fans. Amazon also created Interactive Media Skill components and Song Request Skill components that shorten interaction times with Radio, Podcast, and Music providers and give users extra modes of interaction. Users will either love or hate these features, given most primarily want to listen to music, and music isn’t necessarily an interactive activity.
Making Alexa multimodal
Amazon has announced its new Food Skills APIs that quickly enable users to create food delivery and pickup experiences. One of the toughest choices when going out to eat is deciding on a place to eat. Having local food offers and suggestions by Alexa should make the experience much easier for users, and in some cases, better for restaurants, stores, delivery services to get products and services out.
Amazon also has two new features that go hand-in-hand—Event-Based Triggers and Proactive Suggestions. Alexa users can build proactive experiences that trigger skills when an event or activity happens. Alexa also has improved routines with Custom Tasks that lets users customize routines inside of skills. Amazon also includes a feature that lets users send experiences that start on the Alexa device to a connected smartphone. These features open up the multimodal capabilities of Alexa, and I think users are going to find Alexa to be a crucial part of their days.
Alexa is also opening its Device Discovery feature to include additional Alexa-compatible devices connected to the same network. This feature allows device makers to integrate Device Discovery into other smart home devices to create a connected home. Amazon has also upgraded Alexa Guard to connect to smart safety devices like smoke, carbon monoxide, and water leak detectors around the home that can then send notifications.
Making Alexa Smarter
Amazon says it has doubled engagement of skills since it made Alexa Conversations generally available. It announced that it is expanding Alexa Conversations to be available in public beta in German, all English Locales, and a developer preview in Japan. It is also announcing Alexa Skill Components to help developers build skills faster by plugging foundational Skill code into existing voice models and code libraries.
Aaron Rubenson, Vice President of Alexa Voice Service and Alexa Skills talking about developer API … [+] at the Alexa Live Event 2021.
Amazon
Amazon is also making it easier for users to connect their accounts to a product or service skill or sign up using Voice Forward Account Linking and Voice Forward consent. Amazon said it had upgraded Alexa Skill Design Guide that codifies lessons learned from Amazon’s developers and broader skill build community.
Amazon has included other features that make creating skills and implementing services and products into the Alexa ecosystem much easier:
Alexa Entities lets skills retrieve information from Alexa’s skill graph.
Customized Pronunciations lets developers add custom pronunciation to skill models.
Sample Utterance Recommendation Engine uses grammar induction, sequence-to-sequence transformers, and data filtering to recommend utterances for a developer’s skills.
Service and Test-Generation Tool helps developers test capabilities for consolidated batch testing.
What’s great about these new features is that Amazon understands it does not have to do all the work in making Alexa smart. Amazon only needs to give developers the tools and opportunity to implement smart interactions and user experiences. I think these tools successfully give developers the tools to do so.
Wrapping up
Ambient computing is one of the toughest things to get right but I believe the most valuable in the long-run. It could take another five to ten years of work to accomplish it on a global scale.
Amazon’s Alexa Live Event somehow brought more to the table than last year’s event. A large portion of creating an ambient experience that is ubiquitous, multimodal, and smart is in the hands of developers, device makers, entrepreneurs, and the Alexa community. To create an ambient experience, Amazon must create the tools and opportunities for these partners to do their part.
Amazon created seamless interactions between skills and users with Feature Cards and APL Widgets. It is giving skills more opportunity to be interactive and discoverable with the NFI Toolkit. Amazon is making many interactions and experiences between users and Alexa a big part of people’s day with Food APIs, Event-Based Triggers, and Proactive Suggestions. Amazon is successfully making skills easier and more accessible to developers, and I think the Alexa ecosystem, from end-to-end, can appreciate the feasibility.
Ambient computing is the “win” and Amazon, based on what I saw at Live, is getting us closer to this reality. It’s a two-horse race with Google, and it appears Amazon is in the current lead.
Note: Moor Insights & Strategy co-op Jacob Freyman contributed to this article.
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Artificial intelligence‘s recent rise to the forefront of business has left most office workers wondering how often they should use the technology and whether a computer will eventually replace them.
Those were among the highlights of a recent study conducted by the workplace communications platform Slack. After conducting in-depth interviews with 5,000 desktop workers, Slack concluded there are five types of AI personalities in the workplace: “The Maximalist” who regularly uses AI on their jobs; “The Underground” who covertly uses AI; “The Rebel,” who abhors AI; “The Superfan” who is excited about AI but still hasn’t used it; and “The Observer” who is taking a wait-and-see approach.
Only 50% of the respondents fell under the Maximalist or Underground categories, posing a challenge for businesses that want their workers to embrace AI technology. The Associated Press recently discussed the excitement and tension surrounding AI at work with Christina Janzer, Slack’s senior vice president of research and analytics.
Q: What do you make about the wide range of perceptions about AI at work?
A: It shows people are experiencing AI in very different ways, so they have very different emotions about it. Understanding those emotions will help understand what is going to drive usage of AI. If people are feeling guilty or nervous about it, they are not going to use it. So we have to understand where people are, then point them toward learning to value this new technology.
Q: The Maximalist and The Underground both seem to be early adopters of AI at work, but what is different about their attitudes?
A: Maximalists are all in on AI. They are getting value out of it, they are excited about it, and they are actively sharing that they are using it, which is a really big driver for usage among others.
The Underground is the one that is really interesting to me because they are using it, but they are hiding it. There are different reasons for that. They are worried they are going to be seen as incompetent. They are worried that AI is going to be seen as cheating. And so with them, we have an opportunity to provide clear guidelines to help them know that AI usage is celebrated and encouraged. But right now they don’t have guidelines from their companies and they don’t feel particularly encouraged to use it.
Overall, there is more excitement about AI than not, so I think that’s great We just need to figure out how to harness that.
Q: What about the 19% of workers who fell under the Rebel description in Slack’s study?
A: Rebels tend to be women, which is really interesting. Three out of five rebels are women, which I obviously don’t like to see. Also, rebels tend to be older. At a high level, men are adopting the technology at higher rates than women.
Q: Why do you think more women than men are resisting AI?
A: Women are more likely to see AI as a threat, more likely to worry that AI is going to take over their jobs. To me, that points to women not feeling as trusted in the workplace as men do. If you feel trusted by your manager, you are more likely to experiment with AI. Women are reluctant to adopt a technology that might be seen as a replacement for them whereas men may have more confidence that isn’t going to happen because they feel more trusted.
Q: What are some of the things employers should be doing if they want their workers to embrace AI on the job?
A: We are seeing three out of five desk workers don’t even have clear guidelines with AI, because their companies just aren’t telling them anything, so that’s a huge opportunity.
Another opportunity to encourage AI usage in the open. If we can create a culture where it’s celebrated, where people can see the way people are using it, then they can know that it’s accepted and celebrated. Then they can be inspired.
The third thing is we have to create a culture of experimentation where people feel comfortable trying it out, testing it, getting comfortable with it because a lot of people just don’t know where to start. The reality is you can start small, you don’t have to completely change your job. Having AI write an email or summarize content is a great place to start so you can start to understand what this technology can do.
Q: Do you think the fears about people losing their jobs because of AI are warranted?
A: People with AI are going to replace people without AI.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Tuesday that it would provide up to $325 million to Hemlock Semiconductor for a new factory, a move that could help give Democrats a political edge in the swing state of Michigan ahead of election day.
The funding would support 180 manufacturing jobs in Saginaw County, where Republicans and Democrats were neck-in-neck for the past two presidential elections. There would also be construction jobs tied to the factory that would produce hyper-pure polysilicon, a building block for electronics and solar panels, among other technologies.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a call with reporters that the funding came from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022. It’s part of a broader industrial strategy that the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, supports, while Republican nominee Donald Trump, the former president, sees tariff hikes and income tax cuts as better to support manufacturing.
“What we’ve been able to do with the CHIPS Act is not just build a few new factories, but fundamentally revitalize the semiconductor ecosystem in our country with American workers,” Raimondo said. “All of this is because of the vision of the Biden-Harris administration.”
A senior administration official said the timing of the announcement reflected the negotiating process for reaching terms on the grant, rather than any political considerations. The official insisted on anonymity to discuss the process.
After site work, Hemlock Semiconductor plans to begin construction in 2026 and then start production in 2028, the official said.
Running in 2016, Trump narrowly won Saginaw County and Michigan as a whole. But in 2020 against Biden, both Saginaw County and Michigan flipped to the Democrats.
Although no one likes a know-it-all, they dominate the Internet.
The Internet began as a vast repository of information. It quickly became a breeding ground for self-proclaimed experts seeking what most people desire: recognition and money.
Today, anyone with an Internet connection and some typing skills can position themselves, regardless of their education or experience, as a subject matter expert (SME). From relationship advice, career coaching, and health and nutrition tips to citizen journalists practicing pseudo-journalism, the Internet is awash with individuals—Internet talking heads—sharing their “insights,” which are, in large part, essentially educated guesses without the education or experience.
The Internet has become a 24/7/365 sitcom where armchair experts think they’re the star.
Not long ago, years, sometimes decades, of dedicated work and acquiring education in one’s field was once required to be recognized as an expert. The knowledge and opinions of doctors, scientists, historians, et al. were respected due to their education and experience. Today, a social media account and a knack for hyperbole are all it takes to present oneself as an “expert” to achieve Internet fame that can be monetized.
On the Internet, nearly every piece of content is self-serving in some way.
The line between actual expertise and self-professed knowledge has become blurry as an out-of-focus selfie. Inadvertently, social media platforms have created an informal degree program where likes and shares are equivalent to degrees. After reading selective articles, they’ve found via and watching some TikTok videos, a person can post a video claiming they’re an herbal medicine expert. Their new “knowledge,” which their followers will absorb, claims that Panda dung tea—one of the most expensive teas in the world and isn’t what its name implies—cures everything from hypertension to existential crisis. Meanwhile, registered dietitians are shaking their heads, wondering how to compete against all the misinformation their clients are exposed to.
More disturbing are individuals obsessed with evangelizing their beliefs or conspiracy theories. These people write in-depth blog posts, such as Elvis Is Alive and the Moon Landings Were Staged, with links to obscure YouTube videos, websites, social media accounts, and blogs. Regardless of your beliefs, someone or a group on the Internet shares them, thus confirming your beliefs.
Misinformation is the Internet’s currency used to get likes, shares, and engagement; thus, it often spreads like a cosmic joke. Consider the prevalence of clickbait headlines:
You Won’t Believe What Taylor Swift Says About Climate Change!
This Bedtime Drink Melts Belly Fat While You Sleep!
In One Week, I Turned $10 Into $1 Million!
Titles that make outrageous claims are how the content creator gets reads and views, which generates revenue via affiliate marketing, product placement, and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Clickbait headlines are how you end up watching a TikTok video by a purported nutrition expert adamantly asserting you can lose belly fat while you sleep by drinking, for 14 consecutive days, a concoction of raw eggs, cinnamon, and apple cider vinegar 15 minutes before going to bed.
Our constant search for answers that’ll explain our convoluted world and our desire for shortcuts to success is how Internet talking heads achieve influencer status. Because we tend to seek low-hanging fruits, we listen to those with little experience or knowledge of the topics they discuss yet are astute enough to know what most people want to hear.
There’s a trend, more disturbing than spreading misinformation, that needs to be called out: individuals who’ve never achieved significant wealth or traded stocks giving how-to-make-easy-money advice, the appeal of which is undeniable. Several people I know have lost substantial money by following the “advice” of Internet talking heads.
Anyone on social media claiming to have a foolproof money-making strategy is lying. They wouldn’t be peddling their money-making strategy if they could make easy money.
Successful people tend to be secretive.
Social media companies design their respective algorithms to serve their advertisers—their source of revenue—interest; hence, content from Internet talking heads appears most prominent in your feeds. When a video of a self-professed expert goes viral, likely because it pressed an emotional button, the more people see it, the more engagement it receives, such as likes, shares and comments, creating a cycle akin to a tornado.
Imagine scrolling through your TikTok feed and stumbling upon a “scientist” who claims they can predict the weather using only aluminum foil, copper wire, sea salt and baking soda. You chuckle, but you notice his video got over 7,000 likes, has been shared over 600 times and received over 400 comments. You think to yourself, “Maybe this guy is onto something.” What started as a quest to achieve Internet fame evolved into an Internet-wide belief that weather forecasting can be as easy as DIY crafts.
Since anyone can call themselves “an expert,” you must cultivate critical thinking skills to distinguish genuine expertise from self-professed experts’ self-promoting nonsense. While the absurdity of the Internet can be entertaining, misinformation has serious consequences. The next time you read a headline that sounds too good to be true, it’s probably an Internet talking head making an educated guess; without the education seeking Internet fame, they can monetize.
