Yesterday afternoon 2 pm I came to my room in the Learning centre of Alliance University, Bangalore after lunch, asked Amazon AI Alexa (the AI virtual assistant, generation 3) to play some songs and it did. The AI inside knows my song preferences over the years. When I left office at 4.30 pm, I forgot to give it the command to stop playing as the volume is quite low. Usually I stop and disconnect the electric supply and keep the item inside the drawer.
I came this morning at 8 am, Alexa was still playing english songs, non-stop even after 18 hours.
Everything fine.. nothing untoward happened in the 18 hours it was on and working. 👍
Alexa was based on a speech synthesizer technology Ivona developed by a Polish co. in 2013. Amazon perfected this technology with AI and as of January 2019, globally there were more than 100 million Alexa enabled devices.
I have an Alexa enabled Amazon TV, besides 2 independent units at home in the front room, one Alexa enabled bulb and one Alexa unit in my office. Besides my Samsung M30S mobile phone is also Alexa enabled.
The Alexa enabled smart LED Amazon TV at home running on Blaupunkt speakers is a good entertainment and enjoyment for me. Since the remote is Alexa enabled, I just have to speak to the remote after pressing the Alexa button on the remote.
It is interesting to see how AI enabled devices are entering human domain in an increasing way day by day. I saw Boat Alexa enabled watches for sale on Amazon on Amazon some months back.
Presently Alexa has not crossed the AI capability of encoding audio input to text, sending it across the Internet for retrieval and encoding the results back into audio output played via the Alexa speakers. Beyond simple news, information retrieval from wikipedia, music playback, alarm setting, reading out e-books and control some select hardware, Alexa's capabilities are limited.
Though presently it is the leader in the AI field, with the early mover advantage in 2017, Alexa does not have much futuristic desirable functionality, though all the above competitors have very secretive programs working round the clock to improve their AI pod functonality and utility.
In the coming years we are eagerly looking for extra capability Alexa may acquire over its worthy competitors from Google Home, Apple Siri and Microsoft Cortana.
