alexa Archives - How to Kill an Hour

Amazon workers allegedly have a chat room about ‘amusing’ recordings?!

16th April 2019/in Gadgets / Tech /by billywright

Bloomberg have a report out that highlighted the human labour that goes into manufacturing and improving the Amazon Echo. Amazon have contractors and full time employees working on the Amazon Echo. They’re all over the globe and tasked with reviewing and transcribing clips. Clips that are of conversations between users and Alexa. According to the report from Bloomberg, humans are said to annotate interactions to help identify phrases. Phrases such as “Taylor Swift” that might otherwise be meaningless to the software.

“We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it,”an Amazon spokesman told Bloomberg.

Amazon Echo Chat Room

According Bloomberg, as a result of collating all this data, Amazon workers have a chat room. This chat room is intended for asking for help if they can’t make out a word or phrase. However, allegedly, they also share “amusing” recordings. Furthermore, an Amazon worker, told Bloomberg that each member of the team will listen to as much as 100 clips a day. Clips that Alexa has mistaken or unintentionally activated. Bloomberg have reported that one of these workers will review as many as 1,000 clips in a day! (A full 9hr working day shift)

In cases where the Alexa has tripped unintentionally, there has also been some serious recordings. According to the report, two workers who have spoken to Bloomberg. Who believe they heard a sexual assault taking place. Furthermore another two workers told Bloomberg that they were given guidance not to intervene. As Amazon didn’t consider it the company’s place to intervene in cases like these.

Full report with Bloomberg here

(Business Insider)

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Episode 317 Whiskey With Alexa Ft. Glassmates

28th February 2019/in Shows /by billywright

Whiskey With Alexa!

27th February 2019/in Gadgets / Tech /by billywright

Voice is going to be HUGE in 2019 and there are more and more usages that companies are discovering every day. One of the interesting ones that we’ve used is from Diageo. It’s available on Amazon’s Alexa and it’s called Talisker Tasting Experience. Once asking Alexa to open Talisker Tasting, consumers will be asked to name the Whiskey that they own. Be that the Talisker Skye, Talisker Storm or Talisker 10 year old Single Malt. Once informed Alexa will begin an audio journey. Consequently drinkers will be taken through an auditory journey of how to taste the Scotch and get to know the richness and complexity of flavours from within the Talisker range. Furthermore after completing their drink, tasters will be invited asked to ask questions about the story of their drink, or flavours of Scotch that they’re interested in.

The final stage invites the taster to ask questions about the story behind their drink or flavours of Scotch they may like to try in the future.

“Talisker is a brand with an extremely rich heritage, produced by the sea on the Isle of Skye. When approaching this project, we were looking to bring elements of this location and the fantastic tasting tours at the Talisker Distillery into people’s homes.”

“Voice is the perfect technology to do just this and provide an enhanced brand experience by putting the consumer, product and brand at the centre of a tasting, in a completely seamless and non-intrusive way.” Benjamin Lickfett, Head of Technology and Innovation at Diageo

Additional Apps

This isn’t the only Alexa based app from Diageo either! They also have ‘The Bar’ which was released in December 2017. However, this app is specifically for the Echo Show. This app will highlight how to master mixology techniques and shop for ingredients. All through voice led advice. Furthermore Happy Hour Amazon Alexa Skill uses voice to provide cocktail recipes. Consequently, the app will even recommend bars to drinkers, specific bars to enjoy a Diageo cocktail.

While, voice is getting really really good and we’re intrigued to find out how Diageo will develop their voice technology. It’s worked really well for the Talisker Tasting Experience and we cannot wait to see more!

Download Talisker Tasting Experience here!

Purchase some Talisker Whiskey here!

Listen to the guys chatting about this by clicking here!

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Pure StreamR

20th January 2019/in Gadgets / Tech /by billywright

What's in the box? Pure StreamR

The Pure StreamR carries a bit of weight behind it and for good reason. The sound on this little device is very very impressive! It has a HUGE kick in the bass and we love that!

Posted by How To Kill an Hour on Thursday, 16 January 2020

We love our music here at How To Kill An Hour, so we’re always on the lookout for fantastic pieces of kit. One of which is portable speakers. We’re huge fans of Pure, so when we saw the Pure StreamR it was a speaker we just had to check out.

Upon taking it out of the box, we discovered it is a very small device. But it is hefty. It carries a bit of weight behind it and for good reason. The sound on this little device is very very impressive! It has a HUGE kick in the bass and we love that! It’s the perfect speaker to take out and about with you.

It’s portable so has Bluetooth streaming on it, so you can play all of your favourite music from Apple Music or Spotify. Furthermore, why not play your favorite podcasts while on the go? *cough cough*

Not only that the Pure StreamR has digital DAB radio built in as well as Alexa voice technology! Furthermore the speaker is 360 degrees, so wherever you’re sitting you will enjoy powerful, crystal clear sound. The StreamR is one of the few bluetooth speakers to offer Alexa too. The onboard microphone connects to the Pure Home App on your smartphone via bluetooth. Then it will connect to Alexa using Wifi or mobile data. Therefore allowing you to have access to Alexa, wherever you are! Ask her for the weather, your schedule or even play a playlist.

With the Pure Home App you can also customise your speaker settings and be notified of software updates. So you’ll never miss a beat!

Pure have also added an aux-in cable, so for those not wanting to use bluetooth, this is the speaker for you! The Aux cable also acts as an antenna for the digital radio! How cool is that?!

The sound fills the room and sounds just as good outdoors and with a 15 hour battery life, you simply cannot go wrong.

(Pure)

Pure Home app: Apple / Android

Purchase a Pure StreamR by clicking here!

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Alexa Blueprints

17th May 2018/in Gadgets / Tech /by billywright

Alexa is great and is one of our favourite smart voice assisstants available today! However, would you like it if you could make Alexa, just that little bit more personal? Would you like to make your own Alexa commands? Even your own Alexa, voice controlled games? Now you can with a new feature and website from Amazon! Head over to bluerprints.amazon.com to get started on your very own Alexa commands. Furthermore you don’t even have to know how to code! Plus you can make as many different Alexa skills as you like!

Alexa Blueprints: How To

Alexa Skills are just like the apps you have on your smartphone, but are placed on your Amazon smart speaker instead. There’s already loads available on the Alexa Skills Store! You can download apps which help fit your lifestyle, order a pizza, order a cab even pull down the latest football scores!

Once you start using Blueprints you can use templates that are available to you to create your own personal Alexa skill within minutes! You can create anything that your heart desires. Be that custom games, to-do lists, learning! Furthermore you can get creative with them and make things such as a learning and knowledge skill but make it about your family. Such as a trivia game “Alexa, open My Family Trivia”

There are a whole host of skills that you can make, simply browse the blueprints that are available to you in the following categories:

Fun & Games
At Home
Storyteller
Learning & Knowledge

What skill are you going to make? Let us know by contacting us via our social media pages, we’re @howtokillanhour across all socials!

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Episode 274 Remel London

12th April 2018/in Shows /by billywright

Apple looking to make Siri better!

4th April 2018/in Gadgets / Tech /by billywright

As we have discussed on the show previously, the most impressive AI helpers are those from Amazon and Google. With Alexa and Google Assistant respectively. However, if you may recall that it was Apple who first introduced us to an AI that can help you in your day to day lives. Siri, was the first out of the gate. Yet, she is lagging behind her rivals when it comes to intelligence. Both Alexa and Google Assisstant can recall a lot more information and specific information. Siri on the other hand, sometimes can’t even answer basic questions. Only answering what you want if you ask her something in a very specific manner. She’s just not as good as her counterparts. With the release of Homepod, the lack of intelligence in Siri is even more obvious. Yet it’s vitally important to get this correctly, now more than ever, because of Homepod’s battle with Alexa and Google Home. That’s not to say that Siri isn’t intelligent, she can answer questions, she just isn’t good enough.

Siri Hiring

So to battle this, the guys over at Thinknum have noticed that Apple have been on a Siri hiring spree. Hiring as much as 161 different positions to help improve Siri. There’s been a steady increase in Siri related job positions since the summer of 2016, however, there’s been a surge, since February of 2018. The positions are for engineers. Engineers that are geared towards helping Siri answer her weaknesses in answering simple general questions. Other positions that are available are for Siri’s Proactive Intelligence. This is basically Siri’s ability to anticipate the type of info that you may need. A further two other positions are for SiriKit developer framework and speech generation. While it may be some time before we see any improvement on a consumer level, this definitely shows Apple’s intent when it comes to AI.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Amazon’s race to make Alexa smarter

3rd August 2017/in Gadgets / Tech, Technology /by sadiaakhtar

Amazon bosses are now pushing themselves to the limit to make the Alexa speaker smarter.

Dave Limp – the man behind Alexa is not satisfied with the the function of the speaker as it is.

He now has thousands of engineers inside Amazon adding to its capability every day and then another tens of thousands of developers adding to the skills, this means in the coming years Alexa will be significantly smarter that she is now.

Alexa will understand 15000 commands compared to it’s nearest rival which is Google home and that only understands under 400 questions/commands, Alexa will also be able to understand context.