When will Siri be able to properly respond to "Give me directions to the nearest Post Office?"<p>If I'm driving, and ask verbally for navigation to "nearest X", it instead gives me a list of "X" on my phone for me to swipe through.<p>But at least they're roughly sorted by distance!
In some sense the failure of Alexa is a surprise, in some sense it wasn't. I gave a talk titled "Chatbots in 2017" in December 2016 that
was not all prescient<p><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca-talk-dec-6" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/paulahoule/chatbots-in-2017-ithac...</a><p>There's an expectation that technology gets better over time and one would have thought that Alexa would have gained the ability to do new things but it never did. It's a cautionary tale for the "New A.I".
| Yet, the division has been named as one of Amazon's biggest failures in recent times, which reminded me that, once upon a time, Microsoft also sought a piece of that surprisingly unlucrative pie.<p>Is a company detouring from perhaps internal empire building and excessive hiring, particularly in uncertain economic times, the equivalent of failure?