The key to get magic from Alexa long term will be get unsupervised learning working on it, and then shared back across the entire Alexa user base. The Brazilian real to USD is a great example. If by the 3rd try it gets the right answer, it should notate that and equate the first 2 questions as similar ones. I am surprised it couldn't catch the first 2. The word2vec output should be fairly similar.

"In fact, I’ve had to avoid turning into ‘that guy’. I encourage my family to use Alexa, but then I started admonishing them for not recalling the precise sequence of words that unlocked the dusty tomb filled with knowledge of exchange rates and types of currency."

Its interesting that in the last 30 years we've gone from unworkable text adventure interfaces to the same unworkable interface in verbal form instead of typed/read text. A lot of his story reads as a parody of an Infocom game but spoken instead of typed.

I'll add my two cents on top of the author's. I have both the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Tap. This article was spot on. I'm perhaps less forgiving than the author. If Alexa can't answer a question on the first try I'll just give up. When Alexa does answer a question or a request she usually does a phenomenal job and it's just really cool. It really feels futuristic.

Echo is cool, it can be pretty useful, but it hasn't realized its full potential yet.

I bought the Tap as a portable speaker to take with me on bike rides with friends. Well I took it out the other day and the minute it lost WiFi connection it just wouldn't work. I'm sure this was a problem on my end, but I had already paired the devices and I wasn't going to spend time fiddling with it while I was out with friends.

EDIT: Also it doesn't happen too often but Alexa has definitely accidentally triggered. It even woke me up at 2 AM after the power went out temporarily to tell me that it had no WiFi.

I don't know what the hell is going on at the author's house, but I have both an Xbox One (with active Kinect) and an Amazon Echo in the living room, along with two kids, and I can count on one fist how many times either of them have activated accidentally. That is to say, zero.

Consider that Google and Apple get those questions right at the first time; so it's not that we need to wait for science from the future to have a "working" digital assistant in the home; we just need one from one of those two company. And if that still paired with my Amazon account for the shopping pat, it'd be great :)