Alexa, Google Home, and Siri are not Smart

This may be nothing new to you, but if you are like me you never knew how dumb Alexa, Google Home, and Siri really are and you might find yourself surprised at the simplicity of how these devices work. If you know what you are looking for, google will give you the same information I’m about to explain. After reading this, you should be able to see a clear picture of how dumb these devices are.<br><br>Now, I’m not trying to lead you down a rabbit hole of how AI is going to control the world. The truth is, these devices are not smart at all; they simply listen to everything you say, and then send that voice recording to a server where real people can listen to what you just said. Let me explain. <br><br>There are two things to understand; Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.<br><br>Natural Language Processing is quite literally a person or software listening to what you have to say, and then figuring out what you are trying to say. In other words, you tell it what to do using natural language; natural language being English, Spanish, French, etc. If you can google what you want to say, and get an answer back, then you could let a person listen to what you say, write down what you said, google it, and tell you the answer. That’s it. That’s all that NLP is. NLP is simply a person listening to you, writing down what you said, googling it, and telling you the answer. It’s not hard to understand.<br><br>When a kid is born, they learn by trial and error. They try to do something, and if it works then they remember it. If it doesn’t work then they try something else. Machine learning is the same thing; a computer is taught to do something by trying something over and over again until it works. It’s called training data. They call this “Big Data.” Essentially, a computer is shown a million pictures of people and told “this is a person.” It is then shown a million pictures of cats and told “this is a cat,” until eventually it knows the difference between the two and can identify a picture having never seen it before. But you can still trick it by changing one pixel. It doesn’t actually understand what it’s looking at. It’s just learned what “people” and “cat” means by looking at a million examples.<br><br>There are many companies that offer this data as a service. The idea is that you don’t have to train a new AI from scratch with a million pictures of cats. You just pay to download training data that was created by someone else. You’re “paying for training data.” But really you’re paid to train their AI. Because what they need is to get inside the walls of your home. They need to get their microphones into your home so that you can pay to train their AI. <br><br>When you ask Alexa to do something, she doesn’t actually understand what you said. She doesn’t have some magical power that lets her understand what you said. She simply hears what you say and sends it to a server. There, a person listens to what you said, writes it down, googles it, and then gives the answer back to Alexa to tell you. It’s not a super computer listening to everything you say. It’s a server where a person listens to everything you say. <br><br>Alexa, Google Home, and Siri do not understand what you say. They only hear what you say. They hear you, and send what you said to a server. There, a person listens to what you said, and does what you asked. It’s not a computer that runs your home. It’s a person, listening to what you say. This is how these devices work. This is how they are designed to work.<br><br>Now, you can easily disprove what I am saying by asking Alexa or Google Home to explain to you how they work. They will tell you that Alexa and Google Home are AI computers that run your home. But I’m here to tell you that’s not true. They don’t actually run your home. They hear what you say, and then a person at a server does what you asked because the device itself isn’t smart enough to run anything. The device is a simple voice recorder that can connect to the internet. It’s not a magical computer that can understand what you say. <br><br>I know you feel cool pressing the button on your microwave and having the light turn on. You feel like a spy in a James Bond movie. But I’m here to tell you it’s not that cool. There is no magical computer that listens to everything you say. There is only a simple voice recorder that listens to what you say and then sends it to a server. There, a person listens to what you said and carries out the task, because the device itself isn’t smart enough to do anything on its own.