Provide Voice Feedback when Echo is right/wrong

[dcullen]

Just got my echo dot in the uk, firstly can I say to all involved great job with amazon echo so far, this is a good move towards the home automation we have been waiting for.

I have mentioned the following 'issue' to echo support in the UK but I wondered what others thought.

I have noticed there is no way by voice to notify echo when it gets it wrong, so I assume it is always recording any command as right in the learning process. Is this a valid assumption? If no action is taken in the app does this mean repeated wrongs will enforce the learning process that this is right. How else can echo understand the command didn't have the correct outcome, it doesn't know you requested living room lights and got something else does it (although it can of course dismiss any errors)?. My experience has found normally for many learning machines the teacher provides samples and indicates which are right/wrong so that the learning process can estrapolate.
If the man off the street doesn't take actions in the app does this mean echo is learning incorrectly?

I have also noticed that even when the voice to text works correctly, the echo will take priority for some other default action rather than a user defined group/device.
e.g. define a device/group 'Sky Comedy' (or anything with comedy) in and say 'turn on Sky Comedy'  - in the uk this will result in echo asking you to play something from TunedIn comedy channel (an inbuilt skill)
Try just turn on Sky and echo will ask you for which Sky and you can respond with Comedy and it works correctly
In these cases,  echo is making a priority of other inbuilt services rather than the user defined ones, I would have rathered it the other way 

There are options in the app (history) to indicate for a command it was right/wrong or delete the recording, but this gets very tedious, I would like to see a feature where we could say 'alexa, action wrong' or something similar.

I know this is going into more technical detail of how echo learns, but currently I don't think we have been provided with any guide to how we should help the learning process, surely we should provide feedback for it to learn better.

What do people think ?

[DParker]

When you start your Echo/Alexa mobile app the main screen is mostly devoted to the display of "cards" containing information on the verbal commands you've issued.  If you press the "more" button at the bottom-right corner of each card the will expand to show you "Verbal feedback" information and options, including a display of what "Alexa heard", and the option to geve feed back on whether or not it did what you wamted.  That is what you're looking for.

[dcullen]

thanx, yes I know and you can also do this through the history too.
I am asking if we should have/need a feature to carry out the same by voice immediately after issueing it, for the cases where echo doesn't do what you expect.

I am still unsure whether if we carry out no action in the app to say yes/no/delete recording for a command, where this does not result in a error but gets the wrong outcome, whether this has a negative effect on its learning ability for the issued command.
if so we don't want to have to keep opening up history to provide feedback on each command, we just want to speak to echo direct, without this feedback will the echo start to learn incorrect command/action sequences, in this case 2 wrongs or more will (for echo learning) equal a right.
This may be getting a bit more into the technical detail on the learning machine which is beyond this post.

[DParker]

thanx, yes I know and you can also do this through the history too.

My apologies.  I got in a rush reading your post and managed to miss the third paragraph from the end.

As tedious as it is to provide this feedback via the app, I don't think the ability to do so via follow-up voice command is worth the time and effort on Amazon's part to implement.

[dcullen]

I thought the echo was supposed to be targeted at the general public rather than tech savvy enthusiasts. I can't see the man on the street continually going into history to correct problems and without it I would expect the echo to get dumber rather than smarter. I am already getting fed up when the echo gets it wrong of correcting in history to avoid it learning incorrectly. My opinion is this is an oversight and will lead to more bad perception of the echo not getting things right and having poor performance. Learning machines need to be told their samples are right/wrong without this input they will never learn.

[DParker]

I thought the echo was supposed to be targeted at the general public rather than tech savvy enthusiasts. I can't see the man on the street continually going into history to correct problems...

Using voice feedback would be more convenient, but using the app for that purpose no more requires that one be a tech savvy enthusiast than does setting up an Echo/Dot/Tap in the first place.  If she's misunderstanding you so much that this is a problem then you have other issues that require addressing.