Fight Over Voice Recognition with Alexa (Amazon Echo)

Alexa story

My experience with the Amazon Echo. a.k.a. "Alexa" is mostly enjoyable, but there are times that we fight over voice recognition.

I have accent when I speak English. I'm aware that some of my words are not as accurate as how the Americans say them. However, I'm very confident about the way I say numbers.

Alexa drove me nuts when it recognized my word "fifty" as "fifteen". Once I threw some sweet potatoes into the oven and wanted a fifty-minute timer using Alexa. It told me it set a fifteen-minute timer. I canceled the timer and asked it to set again. It gave me a fifteen-minute timer yet again. We kept going back and forth, cancelling and setting timers and none of them were right.

I don't know about others, but when I was deep in this "Alexa you're wrong, give me my fifty-minute timer" mode, I was drilling into a rabbit hole: I wanted to teach it a "lesson", but hey, apparently it's no use for a robot. More than five minutes passed, I was still trying to set a timer of fifty minutes and it still recognized it as fifteen. Ugh!

At the end, I said, "Alexa, set a timer for 41 minutes." Of course it got it immediately just like that! Now, the "fifty-minute timer" has become my pet peeves with Alexa. (Till this day, it may have got it right no more than two times)