Linked List: December 26, 2016

Monday, 26 December 2016

HandBrake 1.0.0 Released After 13 Years of Development ★

Finally out of beta, just in time for the demise of the optical disc.

Backchannel: ‘Voice Is the Next Big Platform, and Alexa Will Own It’ ★

Jessi Hempel, in an oddly-certain (to me at least) piece for Backchannel:

Yet Amazon has a two-year jump on its competition, having first introduced the Echo speaker in November 2014. Sure, only five percent of American households have an Alexa-powered device right now. But, says longtime Forrester tech analyst James McQuivey, “Qualitatively, Amazon’s position is more secure than the numbers would indicate.” […]

Second, Alexa’s users are hooked on it. About a third of them turn to the tech three times or more every single day. “People are latching on to the idea that once it is in their home, they should use it,” says McQuivey. “It turns out having microphones in your environment is a lot more convenient than pulling out your phone.”

My devil’s advocate take:

Amazon never releases device sales figures, so that estimate of 5 percent of U.S. households is just that, an estimate.
Echo is still ~~only officially available in the U.S.~~. Update: Whoops, it’s now also available in the U.K. and Germany. But still, very limited worldwide.
If it’s true that only “a third of them turn to the tech three times or more every single day”, that means two-thirds of Echo users use it fewer than three times a day. Some Echo users are clearly “hooked on it”, but the data Hempel herself is citing suggests that most Echo users are not hooked.

Again, that’s just my devil’s advocate argument. There are some actual factual signs that Amazon’s early lead in this market is meaningful. I just don’t see any such facts in Hempel’s piece here.

Wynn Las Vegas to Equip 4,748 Hotel Rooms With Amazon Echo ★

John Cook, writing for GeekWire:

Alexa, open the curtains?

You may soon be able to ask that question when traveling to the Wynn Las Vegas hotel, which announced today that it will place Amazon’s Echo device — powered by the voice assistant Alexa — in all 4,748 hotel rooms. Wynn Resorts called it an “industry first,” and founder Steve Wynn seems extremely excited about the concept of allowing hotel guests to get basic information about their rooms and the hotel rather than calling the front desk.

“I have never, ever seen anything that was more intuitively dead-on to making the guest experience seamlessly delicious, effortlessly convenient, with the ability to talk to your room and say: ‘Alexa, I am here, open the curtains, lower the temperature, turn on the news.’ She becomes our butler at the service at each of our guests.”

There’s an argument that we’re still in the very early stages of voice-driven personal computing. That, for example, Apple is not too late in putting out an Echo-like dedicated appliance. But Amazon is running full steam ahead here. 5,000 hotel rooms here, 5,000 hotel rooms there, and all of a sudden Echo is the entrenched market leader.

Controlling the drapes, lights, and TV in a hotel room is a perfect example where voice control is the right interface. I’ve stayed at the Wynn, and their hardware interface for those things isn’t bad, but there’s only a controller on one side the bed. Voice works from anywhere in the room.

I am curious, though, how Wynn is going to handle the privacy issue. With good reason, hotel guests might not want an always-on recording device in their rooms.

Sidenote: Just me, or is Steve Wynn starting to dress like a Bond villain?

Apple’s AI Team Publishes First Research Paper ★

Mitchel Broussard, writing for MacRumors:

Earlier in December, Apple announced that it would begin allowing its artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers to publish and share their work in papers, slightly pulling back the curtain on the company’s famously secretive creation processes. Now, just a few weeks later, the first of those papers has been published, focusing on Apple’s work in the intelligent image recognition field.

The details of the paper don’t matter so much as that it was published, period. Apple’s previous refusal to allow researchers to publish was severely hindering the company’s ability to attract top AI researchers.

App Santa 2016: Great Apps, Up to 80 Percent Off for Christmas ★

Great deals on some great apps. The promotion is only through the end of the day, today, however, so go buy them now.