Spent a few years developing a bot with similar features to Alexa, called LFReD back in 1998. Was possible to carry on a conversation with LFReD via cordless phone, control lights, look up wikipedia articles etc.
Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom.
Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible, especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule' had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner prize is still very safe.
Idealabs approach me at one point offering to buy my botsinc.com dom.
Two things killed development. The first was the quality of the speech recognition. 85% accuracy sounds impressive, but in real life, it's terrible, especially combined with background noise. (I had a love bird that would squawk every time i tried to train the recognizer :) The SR has only recently caught up enough to be acceptable (just). The other was the AI. Every 'rule' had to be hand coded. eg: "if SR = 'hello world' then tts 'hello'". I don't think they'll get past that last issue anytime soon, and I believe the Loebner prize is still very safe.