Comparing Amazon Echo and Google Home Personal Assistants

 

" Alexa, what is the news ? " 

Let me introduce to my friends the two AI assisted (virtual) Personal Assistants in the market, Amazon Echo and Google Home. 

Two days back, I got the AI powered Amazon Echo Dot, having the cloud based service through the Amazon Personal Assistant Alexa.

Amazon Echo dot, INR 3150, www.amazon.in

Slowly getting used to having a personal (virtual) assistant. The virtual personal  assistant, besides doing a lot of information related chores, can help simplify our digital lives. Amazon Personal Assistant, as explained is known by a very popular name, Alexa. Echo is the hardware and Alexa is the software ..

https://beebom.com/best-alexa-commands-for-amazon-echo/

Amazon Echo Dot, has been in the market for more than 2 years and accesses the Amazon Web Services (AWS) through a wi-fi connection while the Google Home is the new entrant released just last year and has access to the vast Google knowledge repository and also great services like Youtube .. (which is a big shortcoming for Amazon) ..

Click here to know more about the best Alexa skills and commands..

For information gathering and retrieval tasks, Google Home is more powerful but for tasks like shopping, networking with other devices using IoT Amazon Echo has the upper edge. 

A hot battle is on, whichever is better, will dominate the AI assisted personal chores segment in the coming days. The yet undefined roles of the Personal Assistant, as the field is still in the evolutionary stage, is also a clear indication of the tech future assisted by artificial intelligence, which is to come to our homes and distort, disturb or assist our personal online lives..

Google Home about INR 10,000 on ebay ..

I am still experimenting with Alexa, like playing radio, getting the latest news, asking time, date, greetings, info query from Wikipedia, info on places, people, events, objects etc ..

In the next few days and weeks, I will be able to explore the additional features of Amazon Echo like IoT by working on integrating more home devices like TV, lighting, Audio systems etc to the Amazon Echo. I find AI capabilities in Echo and Google Home limited, but in the growth phase.

Echo is simple to setup and use ...

As of now as regards networking and reach, Amazon Echo is much more capable than Google Home. Google Home, other than information, has a long long, long way to go to catch up with Amazon echo. In the coming days, am sure more AI related apps would be released on Amazon Echo and on Google Home too.

Cost wise, in Bangalore, Amazon Echo dot comes at INR 3150 while Google Home mini costs almost INR 8000.

Google Home mini, INR 8000 on ebay

Click here for a good comparison of Amazon Echo and Google Home..

Here is a Techcrunch comparison of Alexa, Google Siri and Sonos .. 

While Google and Tesla / Toyota / Ford are fighting it out on who will dominate the driverless electric car market, this fight between Amazon and Google is set to get  more personal ..

George..

Advice from the oncologist, Dr Thomas Varghese

When Dr Thomas Varghese trained at the Tata Memorial Cancer hospital in Mumbai and developer of the Varghese technique in cancer surgery, started his practice from Kochi, Kerala, little did the people of Kerala know about him.

Having proved himself in a short time to be a great trained oncologist surgeon from Kochi, he gives valuable advice to people on how to prevent cancer. 

According to Dr Thomas, urbanisation and food intake are the greatest threat mankind is facing which limits his working life and his restful life out of office hours. 

Dr. Varghese says that of all human food intake, white sugar, salt, milk, maida (American flour) and white polished rice are the greatest reasons for cancer of different kinds, not forgetting redmeat. Salted foods, snacks are great promoters of cancer in human beings. Not taking more food and having more frequent and less food intake, not snacks or packaged food, can also ensure that we lead healthy lives. Avoiding processed and packaged food can also be a positive step to a healthy life.

Urbanisation has resulted in humans leading a very subdued and less active life (with no exercises). This also found to be another great contributor to cancer. Proper walking and other body relaxation and stretching exercises is a good antidote to the early onset of cancer.

Environmental pollution which includes air and water pollution, is the modern day cancer agent. From his vast experience at Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital in Mumbai, Dr Thomas has seen many instances of cancer of the liver and the kidneys among people living on the banks of Ganges and Yamuna river. This talks of how unwarranted pollution of two famous and large rivers in India has been a health risk to the people staying on the banks of these two rivers.

Having listened to many of Dr Thomas' speeches, it is opined that more of vegetables, fruits, fibrous foods and curds with enough of fish (with easily digestible fats) with enough opportunities for lots of exercises for the body and the mind, including yoga, can ensure that we keep cancer at bay.

George.

The Malankara Titans .

The 7 Rs of Process Innovation

Steven Shapiro's 7Rs of Process Innovation ..

Rethink - fundamental rethinking of the process

Reconfigure

Resequence

Relocate

Reduce

Reassign

Retool

Future head transplant by Italian surgeon Dr Sergio Canavero ..

At first I thought this was an April Fool's joke being played on the people of the world, but later I realised it is really a surgeon trying to convince the world of the success of such a surgical process from his limited knowledge and exposure ..

A 36 hour mammoth head transplant surgery involving 150 surgeons in Harbin Medical University in North China is what Dr Sergio Canavero is planning by end 2017 or early 2018 (click here for the news from Guardian) to fix the healthy body of a brain dead person to the head of a quadraplegic patient.(the medical term for the procedure is cerebrosomatic anastomosis)

By June 2015, Dr. Canavero was recruiting surgeons to participate in the procedure, which will be conducted on Valery Spiridinov, a 31-year-old Russian man with Werdnig-Hoffman disease, a rare genetic condition that prevents his muscles from growing. .. the Observer website ..

There is a Newsweek report of the first patient of Dr. Sergio being a Chinese patient. Needs confirmation.

Joining just 10 to 20% of the millions of nerves passing through the spine to the different parts of the body is what Dr Sergio says makes his intention of doing a successful head transplantation very easy.. But by doing a part shoddy work on a human patient, is Dr Sergio inviting to give birth to Frankensteins on planet earth ?

Click here for the TED talk by Dr Sergio ..

His idea sounds very plain and lacks the needed academic and professional medical rigour and looks like he believes human physiology, especially the nervous system is a simple as that of rats ..

Can the civilised world get up and sensitise the people of the world as to the threat this experiment would pose to humanity as it would be akin to releasing a genie out of the bottle ?? Can there be a consensus among the medical fraternity of the necessity and ethical position regarding this head transplant ?

george..

Privilege - the bait that weakens oneself ...

What are privileges ? Oxford dictionary defines privilege as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group. For example, ‘education is a right, not a privilege’

When we do not make use of privileges intelligently and use it as a favour for a select few in society, privileges can be like a millstone tied around your neck.

Click here for the video explaining this concept pretty well with a common example from society. The video explains clearly the concept of privileges.

The best example to explain the bad effects of privileges is to take examples from well-to-do rich influential families. Why do children from rich privileged, influential families lick the dust when it comes to open competition ?

Rich, influential parents, out of ignorance and pride, shower more and more comforts and privileges on their children thinking it would take them ahead in life, only to find their less than average kids fail in life. They contemplate that riches, influence, power etc can help their kids, when actually it only spoils them !

The same logic applies to rich countries too. US and Europe are fighting hard to keep off competition to it's spoilt children, not knowing that they are just waiting to see their children being wiped out of contention soon .. 

Share your wealth and riches with the less fortunate. Better still, devote your life for the upliftment of society, not for your personal benefit and comfort. 

Why is Tata Son's surviving even after 150 years of existence ? Pure reason is philanthropy .. 70% of Tata Son's profits go for philanthropy, like cancer care, orphanages, education, research and so on. 

How is the Travancore royal family still finding itself respected and manage to be the richest royal family in the world (though its riches are lying in the vaults of the Sri Padmanabha swamy temple in Trivandrum, a trillion dollars to say the least) !! They are roughly 150x the British royals .. the sole reason is philanthropy !!

The Travancore royals were intelligent enough and quick to realise that all the riches showered on them actually belonged to the society .. They felt it their responsibility to give back to society and they have been doing it for more than three centuries.

A true inviolable truth .. Privileges are intentional baits to spoil you. Accept the truth and make peace with the less privileged, share and be equals ..

George ..  

Why and How of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) .. ??

We have very frequently come across the term Standard Operating Procedure. What exactly does this mean ? Should we try to follow the SOP religiously, will it help us, how can it reduce defects, how does it improve the final output, does it finally lead to better quality, these are some of the questions that are constantly in the minds of production managers and top decision makers in organisations.

Let us see whether they can be answered by a discussion on SOPs.

Standard Operating Procedure is a written procedure prescribed for repetitive use as a practice, in accordance with agreed upon specifications aimed at obtaining a desired outcome. www.businessdictionary.com
A standard operating procedure, or SOP, is a set of step-by-step instructions compiled by an organization to help workers carry out complex routine operations. SOPs aim to achieve efficiency, quality output and uniformity of performance, while reducing miscommunication and failure to comply with industry regulations. - www.wikipedia.org

A neat template to implement SOP in the organisation

An SOP provides consistency, predictability and ensures consistency of outcome, in other words, it reduces the variability of the output. It does not require constant supervision, facilitates training for the employees to be better at the jobs they are good at. It also enables cross-training of the employees at different tasks by having very detailed and definite instructions neatly laid down enabling work to be done with great consistency and less variability.. 

I usually teach about Standard Operating Procedure by playing a game in the class. It is called the paper folding game.

Click here for the presentation on the Paper Folding game.

This game helps the students to understand the importance of having a formally accepted set of instructions to do any task the way it is done, which reduces the variability and thus improves the quality of the task. More clearer and detailed the SOP, better is the compliance and less the variability.

Lesser the variability means better quality and lower costs of non-compliance ..

Whenever there are repetitive operations organisations need to do on a regular basis, the only way to do it consistently and uniformly do it is by insisting on Standard Operating Procedures to be implemented and adopted.  

The other advantage of having an SOP is that the employees can come up with improvements over the existing SOP if it improves the quality.  An SOP can thus challenge the employees to constantly look to improving the quality of their work and the work output, as also to look at reducing the use of inputs and ensure better compliance.

george..