Monday, November 18, 2019

Improvements needed in Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K which will make it a much more useful device [RAWDUMP]

  • TYPING / VOICE DICTATION + RECOGNITION
    • Anywhere where you can / have to type, should be possible to voice dictate it using Alexa, the way one can voice dictate anywhere in Android using Google. At times you need to type a lot and it's very difficult using the supplied remote controller.
    • If you speak "Baghdad 1968", Alexa types that as "Baghdad nineteen sixty eight". Not right. Search results in both YouTube and the browser go bad as a result.
  • ALEXA SEARCH
    • When you do an Alexa search, it should return results from inside the respective content libraries of all the apps that you've installed. For example, when I do a search for some movies, those aren't returned in the results even if an app, say JioCinema, has those for free viewing. Each app's database needs to be indexed.
      • Of course, Amazon probably wants you to view stuff only on its own Prime app.
    • Not possible to pass on the spoken search query to the installed Mozilla Firefox browser - can pass it only to YouTube, Amazon Silk, or Amazon Music. Probably a deliberate choice to cripple Firefox and to direct users to Silk.
    • Some queries that you speak to Alexa, you intend to search for those on the Web, by passing the query text to Silk's default search engine. But many times, Alexa gives a sort of "answer" to that query. For example, if you speak "latest news", Alexa starts the NDTV latest news video, but there's no way to pass the text "latest news" as a text search query to Silk's default browser. Another similar query is "Disha Patani age", for which Alexa forcibly gives you a direct answer without converting the voice query to text.
    • Several voice searches Alexa just doesn't transcribe to text form, no matter how clearly/slowly you speak, and even if those queries seem pretty simple [Alexa just says "sorry...", and doesn't even provide any sort of 'instant answer' to that query]. For example, as of Nov'19, if you speak "Hyundai Venue", intending to pass on the transcribed text as a Web search to Silk, Alexa simply returns a 'sorry' message and doesn't transcribe it. Quite frustrating, since this happens with several queries.
  • REMOTE CONTROLLER
    • Silk is a good browser, but having to move the on-screen cursor / pointer all the way up or down in order to scroll a webpage up or down is tiresome. Dedicated scroll-up and scroll-down buttons needed on the remote, and this'll make Web browsing much better.
  • CACHING + CHEAP MEMORY CARD
    • Allow inserting a microSD card, say a cheap 128 GB card, to act like a disposable cache. Songs that you frequently play, movies / videos that you watch repeatedly, etc., will be cached locally to reduce server load, to save user's data usage, and to increase responsiveness. Even an ongoing movie should be fully cached to the extent it has been played, so that if you go back to any previous scene, it plays instantly.
  • SPEED / PERFORMANCE / PROCESSING
    • Processor should be faster. Compared to contemporary mid-range smartphones, even the latest 4K model of Fire TV Stick feels just a bit sluggish and jerky at times [this is more pronounced in the inbuilt Firefox, but also with Silk when the webpage in question is complex/heavy].
  • NAVIGATION / USER INTERFACE
    • Firefox-specific
      • Default up-down scrolling speed in the inbuilt Firefox browser should be faster.
  • Q

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