The "play some good 60s rock" example isn't a VUI breakdown, it's a functionality gap in the backend. One that will probably be fixed pretty quickly, given the way things are headed.
A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.
There will certainly be some aspects of the computer training the human, too. Just using this as an example, I don't know how much candlepower I want, but computers don't get bored or annoyed by my requests. I could start with 1 candlepower and move up to 10 if it's not bright enough. 100 might be too bright, so now I know what range I'm looking at. Next time I could just say "computer, 12 candlepower lighting, please".
Computers train users on how to use the computer all the time. It's less ideal than having the computer know everything, but once you know what you can expect from a computer, it's easier to get a good result.
I think that cuts both ways. If the computer can be trained to understand the user's intent, that seems like a better solution than forcing the user to think a different way.
Which would you rather do? Be forced to state your lighting preferences in candlepower, or have the computer learn that when you say "subdued lighting", you mean "12"?
Very true, but this is one simple example. Look at what Wolfram Alpha tries to do for even more complicated examples. If I put in "if I am traveling at 60 miles per hour how many hours does it take to go one hundred miles" it gives me an answer of 6000 seconds (1.66 hours). Very intuitive, and it actually ruined my example because I did not expect the site to understand what I was saying.
But if I type in "how fast do I need to go to travel 100 miles in 6000 seconds", now it has no idea what I'm talking about and instead gives me a comparison of time from 6000 seconds to the half life of uranium-241.
Now, when I get that result, I don't usually just give up on trying to figure out the answer. Instead I try to figure out what the computer expects me to say. Through some trial and error, I can shorten the query to "100 miles in 6000 seconds" and boom, I get the answer of 60 miles per hour. Instead of natural language, I'm using the search engine like a calculator.
The computer has just taught me how to use it. Ideal? No, but we work within the reality we're given. 12 candlepower is dim for you but for someone with decreased vision, that might be completely dark. The computer doesn't know unless it's taught, and we know from looking at history that users would rather the computer train the user than the user having to train the computer.
You asked: "how fast do I need to go to travel 100 miles in 6000 seconds"
Which is equivilent to saying "at what rate do I need to go to travel {rate}". It's a nonsense question, you already know the answer. You need to go 100 miles per 6000 seconds.
What you should have asked is: "100 miles per 6000 second to miles per hour", which it will happily convert the rate you gave, for the one you really wanted.
I guess what your saying is it should be able to figure that out, but at some point, the old phrase "garbage in garbage out" surfaces.. You never told it to convert the unit.
Wolfram is, and has always been, much more inclined to understand you if you work out what exactly you are trying to calculate before hand.
Some phrases exist as a "wow, 1 million people phrase this problem this way, let's throw that in." The fact it can take an easily dictated, albeit strictly phrased problem, and get you your answer is really what I love about it. Now if Siri would just stop sending stuff to Google. -_-
What if you could define the equivalent of Bash aliases via voice control? This would allow users to tailor their experience from the default (possibly complex/unintuitive) commands to their own personalized ones.
Example format: "Computer, define X as Y"
"Computer, define subdued lighting as set lighting to candle power twelve"
Then the VUI just adds a new entry to the voice commands where saying X results in Y.
You're thinking too much like an engineer :-) It's not a speech recognition breakdown but it's certainly a voice interface breakdown in the sense of I can't get the device to do what I want it to do. As a user, I don't care where in the pipeline my attempts to communicate a desired action break down. I just know that they do.
Exactly. We're used to dealing with either humans, who are intuitive and highly adaptive, and technology, which we manipulate and have total control over (so long as the system displays its status, we can find our way). We're not used to systems that expect us to interact with them in natural language, but have very specific criteria around what we ask for.
It still feels a lot like the old text-based RPGs, in that you spend most of your time trying to figure out how to phrase something to accomplish a basic need, while angrily thinking "it would have just been easier/faster to pick up my phone."
It's 2016. How are we still OK with the unreasonable constraints of technology that make us jump through a hoop like a trained poodle to get the treat?
A VUI breakdown would be inability to understand accents, or non-responsiveness to commands. As a user input, Alexa is pretty well buttoned up.