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Tell HN: Alexa regularly lies to me about which songs are available on Spotify

41 points by trwhite ↗ HN
This is something I've noticed over the last few months. I did previously have an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription but now I use Spotify and have set Spotify as the default for music and podcasts.

I will often ask my Alexa to play a song and it will say "This song is only available on Amazon Music Unlimited", which I know to be false because I'll have been listening to the song/s in question that day. For example, I asked for the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief yesterday.

I don't know whether this is because the device stores this database internally and is simply out of date, though I've noticed this on much older songs too. I'm sure there's a technical reason and not some conspiracy, though I do find it strange that during the ~3 years I've owned an Alexa it only started behaving like this recently.

10 comments

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version_five
I had an Alexa ~4 years ago, and I found that (a) it seemed to keep switching to playing clips from songs on amazon music (which I don't subscribe to) vs spotify (which I do) and (b) it would often play a very odd version of common songs when promoted. Like I'd get a live version some other nonstandard version, when searching for the song in spotify gave the album version. I wonder if whatever difference exists in their search process vs the standard spotify way could be responsible for what you're seeing as well (edit, though I realize you didn't have this problem before).

Anyway, I stopped using alexa because music was all I found it useful for and it became a pain, and not worth the privacy implications

darrylb42
Google lies about music available on Youtube Music. Getting voice command to play stuff you know exists is next to impossible. I think voice command just sucks in general.
stazz1
wish i could train stuff on my voice
sokoloff
If you specify “play Spud Infinity on Spotify”, does it work? It might be trying Amazon Music anyway.

I don’t think much of anything is stored or responded locally (beyond wake word processing and “I’m having trouble connecting right now” [or whatever the “I can’t reach AWS” message is])

re
I think this is most likely related to the mediocre reliability of voice search, and different algorithms for searching the different music catalogs.

> I asked for the song "Spud Infinity" by Big Thief yesterday

Did your device mishear you at all? What does your voice history show for that request? https://www.amazon.com/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh

kramerger
Wait, how come it misheard when searching Spotify but correct it when searching their own database?
withinboredom
I feel like it also does some sentiment analysis too. Anytime I ask Alexa to play something, and I’m excited, it will tell me it isn’t available and I have to pay. Yet when I look on Amazon, it isn’t behind a Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.
zoltrix303
Could it be linkedin to your location? Song rights are different from one country to another, could Alexa's server be checking for right in one location au you live in another ?
_vertigo
Used to work on Alexa. I interpret the response you are getting from Alexa as “The song isn’t available on Amazon Music Free Tier” (or whatever) and not “The song isn’t available on Spotify”.

Your query gets routed to different backend services based on “intent”, and I’ve noticed that sometimes I have to append “on Spotify” to get my request routed to what I imagine to be the Spotify-interfacing backend rather than the Amazon music one.

If you get routed to the Amazon music one, it just checks if the song is eligible for free tier play but doesn’t check Spotify at all. That’s my theory at least, and it kind of maps with the state of Alexa when I left it a couple of years ago. The service that routes based on intent should probably call both music services when the user has not specified a preference and pick the most useful response to send to the customer, and probably does, but for whatever reason I notice this behavior sometimes from Alexa.

Tl;dr say “on Spotify” to fix the issue. literally 5 years after I joined Alexa the same bugs and bad ux still happens and is apparently not being prioritized to be fixed despite Alexa being basically useless for anything besides timers, weather, music, and maybe the occasional fact lookup..

throwawayc120
I also used to work on this ecosystem, and I agree with this analysis. We regularly found cases where the routing system did not route to the preferred provider, despite the routing system knowing that the user was eligible to play a streamable result on the preferred provider and not on other providers.

The experience would dead-end in a way that was invisible to the organization tracking KPIs of the preferred provider, since the playback attempt landed in another org's system, and would penalize the KPIs of the actual destination, even though they couldn't service the request with a playable result.

Despite every music service provider being penalized in this way (and providing crappier CX), we were not able to get the Alexa organizations in question to prioritize whatever the investigation and fix required.