oculus42

There are some very disturbing stories about extreme conditions in the warehouse.

There's a good NYT article about it (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-very...)

This is the piece I heard about:

So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call.

Wolfram Alpha is amazing at discerning the intention of the question.

In the article, the question "How old is the Lincoln Tunnel" struck me as incorrectly formatted for the parser (I know, that's the point), so I asked Siri, "When was the Lincoln Tunnel built." The Wikipedia article on the Lincoln Tunnel was returned. Wolfram Alpha was listed under other sources, so I chose that. The response? "1937"

Formatting and pronunciation issues are a major stumbling block for these interfaces, though. If the device (or service behind it) can't identify "ten to the power of" when it sees 10^, I can't rely on being able to converse with my device for significant problem sets.

Solving it isn't really easy, either. When reading a document is a caret a power, a regular expression operator, an exclusive or, or a nose on a smiley? :^)

A lot of context identification work has to be sorted out for smart agents to succeed.