This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Alexa is so bad though. Who's going to pay for that?
“By the way, you can now pay for Alexa AI option if you want me to reply in a slightly smarter way, but I will still cut you off with ads and other useless things. To activate AlexaAI say activate”
"No"
"I heard 'activate'. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there's no way we're letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it."
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It'll eventually be very affordable.
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off... but noooooooooooo
It's the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I'm hopeful they'll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you're on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.
AI is being touted as the solution to everything these days. It's really not, and we are going to find that out the hard way.
I get what you’re saying, but voice assistants are one of the main places LLMs belong.
Alexa is more like a telemarketer disguised as an assistant. Every interaction is followed by a “by the way . Its a shit experience so I stopped using mine.
Alexa was designed explicitly for that purpose. They lose money on every Echo sold, the whole idea was they would make money selling you stuff. Turns out people would rather use their Echo to check the weather, get recipes, etc. rather than voice shop.
I just can’t see a use case for voice shopping. There are almost zero instances where I want to buy something without having a visual of that thing in front of me at time of purchase.
I could possibly see something like “buy another stick of deodorant”, but even then I want to see if there are deals or some other options and would want to check the price at a minimum.
Seems like yet another MBA idea.
So they expect that people pay for being spied upon and seriously data mined?
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
It's like charging you for cable and then shoving ads down your throat.
It's like charging you for Prime Video and then shoving ads down your throat.
That's often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you're leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
Just FYI, Alexa records everything you speak into it, you can listen to it here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW
I already don't use it, you don't have to sell me on it.
...charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
Good luck, I guess? Got the first Google home, at first it was great, I was asking it tons of questions. Then the questions stopped, used it for turning on the lights and other automations. Then I installed Home Assistant and the only command Google Home got was to set a timer to know when to pull things out of the oven. Eventually I stopped doing that.
At the moment all Google/Nest Homes have their mic cut off, I only use them to stream music in my house from my NAS via Plex. So yeah..
Something tells me that they'll still listen to you for free.
How to make me go back to buying shit in person, by Amazon.com
Their using the public to train AI. Then charging the public for the AI it trained.
They thought people would be like "Alexa, but me a ton of shit on Amazon" but people just use it for timers and the weather
Ok. I'll be the weirdo. If it's actually useful, I would pay for it.
Not if it's just the parlor trick that it currently is.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I'm concerned. All of it lives squarely in "huh...neat" territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
I use Alexa as a way to use an old speaker system. I wouldn't pay to use any "smart" speaker systems. They are pretty dumb and I've already paid once
Oh no!
I'll just have to install a weather app and use the timer on my stove instead of using Alexa.
We upgraded our technologies so much that it'a becoming unsustainable for us, so we are increasing prices.
They're never going to be satisfied with the amount of money that have.
That’s capitalism. Endless growth. Grew 1000%? Grow more. More. More. More.
All I want alexa to do is turn my lights on and off, set timers, and show me my own pictures. And it can BARELY do that without fucking it up. Everyone I know wants the same, they expect nothing more from it. "AI" features of Alexa aren't t needed or wanted by anyone I've talked to about it.
They won't be charging me, because I don't buy shit from Amazon, and don't use their spy platform.
