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AI HP Windows

Alexa is Coming To Windows 10 PCs From HP, ASUS and Others (engadget.com) 99

Posted by msmash from the next-up dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's Alexa recently arrived on headphones and even toilets, but it's about to become much more ubiquitous by hitting Windows 10 PCs later this year. HP, ASUS and Acer have revealed that the voice assistant is coming to various models, including ASUS's ZenBook and VivoBook lineup, the HP Pavilion Wave, and select Acer Spin, Swift, Switch and Aspire notebooks. Amazon will release a special Alexa app in the spring, and laptop builders are tapping Intel's Smart Sound tech to make sure that the app can pick up your voice when you're not right next to your PC. "Hands-free access to Alexa on PCs can be helpful to customers in many ways, like making it simple to interact with your smart home, get news or weather, set timers, and more," Amazon Alexa VP Steve Rabuchin said in a statement.
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Alexa is Coming To Windows 10 PCs From HP, ASUS and Others More

Alexa is Coming To Windows 10 PCs From HP, ASUS and Others

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  • The article didn't state (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    why I would want this?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      *You* aren't the customer -- like the cellphone applications that you don't want, it will probably be pushed onto "your" device and you won't be able to delete it or shut it off.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )
        The power button, perhaps? Windows 10 is a desktop OS, after all.

        • Doesn't the power button just put Windows in a sleep/hibernate state? I bet Alexa is still listening.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mark-t ( 151149 )
            Yes, but that is user-selectable. Plus, thereâ(TM)s always the mains switch in the back, attached to the power supply, if the situation gets really dire. Unless you were in the middle of a large disk-write when cutting power, windows will generally recover from it at next bootup quite handily

    • you might pay more for a PC tho if it didn't have it installed, so there's that angle. Similarly not having a webcam and not having a microphone are increasingly features i'd want in a PC if I were going to buy one rather than build one.

    • Re:The article didn't state (Score:4, Funny)

      by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Monday January 08, 2018 @10:28AM (#55884843)

      "why I would want this?"

      It's progress.
      When you now say on a public toilet:
      There's no fucking paper!"
      Nothing happens.

      On the new toilets you say:

      "Alexa, there's no fucking paper!"

      You'll get a response:
      "Order for toilet paper confirmed, stay put until monday."

      Or in select cities:
      "Stay put for 2 hours."

    • Re:The article didn't state (Score:4, Funny)

      by coofercat ( 719737 ) on Monday January 08, 2018 @10:31AM (#55884859) Homepage Journal

      Surely you 'set timers' all day long don't you? I mean, I probably spend literally microseconds per month setting timers that would be oh so much easier if only someone could give me a voice controlled one.

      Even Amazon can't think of a good reason for Alexa on your PC. That's okay, neither can I.

      This is obviously all just part of a plan to flood the market with Alexa so that literally every calculator and laser pen has it. Hell, you'll soon walk into some people's houses and say "hey Alexa" and have 5 devices all answer you. Setting timers will never be quite so easy as it is now. So long as Alexa is there though, then Google probably isn't (or can be kept out), and god forbid Cortana or Siri should ever get anywhere.

      • Wouldn't putting Alexa on your pc just result in Cortanna and Alexa having a cat fight...
         

        • Wouldn't putting Alexa on your pc just result in Cortanna and Alexa having a cat fight...

          More like a cycles fight, especially when both are combined with the Meltdown and Spectre fix drivers.

      • We set timers probably 15 times a day. Mostly for cooking and having a voice controller timer while cooking and your hands are either full, or covered in food is actually very nice.

        As for being on the PC, well... In the past week:
        Twice I was either working later than I normally do, or on a day that I don't normally do, so I had to change the thermostat. Once I did it via the web on my PC, the other I yelled at Alexa in the living room from my office to do it. I guess I could get a dot for my home office,

    • Also didn't state why amazon didn't do this before. They can't be making much money off the dots at $35, and if google or apple smart assistant gains more users, they'll have lost a big edge on their store.
    • You, are no geek or nerd. Every true geek or nerd has dreamed of speaking to his computer since the dawn of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Only Alexa responds to the wrong prompt and doesn't sound like Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.

      This has a ways to go, but in many ways is achieving that geeky dream. Giving us handheld communicators with global reach. (you can even get Bluetooth broaches for that variant of the experience.)
      Now if we can just get Warp drives, anti-gravity and gravity controls, Holodecks, re
      • The Star Trek computer is a voice command interface, not an 'assistant'. If you watch Star Trek closely, they use voice to narrow the search field and then almost always look at the drilled-down data on a screen. Further, The Star Trek computer doesn't attempt to 'be nice', or use colloquial phrases. When i tell Cortana to play a song, she gets cheeky and REPLIES instead of just playing the song. The Star Trek computer never attempts to be my friend or buddy up to me. We DO NOT WANT an assistant, we want vo

  • CustomersDontMatter (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Monday January 08, 2018 @10:32AM (#55884861)
    Just like the evisceration of NN so the wealthy and powerful corporations can pillage- it no longer matters what we as consumers want. 80%+ of Americans supported Net Neutrality, yet it was killed anyway.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
    What you or I want as "free" Americans in a "Democratic" society no longer matter. If a company can extract our personal information it will at any cost to our liberties or pocket book.

  • Off my new laptop list (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So, conveniently can remove the following laptop from my list of possible new laptops to replace my agin ASUS Zenbook this spring -ASUS's ZenBook and VivoBook lineup, the HP Pavilion Wave, and select Acer Spin, Swift, Switch and Aspire

  • Another "Assistant"? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cyberpunkrocker ( 1649121 ) on Monday January 08, 2018 @11:23AM (#55885191)

    I've already disabled Cortana on Windows 10 and Google Assistant on Android, Alexa is just yet another privacy-invading annoying ass-istant to disable...

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