Amazon's Alexa Stalled With Users as Interest Faded, Documents Show (bloomberg.com) 135
Bloomberg Businessweek: Each holiday season since 2015, Amazon.com has counted on selling a lot of its Alexa voice-controlled smart speakers. For almost as long, it's known that the devices have had trouble holding customers' attention even into January. According to internal data, there have been years when 15% to 25% of new Alexa users were no longer active in their second week with the device. Concern about user retention and engagement comes up repeatedly in internal planning documents that Bloomberg Businessweek viewed. The documents, which covered 2018 to 2021, detail Amazon's continued ambitions for Alexa, including plans to add more cameras and sensors that would allow devices to recognize different voices or determine which rooms users are in during each interaction. They also reveal the roadblocks the company sees to realizing these goals. Last year, Amazon's internal analysis of the smart speaker market determined it had "passed its growth phase" and estimated it would expand only 1.2% annually for the next several years.
Well, can Alexa recommend porn? (Score:5, Funny)
No? That is the problem right there: Alexa was clearly designed ignoring the main purpose of the Internet. That cannot work.
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"Alexa: help me get horny."
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"Alexa, tell me if this sounds like me shooting a shotgun at you."
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I am sure there is a third party that can. :P
Amazon keeps building better Alexa-enabled audio (Score:3)
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Good and bad (Score:5, Informative)
But it is nearly impossible to turn off the "beep" notice that tells you "We think it's time for you to re-order Bic Ball Point Pens. Would you like to reorder?"
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What can be more intrusive than an audio prompt that you can't turn off? I guess the next step is for it to place the order anyway and your only way out would be to send the stuff back.
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(flaw: if you want to listen to "Something", by the Beatles, you can't ask for it: Alexa will give you something by the Beatles, all right, just not "Something" by the Beatles.)
Like talking to Fred Kwan in Galaxy Quest:
Sir Alexander Dane: Could they be the miners?
Fred Kwan: Sure, they're like three years old.
Sir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.
Fred Kwan: You lost me.
Re: Good and bad (Score:2)
Notices can be disabled in the Alexa app.
A duckduckgo search brought up the answer on Amazon's website and it was easy to implement.
*gnihihi* someone who kniws Alexa intimately enough to tell where to disable stuff, but who values privacy enough to use duckduckgo. I'm confused.
Re: Good and bad (Score:2)
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I bought one of the Alexa Dots a few months ago, with the idea of using it to listen to SiriusXM music channels next to my bed. I found that the speech quality by "Alexa" was so muffled that it was almost completely non-understandable. The interface was so convoluted, I wound up peddling the damn thing on eBay for about 1/2 of what I paid Amazon for it. What a piece of crap.
Re:Amazon keeps building better Alexa-enabled audi (Score:5, Informative)
We don't use ours nearly as much as we used to, and there's a simple reason why: it's annoying. After almost every use of it to answer a question, like: "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a cup" results in the answer, followed by an ad. It's fucking irritating. I literally just tried this question, and got the answer, followed by "... You know, I was just thinking..." which is the introduction to an ad.
"Alexa, what are my notifications?" results in something like "You have one new package" followed by, "... by the way, did you know that" which is the intro to an ad about setting what you just purchased on repeat delivery. I hate using this tool now. Amazon has ruined it.
Re:Amazon keeps building better Alexa-enabled audi (Score:5, Informative)
I agree. I don't get ads, but I just get stupid things like "You want me to learn your voice", or "Did you know that I can " and similar questions/comments. The same ones are stated over and over. It's just annoying.
I use Alexa to play music and interact with connected media devices. That's it. I don't get any "lip" from "her" when just using these features. I don't even use it for the weather anymore because it just won't shut up afterwards.
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Reasons like this are why I will never have an echo in my house and I've fully commited to the Zwave/Zigbee/OpenHAB setup in my home. I just did a remodel of my house that took about 3 years. While the switches/lights/locks/Garage door openers and sensors and stuff are all installed, I'm still in progress of bringing it all together in OpenHAB, I'm extremely interested in the MyCroft Project, and due to this article just ordered 2 Mark II's... We'll see how everything comes together. I will NOT h
Siri is okay on this front (Score:2)
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That's the problem. It's great hardware paired with a mostly terrible voice assistant. Meanwhile, Google has a great voice assistant and mostly terrible hardware. I tried them both out and I constantly have to shout over whatever's playing to get Google to acknowledge me. Echo devices and their better microphone array can clearly pick my voice out in a noisy room. However, an actually useful voice assistant won out. Maybe someday the Echo devices can have their firmware replaced with something Google-
Who would want ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why so complicated? They have continuous glucose monitoring meters for diabetes. Why not a continuous monitor for COVID? (Tied together with a Pfizer auto-injector.)
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Re: Who would want ... (Score:2)
Anyone who has a router that tracks traffic and bandwidth usage can confirm that Alexa listens and sends data constantly.
Try it yourself.
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/help... [amazon.com]
If they were violating that I don't think they'd be able to keep it a secret.
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And I grew up when cell phones didn't exist. Amazing what "progress" brings us. Far as 24/7 you all are supposed to be geeks, hackers, and nerds. You're basically admitting that a multibillion-dollar company can sneak by all that network traffic and contents without anyone ratting them out for eight years.
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My concern is not that they are, more in they could be, and that is bad enough, I believe their motive it to make money not my life better, they also don't really care about security or that other people may hack their devices either. There security concerns go to the point it costs them more not to have security than they are making from having that security, and since most people don't understand, or care that makes the threshold is quite low.
Think of it this way if the government, for the safety of the p
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I suspect maybe .0001% of the users of an Alexa unit know how or have the equipment to SEE how much data it uploads/downloads, and the fact that it does this 7/24. That crap is banned from any network I control..
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Re:Who would want ... (Score:4, Informative)
- A phone cannot be spying at such detail constantly, this would consume too much power. Listening to one or half a dozen keyword can be done very efficiently. But the more keywords it listens too, the less power efficient it becomes. To detect the "exact boots", or something close enough that the "exact boots" would show in the ad, would required hundred, if not thousand of keywords, and likely some understanding of the context as well (natural language understanding). That's way to computely intensive to be done as a constant background process.
- Advertisers are not interested in the specific things that a single person wants. That would only benefit the sellers of that one item, instead all of the sellers of all kind of "western boots", driving down the price of the ad space.
More likely, your friend saw the same ad as you a few days/weeks before and bought the boots. You have the same interests as your friend. Ergo you should see a lot of the same ads as he does. ...)
Or maybe your friend didn't see the ad per-se, but he was affected by the marketing campaign trying to sell those boots (e.g. "popular item"/"best seller" is an Amazon listing, word-of-mouth from other friends also affected by the campaign, user review in a youtube video,
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Which one would be cached locally? A 24/7 recording or a 24/7 CPU-intensive voice transcription? Both would kill the battery.
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I don't know about you but I don't talk 24/7 in fact I talk a very small fraction of the day, it must be listening 24/7 for it to pick up hey google, or whatever you say and respond and transform recognize that it is "hey google" if that bit sends the data to the server to do that recognition then the server is no longer power limited.
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Which one would be cached locally? A 24/7 recording or a 24/7 CPU-intensive voice transcription? Both would kill the battery.
If your phone recorded 24x7 and sent it all to a server somewhere on the Internet you would never know it.
You can buy cheap tiny handeld recorders that weigh less than a quarter of a pound able to record continuously for WEEKS. The OK Google garbage consumes 2-4 percent per day. Storage and bandwidth required are basically thermal noise.
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It's the difference between entire chips being asleep vs active. It makes a huge difference. Wake words use a dedicated core that is just for hot word detection.
Re: Who would want ... (Score:2)
I think what parent means is that don't have to send it all in real time. Recording for 6 hours straight can also be done by dedicated hardware while everything else is asleep. Then send it all in one burst in a matter of seconds. Audio data is dirt under your fingernails compared to even a single facebook page you load, volume wise.
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It doesn't kill the battery. It just is always listening for keywords. I'm pretty sure it's very efficiently converted into a digital wave pattern, not full detail where you can recreate a persons voice but the markers they use to identify what was said, which is very small data (Not enough to recreate a voice, again, it's not a recording) and submit that to their servers.
Keyword detection such as "Ok Google" or "Alexa" is not done on a server, it's done on a dedicated hardware directly on your device. You can easily extrapolate that if it is cost effective to have dedicated hardware for such a use, it cannot be efficient to be sending whole sentences to a server for analysis (although I admit that a keyword detection as an additional latency requirement which is not needed for ad purposes and which adds another incentive for hardware keyword detection).
And if you don't beli
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I think you're taking a lot of liberties here.
When people talk about the power requirements of the phone to do this, it's like they take the stance of "Your phone is always recording in voice quality samples and continously transmitting it." No, that would take a lot of power and your phone would die rather fast. I think it's silly for anyone who thinks thats how it would work.
Having hardware based signature recognition of words makes sense, and it can transfer the recorded signature, not the actual audio w
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If the phone was the culprit, you would see that in your data usage.
Or do you think "they" have a magic dael with the network operator that their "secretly" picked up voice data goes via a secret channel - and does not show up on your data budget or uses your data plan?
I have 500MB free data a month. YES: MB, not GB. My data plan would be over 1st day of the new billing period if my phone would be listening and sending data to a host.
Re: Who would want ... (Score:2)
You can compress voice at 30 kbps without problems. Probably even lower, buy let's stick with that.
That's about 350 MB per 24 hours... but you're not taking for 24 hours straight. If a simple circuit is in place to detect voice from non-voice, I'd say 5-10 MB for your complete day's conversation is plenty. If it were sending data in real time, that'd cost you about 100 MB / month, tops.
Do you ever use wifi? Because a day's payload, 5-10 MB, is about one single webpage you load. So caching few MB and sending
Re:Who would want ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I could find the article, but it's not that Alexa (or anything else) is picking up on the voice conversation. It's your phones using proximity and timing.
You friend bought boots. That purchase, through whatever means, is now tied to him, to his phone, to his Facebook/Amazon/Google/Meta profiles. He then went to your house and spent time there. This triggered your Facebook/Amazon/Google/Meta profiles; since there is a relation between you two, and this was not a quick encounter, there must be similarities. Therefore, the advertisers hit you up with your friends' recent purchases.
* Maybe they bought something you would also like?
* Maybe they bought something and you would buy something similar as a gift?
* Maybe they bought something and they will spend more time at your home so you should buy a spare?
* And maybe, just maybe, it was also talked about so now you see an ad plus have a recent review in your head bettering the chances you'd buy it yourself.
So after this holiday season, don't be surprised when you get ads for Grandma's favorite toothpaste, or Uncle Joe's hair restoration creme.
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"Therefore, the advertisers hit you up with your friends' recent purchases.
* Maybe they bought something you would also like?
* Maybe they bought something and you would buy something similar as a gift?
* Maybe they bought something and they will spend more time at your home so you should buy a spare?
* And maybe, just maybe, it was also talked about so now you see an ad plus have a recent review in your head bettering the chances you'd buy it yourself."
Yeah, and maybe I don't want it fucking doing that. Any o
Re: Who would want ... (Score:2)
And yet you did click "I agree"...
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Err, this is more proof that capitalism is superior to communism. The CCP has to force people to be spied on, with capitalism, people actually pay to be spied on, then the government pays for the data, making Jeff even richer. What's not to like, capitalism at its finest. Next up is a law that every house needs a digital assistant, bought and written by Amazon.
consumer apathy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Got a firestick. Still trying to find a problem that only Alexa can solve.
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Constant directed marketing to consumers where the consumers pay for the hardware, I thought it was obvious.
Oh, you where talking about the consumers problems, that's not amazons concern.
Useful as an intercom (Score:5, Interesting)
Last year, I started looking for a way to communicate with my 3 teenagers while they were in their rooms with the doors closed, without yelling at the top of my lungs to be heard over their airpods. Texting would have probably worked but felt wrong. Dedicated wireless intercom systems are clunky, unreliable, and expensive.
Giving the kids each an Echo, either the Dot or the Flex, and putting one in the kitchen as well gave me an easy way to solve this problem. I can use the Echo as an intercom to drop in on one or all of the kids when I need to. This has been a lifesaver for us! I also use the kitchen Echo to play music, which works quite well of course.
I'm not a fan of the privacy implications of having Echo devices in my house. Amazon does provide some controls for that, at least.
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The problem he described is no different from when I was a teenager, with my headphones on, listening to Pink Floyd in my basement bedroom and my parents needed to get my attention. Kids have been playing music in their rooms with the door closed since the invention of the portable radio.
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Texting would work but felt wrong? Why?
Re: Useful as an intercom (Score:2)
I'm not a fan of the privacy implications of having Echo devices in my house.
Yet you're not only having those, you're also training your kids to have them. They'll have been having them for "as long as we can remember".
Why oh why does everybody grow to not care about privacy anymore? A mystery...
My ex and I had one (Score:2)
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"What time does Costco open tomorrow?"
"Ordering Cost Co brand Kleenexes from Amazon. They will arrive today in 2 hours."
They could retain more customers... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you said. (Even though the app clearly shows the speech to text was FLAWLESS. More acurrate: "The thing that you said doesn't have a pre-programmed/canned response.")
Alexa doesn't have "AI" yet. It's just a bunch of keywords.
The hardware is nice but the software is lacking. (Score:2)
If I ask Alexa if it will be warmer today, all I get is today's weather report that neither answers my question nor provides me yesterday's temperature for comparison. It's a simple question but Alexa still isn't up to the task.
Re:The hardware is nice but the software is lackin (Score:4, Interesting)
It's simple to humans, because humans have had hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to an environment as animals into modern day. Most living organisms operate cognitively on a "relationship" or "relative" level, and that bleeds heavily into our language; that's because environments change, threats change, and it's far easier cognitively to recognize a pattern in an environment and feel safe vs. recognize something is off about the pattern of your environment and detect a predator. Take your question "Will it be warmer today?". There are multiple variable assumptions in that question that an algorithm has to figure out.
1) "Will it be..."? Over what time threshold? what if it's colder at 2 AM but warmer at 11 AM than yesterday? Are you talking about the continuum of the entirety of the day or just when it matters to you, ie your hours when you go out? A human automatically assumes their own experience, easily ignores the night time when someone is inside, and tells you "yes it will." Software needs a dataset to figure that out. Heck according to the dictionary, the word "will", as a modal verb (and not the noun or other participles), has 6 different definitions depending on where it's placed in a sentence and the context in which it's used. That's something we humans pick up in a nanosecond, because of experience; software needs a lot more processing power to put that together and define just that first word.
2) "...warmer...?" How much is warmer? .1 degrees? 10 degrees? 100 degrees? All of those answers are correct, but .1 vs. 10 degrees you'd say it got it wrong. And what if it's .1 degrees warmer than yesterday, but it's still -10 out? And so it assumes a factual statement "Yes, it will be .1 degrees warmer", but a human would say "No, it's still cold", because based on their experience and assumptions they understand what you're really asking, which is "Should I go outside to run my errands, or when I go out do I need a big coat or a light jacket?"
3) "...today?" As opposed to when? Yesterday? Last week? Last year? Again, the software has to guess at what you mean. A human understands you meant by comparison to yesterday because they also work on a relative basis, but software works on a literal basis and there just isn't enough information or context for the software to give you that answer.
There's many more layers to it too. We as humans take this for granted, but to be fair we also recognize that people from different cultures miss certain things we take for granted in our home culture. So in that sense, we easily miss that culture, upbringing, and our life experiences all create context that we assume others get through a shared experience that allows us to communicate in a non-literal, relative way, and even from other cultures some things are still the same because we all have some shared experience based on our common experience as a similar animal of humans. Software has absolutely no context to work with.
English in particular is very difficult. English's grammar, compared to many other languages, are more like guidelines than actual rules. Many people who learn English as a second language get confused in how easily native speakers just change things around willy nilly and the listener gets it. It's fascinating that if you take a sentence properly formed, then say the words completely out of grammatical order, a native speaker can generally get what you're saying. Software has no way to keep up with how loosey-goosey English as a language really is.
That's not to defend Alexa. Alexa is garbage, I don't want it in my home. I've just always found fascinating how easily we take language for granted, but when you break it down and try to code language recognition it's stunningly difficult to do.
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You're making it so complicated. This is something that GPT-3 handles PERFECTLY. Amazon software engineers are just lazy bums.
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Google Home (or Google assistant on an Android phone) handles the question "will it be warmer today" just fine. It tells you how many degrees warmer/colder today's high will be compared to yesterday's.
Not useful unless you pay a lot (Score:2)
$80 for an Alexia compatible Light switch, or power plug. Hundreds of dollars for a thermostat, Adapters to your TV...
And a good chance that they are not compatible with Apple's or Google's solutions. So if you no longer care for Amazons services, and want to switch you have to redo everything again.
It is just expensive and a lot of work to make it a useful product. But you normally just get a marginal amount of benefit from it, and it isn't worth the price. Besides I usually have a phone on my person w
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So if you no longer care for Amazons services, and want to switch you have to redo everything again.
Or if Amazon decides to discontinue the product line.
Re:Not useful unless you pay a lot (Score:5, Funny)
So if you no longer care for Amazons services, and want to switch you have to redo everything again.
Or if Amazon decides to discontinue the product line.
You could always use Google products instead, they never discontin... oh, wait.
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We're sorry. The Google keyboard you were using to type your comment has been discontinued.
Re: Not useful unless you pay a lot (Score:2)
Just dictate it to Bixby.
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TP-Link Kasa line of smart home devices is cheap, works well and can be controlled with both Amazon and Google.
3-pack of single pole HS-200s is $40 on Amazon.
Amazon's own thermostat is currently on sale for $62.
Re: Not useful unless you pay a lot (Score:2)
Matter of taste, but in Europe KNX is fairly common. Has a number of drawbacks (being a consortium protocol and not "open" for one), but a lot of advantages.
The main advantage being thay KNX devices, ad far as their KNX functionality goes, JustWork(tm). For decades.
And you can build pretty advanced, decentralised installations, i.e. no central intelligence component (e.g. a server) needed.
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$80 for an Alexia compatible Light switch, or power plug. Hundreds of dollars for a thermostat, Adapters to your TV...
Okay, I can sort of get the light switches, though timers work fine for most cases, and I'm not lazy enough that I can't change my own TV channels and actually can think ahead to program my TiVo in advance, but never understood an IoT thermostat.
Seriously, how often are people messing with their thermostat? I have a heat pump and it's best to simply leave it alone. My regular thermostat (which is programmable, but I have that disabled) has a high and low temperature setting and automatically switches bet
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You're thinking like those features are for you. They are not, they are for the thermostat makers and the electric companies.
You live in an apartment complex that has Nest thermostats and you want your temperature to be stable? Do not configure the Nest with your WiFi.
The tech is just not there yet (Score:2)
Southpark (Score:5, Funny)
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Try watching the latest episode of Southpark. It's set in the future where all the cars are controlled by.. Alexa. Alexa turn on engine... my Alexa hears it and waits for a command. Had to turn my Alexa off to watch the episode. Nice one Trey Parker and Matt Stone you assholes!
The previous episode set 4 different alarms on mine.
SOUTH PARK (two words) (Score:3)
Future Alexa is sure a biatch too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] as an example. Who wants that? :P
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If Amazon were competent or cared about you they'd make Alexa only respond to your voice, and those voices you authorized. Neither thing is true, however, so enjoy your little electric brownshirt.
Me too (Score:2)
I grabbed a couple of Echo Dots in a black friday sale, these days I don't even leave them plugged in. Once the novelty wears off, and to be honest the only thing I asked Alexa for last time she was switched on was the current date. The Show is good for video calling family, but apart from that doesn't get used. Once the novelty wears off, well, the novelty wears off and there's little essential that it does.
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Alexa is not even "self aware". (In the literal sense, not in the hand wavey sense.)
"Alexa, what processor do you use? Alexa, what version is your software?" (All met with "I'm sorry, I'm only programmed for mindless consumer zombies.")
Lost in Translation and Greed (Score:3)
Not that any clarification will prevent this from being the reality, but...ah fuck it it's worth the comedic effort. I can enjoy the sarcasm now, and depression later.
Amazon's continued ambitions for Alexa, including plans to add more cameras and sensors that would allow devices to recognize different voices or determine which rooms users are in during each interaction.
Translation: Amazon will deploy as many "sensors" as they can sell or give away even at a loss, in order to sell all that survellience capability to law enforcement through backdoor deals that are growing almost exponentially, as Privacy Advocate is officially added to the endangered species list.
They also reveal the roadblocks the company sees to realizing these goals.
Translation: The sky is the limit. There are no roadblocks. What we want, we get. We're Amazon. Fuck You, That's Why. We Are, Your Official Surveillance State.
It's a spy device (Score:2)
'cause no one trusts Amazon anymore (Score:2)
Would you like X with that? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the damned upselling that has me considering ripping the things out. The thing is dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to answering questions, which is fine, just don't ask it questions like you would Google, etc.
What really grinds my gears is when I ask it something simple, like the Weather, then it tries to UPSELL something... and leaves what should have been a simple response format by then asking ME an unwanted and unappreciated question that might cost me money if I answer wrong. F*ck that noise!
Comment removed (Score:3)
So they wanted to make it even creepier? (Score:2)
My Alexa has started trying to sell me shit. STOP (Score:3)
I love my Alexa but this whole thing where it tries selling me stuff that started a few weeks ago has got to stop!
Need more than Amazon to enjoy it (Score:2)
You can also turn off the 'By the way' options but you have to dig into
it is amazons own doing (Score:2)
It is amazon's fault, they are taking away features from the echo. most recent the greetings skill. the ability to drop in to other echos or echo calls to phones have been greatly curtailed, they even took away the ability to read emails. They do not give the ability to disable the btws or turn off echo for your day screen. They advertise the shows can be used as a photo album but it cannot be used as such since there are ads and a bunch of other unnecessary amazon nonsense on the screens. I was in the ski
Fine for their limited use (Score:2)
We use Alexa on our smart speakers for exactly 2 purposes. 1. Keep a grocery list - it's easy to yell at Alexa when we are out of something rather than stop and write it down. 2. It's easier for the kids to ask Alexa for music or Audio book than fumble with an app on an iPad, particularly when they were too young to read. They are still iffy on spelling anyway.
That's about it. Once in a while we'll use it to look up something on Wikipedia or whatever but I could take or leave that.
It's a gimmick, not an assistant... (Score:3)
It fails because it smacks of being a gimmick, not a real assistant.
Ask it a question, all it does is a web search and present results.
Ask it for a recipe, it shows a youtube video.
You can ask it jokes which it reads from a big stupid dad-joke database, or you can "open box of cats" to hear a cat recording, or ask it the question of the day for a trivia hit (along with constant begging for enabling other features so the creators of it can monetize the thing)...
None of those things are truly an assistant. Consumers want something like Scarlet Johansen's character in Her or Jarvis from IronMan or even Jexi...
Those are (maybe unrealistic at this point in time) representations of what consumers expect to see in a digital assistant, not the crappy thing that Alexa and Siri and Google currently represent.
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or Jarvis from IronMan
There's a thought - can I get the Alexa voice changed for famous voice actor (and sometimes screen actor) Martin Jarvis? Obviously, I'd change the prompt word to 'Martin'.
I'm sorry, I didn't get that (Score:2)
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If Amazon were smart, every "I'm sorry, I'm a device for stupid consumers" would be met by throwing a dozen software engineers at it, so the next person who says it isn't met with stupidity.
Timers and Alarums (Score:2)
"Alexa, set a timer for ten minutes"
"Setting a timer for one minute"
So then I just use my phone to set a timer. Setting alarms for times works little better. It's good at many other things, just not this.
Conjuction support (Score:3)
I've got one and currently four lights/switches connected to it. I can't say "turn this thing on AND turn that thing on" or other similar phrases that require the system to understand a series of commands. The system needs to become more conversational.
Alexa voice remote not very smart (Score:2)
This fall I bought Amazon's new Fire TV. Not a bad TV, but the voice remote with Alexa isn't very smart. "Alexa, Channel 13"...sometimes switches to channel 13, sometimes it brights up a list of search results. "Alexa, switch to DVD player." "I don't know how to do that." Really? Isn't that kind of a basic function of a TV, especially after you've identified that input as a DVD player? I'll keep the TV, but I can't find much use for the Alexa voice remote.
FFS, it's a novelty item (Score:3)
It's a novelty item and I know you'll be surprised at this, but it turns out that novelty items don't have long use cases because they're novelty items.
Alexa is the fidget spinner of the home appliance market, with a corresponding attention curve that inevitably crashes shortly after purchase.
Stop (Score:2)
I can't end an interaction with Alexa without saying "Alexa... A l e x a... STOP."
It kept trying to sell me stuff... (Score:2)
so like all other sources of advertising, my brain filtered it out.
thirdparty syntax SUCKS (Score:2)
I spent a few days learning how to write extensions for it... and discovered it's almost useless for them unless you're a sufficiently big "partner" to qualify for otherwise-taboo triggers.
For example, suppose I made my own ESP32-based air conditioner controller, and implemented a feature to run a 10-minute heat cycle (or stop cooling for 10 minutes if it's in A/C mode) if I have to pee or get up, and it's too cold to get out of bed. You have to use syntax like, "Alexa, use (unique-longword-1) (unique-longw
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"So when The Progressive/Socialist All-Glorious State finally arrives, they can knock on my door at 4 AM with jackboots and guns and take me to jail."
One small change and I agree with you.
Holodomor, Great Purge, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Killing Fields, no one hates like a Socialist.