>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality.
This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.
Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.
To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.
If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.
I think this is an interesting curiosity, but I am a little worn out on every company announcing AI as some kind of major upgrade. Alexa has already been sort of a waning product, and in some ways, it was already kind of cute since you could play goofy games. But cute gets old.
With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?
I remember when law officers wanted the Alexa recording at the home of a murder. Amazon did not give it up.
I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?
I think your memory is mistaken. Amazon will give up recordings when legally obligated to do so, because that’s the law. They can’t choose to ignore the law.
However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive).
I don't know the specifics of this case, but maybe the investigators just asked in case there was an accidental trigger, or a real trigger etc. Seems reasonable for the detective to attempt to turn over any stone they can to aid the investigation.
I don't know about Alexa specifically, but I've seen stories where the police requested Ring videos from a neighbor's house, including cameras inside the neighbor's house that they could not have known of without Amazon's assistance, that were not pointed outside, and even, if I remember correctly, one that was in the neighbor's business in a completely different location, where the justification pointedly identified the neighbor as not a suspect, but Amazon gave over this video anyways.
I think if an Alexa device were present in a home in which a person named Alexa lived, they would reconfigure the wake word. A more likely hypothetical would be one in which the murder was named was Alexa, and the surprised victim exclaimed, "Alexa, what are you doing here!?!"
I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.
I've found Perplexity.ai with Deepseek R1 to be very good at choosing a product or a hotel for me. I just punched in your query and it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen ! "Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer"
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers".
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
Nothing you describe hasn't already been done in the pre-LLM era with simple keyword matching.
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.
I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products.
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
If you order from Walmart and limit it to what is in their actual store then you know at least some human vetted it as safe for sale in the US. Walmart also lets 3rd party sellers on their website and yes most of that is drop shipped junk just like amazon.
That's exactly what I asked for, wow. To whoever asked why should Amazon want to do this, it's to keep their customers from bypassing their own search with services like this one.
Curious as to what LLMs you are using to allow successful queries like this and what are you using them for? If you don't mind sharing. My understanding was that these would result in some fairly random, maybe true maybe not, results. Is there a company with a RAG that produces reliable results? If so, I would like to check it out.
If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key).
That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).
One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.
Fair, but the above comment is about general population. The percentage of people that’s actively against it in the real world is negligible. Like where do you cut the line? Is Siri/Google Assistant ok on your phone? What about every newer BMW nowadays coming with its own assistant? Samsung TVs? Nest/Ecobee products? I could go on, and I haven’t met a person who owns has 0 devices with voice assistants in years.
I'm not sure how any person can be confident of such things these days, but would you be ok with the open mic if you knew it couldn't be used to build some profile about you?
I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?
The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).
I didn't say it in the prior comment, but this is what I'm hoping for and that people end up caring enough so that this option "wins." Evidence suggests people will take the cheaper option, though, even if all of their info ends up in the hands of advertisers or something far more nefarious.
You mention Apple... I feel like, of the megacorps, they're the most likely to do something like that. Then between the phone, AirPods, HomePod (tethered to the phone I guess or a newer version of the hardware), and your car with CarPlay, the hardware already exists and so someone will build a privacy-focused LLM that Apple could plug into. At least Apple could justify that by being the hardware interface between the LLM and the user if they can't build their own effective LLM (seems unlikely they'll be able to do that given track record).
If I were really crazy I'd say Apple could buy Anthropic (right right they don't do big acquisitions) and turn it into their privacy-focused LLM.
I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism.
My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation.
If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.
That's one of the things I like about the current implementation of Gemini - they seem to really be leaning in on grounding, and there are ref links for pretty much all of the stuff that I'd normally want to fact check form a chatbot.
It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.
I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.
Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand.
Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!
People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop.
I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.
The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly.
I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house.
I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?
Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.
That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription.
Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.
Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale.
I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.
On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.
Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
Every time I hear that, I think “you mean like I’ve been doing for, what, the last five years?” How does Siri not know that I know this already? Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?
Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.
I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for.
Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.
Honestly I think it's a tiny number people that are actually eager consumers of surveillance capitalism. It's just pushed so hard by the companies around us that unless you actively oppose it it will creep in.
> the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials
I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.
> On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.
>continue on the go with your phone or in the car,
I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs.
I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings.
Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.
I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can.
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.
> We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.
Thank you for nothing, then?
I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?
--
Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
> Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+?
I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.
1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
Can Prime users instead get a discounted prime without this Alexa stuff? Seems like it should be $20 cheaper per month. In other words Prime shipping should be free.
What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
By having my phone I get the benefit of keeping my job and life after Google and other big tech companies dominated society to such a degree where it's basically impossible to function offline. By paying Amazon I get the benefit of being able to buy stuff after every other store was undercut to extinction. Hurray
Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device?
edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
> Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"
The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
Wait till she "mishears" you: "I thought you said you wanted to purchase 10 gallons of Amazon basics hand soap. Sorry about that. The shipping is arriving today, but you can return it back at the nearest UPS location".
I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".
How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?
In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.
"Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."
I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years.
But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.
I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results.
But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.
I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center.
Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice
Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.
I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list.
A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy.
While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list."
It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.
It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.
It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".
We all make the calculation whether it is worth it and for me it is worth it. I'm not a head of state or someone with great secrets to keep. Alexa just hears me talk a lot about Elden Ring or whether we need to buy milk. I'm just a normal guy talking to his girlfriend and for me it is worth it. I completely respect the opposite view though. For me the pros outweigh the cons. I have good reason to believe that they are being truthful when they say it only hears me talk when I give the wake word.
I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.
>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.
This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.
Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.
I don't think you can say that is the problem. It may have exacerbated the issue, but problems exist when summarising full news content too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality.
This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.
Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.
To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.
If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.
I think this is an interesting curiosity, but I am a little worn out on every company announcing AI as some kind of major upgrade. Alexa has already been sort of a waning product, and in some ways, it was already kind of cute since you could play goofy games. But cute gets old.
With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?
I remember when law officers wanted the Alexa recording at the home of a murder. Amazon did not give it up.
I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?
I think your memory is mistaken. Amazon will give up recordings when legally obligated to do so, because that’s the law. They can’t choose to ignore the law.
However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive).
Here’s a case where the Alexa command was used as part of the case, though it didn’t have recordings of the actual crime: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
Try these searches: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Until last year, Amazon gave police video from Ring without a warrant.
https://www.wired.com/story/ring-police-rfa-tool-shut-down/
Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?
I don't know the specifics of this case, but maybe the investigators just asked in case there was an accidental trigger, or a real trigger etc. Seems reasonable for the detective to attempt to turn over any stone they can to aid the investigation.
I don't know about Alexa specifically, but I've seen stories where the police requested Ring videos from a neighbor's house, including cameras inside the neighbor's house that they could not have known of without Amazon's assistance, that were not pointed outside, and even, if I remember correctly, one that was in the neighbor's business in a completely different location, where the justification pointedly identified the neighbor as not a suspect, but Amazon gave over this video anyways.
With an unfortunately named victim, I suppose.
I think if an Alexa device were present in a home in which a person named Alexa lived, they would reconfigure the wake word. A more likely hypothetical would be one in which the murder was named was Alexa, and the surprised victim exclaimed, "Alexa, what are you doing here!?!"
I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.
I've found Perplexity.ai with Deepseek R1 to be very good at choosing a product or a hotel for me. I just punched in your query and it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen ! "Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer"
It's a good air fryer.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/air-fryers-without-bluetoot...
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-recommend-a-hotel-mo...
I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers".
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
May I ask you what makes you so sure that it's an LLM-based search - and not any other kind of NLP search tech?
Nothing you describe hasn't already been done in the pre-LLM era with simple keyword matching.
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
> They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them.
They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”
Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.
I'm pretty sure their search results intentionally suck to make their ads more valuable.
I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products.
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
I can't believe that in 2025 BestBuy is my go to for electronics. Wild times.
> Too much overhead figuring out the good products ...
How does changing stores help. If the products are still the same but on Walmart, how are you getting better information?
Amazon doesn't care if you die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=192s
If you order from Walmart and limit it to what is in their actual store then you know at least some human vetted it as safe for sale in the US. Walmart also lets 3rd party sellers on their website and yes most of that is drop shipped junk just like amazon.
Check out https://exa.ai/ - iirc they use a link-prediction transformer
https://websets.exa.ai/cm7m8a1ip006rdzzzgxsalirs
Looks great, but wow, the pricing is insane for the typical consumer
Agree, very cool but not $200/mo cool.
That's exactly what I asked for, wow. To whoever asked why should Amazon want to do this, it's to keep their customers from bypassing their own search with services like this one.
Curious as to what LLMs you are using to allow successful queries like this and what are you using them for? If you don't mind sharing. My understanding was that these would result in some fairly random, maybe true maybe not, results. Is there a company with a RAG that produces reliable results? If so, I would like to check it out.
> and free with Prime
Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.
Pricing for Prime is totally disconnected from costs. They will price at whatever maximizes p*q.
If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key).
That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).
One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.
Fair, but the above comment is about general population. The percentage of people that’s actively against it in the real world is negligible. Like where do you cut the line? Is Siri/Google Assistant ok on your phone? What about every newer BMW nowadays coming with its own assistant? Samsung TVs? Nest/Ecobee products? I could go on, and I haven’t met a person who owns has 0 devices with voice assistants in years.
I'm not sure how any person can be confident of such things these days, but would you be ok with the open mic if you knew it couldn't be used to build some profile about you?
Do it all locally.
I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?
The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).
[1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...
I didn't say it in the prior comment, but this is what I'm hoping for and that people end up caring enough so that this option "wins." Evidence suggests people will take the cheaper option, though, even if all of their info ends up in the hands of advertisers or something far more nefarious.
You mention Apple... I feel like, of the megacorps, they're the most likely to do something like that. Then between the phone, AirPods, HomePod (tethered to the phone I guess or a newer version of the hardware), and your car with CarPlay, the hardware already exists and so someone will build a privacy-focused LLM that Apple could plug into. At least Apple could justify that by being the hardware interface between the LLM and the user if they can't build their own effective LLM (seems unlikely they'll be able to do that given track record).
If I were really crazy I'd say Apple could buy Anthropic (right right they don't do big acquisitions) and turn it into their privacy-focused LLM.
Now to read your blog post...
This is a local only version: https://www.jollamind2.com/
Love the "Drop In" Feature opening a conversation channel to a particular room..
I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism.
My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation.
If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.
The big issue with LLM is how can you trust the information it gives you? It could be flat out making all or some of it up.
The built in web search
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a...
That's one of the things I like about the current implementation of Gemini - they seem to really be leaning in on grounding, and there are ref links for pretty much all of the stuff that I'd normally want to fact check form a chatbot.
It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.
It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios.
And yet people still drive into rivers because Google Maps tells them to.
Never underestimate the power of "computers are never wrong."
I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.
Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? None of this makes any sense.
> Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT?
Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa.
> Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo?
Because it isn't out yet?
Most people using Alexa heavily probably already have Prime.
Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand.
Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!
People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop.
I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
Why did you let Alexa in in the first place?
My main request is to add the functionality to inquire about the progress of running tasks, such as checking the time remaining on a timer.
The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.
Finally, Alexa hasn't improved at all in years. I half love half hate mine.
I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.
The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly.
I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house.
I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?
Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...
then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.
This is what’s happening to us.
The pricing seems odd. $20/mo for Alexa+, but it's free with a $15/mo Prime subscription?
It makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.
Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.
That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription. Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.
Anchoring
Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this terrible offer.
Or Prime's getting another price increase.
Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription
>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale.
I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.
On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.
Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
Every time I hear that, I think “you mean like I’ve been doing for, what, the last five years?” How does Siri not know that I know this already? Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?
> Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?
Essentially, yes - for various privacy/marketing/whatever reasons what information Siri collects is heavily anonymized and can't be tied back to you.
Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.
>On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
On a bus or plane, no, absolutely not. In the kitchen of a busy household, yes, definitely.
Yup. Or rewinding your podcast or skipping to the next music track in the shower.
Asking what the name of the artist is while running with earbuds.
And so forth. We have different interfaces to adapt to the outputs we have available at the moment...
The Alexa in my in-law’s house already does this and it is such an anti-feature.
It’s always some garbage that they had clicked on at one point.
Suggested: the “AOWFIZ Toilet Brush with digital thermomteer” is 10% off
Like they paid $200 to have that in their kitchen
I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for.
Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573
Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...
Honestly I think it's a tiny number people that are actually eager consumers of surveillance capitalism. It's just pushed so hard by the companies around us that unless you actively oppose it it will creep in.
> the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials
I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.
> On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.
Who actually wants this garbage?
Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about electronic music.
>continue on the go with your phone or in the car,
I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs.
I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone spoken ones.
That’s wild. What kinds of things do you ask about?
I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.
Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings.
Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.
Smile? No, it's a penis.
If they have a decent API I might consider buying it. Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.
I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can.
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.
> We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.
Thank you for nothing, then?
I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?
--
Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
> Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+?
I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
> And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+?
I presume via the "new browser-based experience at Alexa.com"?
The website says there will be browser support
I have 4 echos. This stuff looks like a lot of things I will never use.
Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more pleasurable!
I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.
https://deepdreams.stavros.io
They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.
I remember reading an article about how Amazon would lose money every year on the Alexa service.
I wonder if /how that will change now after this.
IIRC, Alexa lost money because:
1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
Specifically, if they’re going to lose even more on this venture now cranking it up to 11.
Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too
I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?
Given how Apple Intelligence has gone so far, I'm not going to hold my breath.
Can Prime users instead get a discounted prime without this Alexa stuff? Seems like it should be $20 cheaper per month. In other words Prime shipping should be free.
The fusion of the different devices is cool but man it feels odd to be owned by some company, integrated into all aspects of your life idk.
My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically
What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
By having my phone I get the benefit of keeping my job and life after Google and other big tech companies dominated society to such a degree where it's basically impossible to function offline. By paying Amazon I get the benefit of being able to buy stuff after every other store was undercut to extinction. Hurray
Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device?
edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.
Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?
"We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period."
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
> Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"
The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower and undercut the Prime cost?
Wait till she "mishears" you: "I thought you said you wanted to purchase 10 gallons of Amazon basics hand soap. Sorry about that. The shipping is arriving today, but you can return it back at the nearest UPS location".
I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".
Wait til Alexa+ becoms "Alexa+ thinking", and tells you she's replaced the Ice Cream on your Amazon Fresh order with oatmeal because its healthier.
How can I try it? My Prime expires in 3 days.
model agnostic, meaning a model is enlisted based on specific task, rather than a shoehorn and a single model.
Related: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus
How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?
In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.
This isn’t what they are selling.
They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
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It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.
"Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."
I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years.
But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.
I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.
I'm morbidly curious about your questions.
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That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results.
But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.
A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.
I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice
Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.
I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list.
A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy.
While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list."
And it did!
It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.
It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.
Personally, I think they'll move some of the Alexa+ functionality to prime subscribers and increase the prime rate again to subsidize.
It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".
We all make the calculation whether it is worth it and for me it is worth it. I'm not a head of state or someone with great secrets to keep. Alexa just hears me talk a lot about Elden Ring or whether we need to buy milk. I'm just a normal guy talking to his girlfriend and for me it is worth it. I completely respect the opposite view though. For me the pros outweigh the cons. I have good reason to believe that they are being truthful when they say it only hears me talk when I give the wake word.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.
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