>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.
It’s worse than that because SEO excreta is still shown to the user, who at least has a chance to question it. With this style of assistant, the user doesn’t even see what the bot saw and that opens up new areas for abuse which is harder to detect.
This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.
> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.
Just like nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, you can find a handyman and schedule an appointment with a voice assistant / chatbot in 6 months, and everyone will use self driving cars in 5 years.
I was a little kid when a local university came out with news that they had a big breakthrough in Cold Fusion. I remember my mom telling me it was going to change everything and we would travel around the world on invisible rails.
Many years later the worlds richest man is digging short tunnels to drive electric vehicles in.
My house, not too far from Three Mile Island, was built between its commissioning and the incident with reactor 2. As a result, its builders installed the most insane heating system known to man: resistive heating in the ceiling. Crank it all you want, your feet will still be cold. It’s a system that could only possibly be acceptable if electricity doesn’t cost anything.
They weren't unreasonable - they just didn't predict the whole world going collectively insane after Chernobyl, and choosing to pay for being slowly suffocated and cooked to death instead.
It also seems like it's ripe for just being an outright lie. People will pay Amazon to be ranked as the preferred service provider. You won't get the best service provider, you'll get the one that paid Amazon the most money.
They already failed at this. Adding something to a shopping cart is just one of the steps the mentioned example states. And consumers have already indicated that they don't trust it, because they prefer to know just what they're buying. So this project, by doubling down on that, is DOA
Yeah there's roughly zero chance that works reliably. It's so prone to bad failure cases I'm skeptical that they'll even ship something that tries to do that automatically.
On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
I'd expect this to be like when you call the bank and go through the phone tree, enter your account, birth date, SSN, zip code, etc. Finally get connected to the rep and the first questions are "What's your name and birth date?"
> Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
Unsurprisingly this human-made summary of Apple’s missteps is grossly incorrect as well. There were no catastrophic failures and the feature being poorly implemented does not warrant the hyperbole.
i can picture your ancestor saying "what? i will go to one mega store and buy something made in asia instead of getting a suit made to measure by Giovanni across the street?"
or your mom complaining about "buying shoes online without trying then" (or maybe that's you if born before 2000)
AI slop will define your identity tomorrow, doesn't matter what you think
Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.
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.
Google has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini.
I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google.
It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not.
Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.
I've been saying this for years, but I am still surprised there was no class action against Google for borking up their Home speakers.
Mine literally don't even understand "STOP" anymore when I ask them to stop playing my podcast. I am not kidding, every couple months they lose some basic functionality.
If that's not a modern version of planned obsolescence then I don't know what is.
We might need a new term, like we're in the Darth Vader Economy now, pray that corporations/CEOs/presidents don't alter away your jobs, features, and rights any future.
Sometimes when I was bored in meetings I would ask how what we were discussing would benefit users. It almost always resulted in uncomfortable silence, then some half-assed attempt to paper over the real answer (no benefit), and proceeding back to enshittifying.
Truly soul crushing environment, but it was amusing.
I'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.
Not that I know of? But, I have also not been watching that market for a long long time.
I am actually somewhat interested on building a small speaker thing that I can load a VXML document on and start adding use cases to it. Especially after considering how much I could save by dropping all of my current subscription stuff.
It is not completely unexpected. Within executive ranks there is an odd FOMO on 'new big thing'. That's partially why you saw attempts to sell more passing fads like crypto-everything, blockchain-everything, iot everything, subscription everything. It is easy to make fun (especially in retrospect), but being wrong means executive may make the mistake that Dwight made and declare internet a fad.
This makes some sense, but I generally you'd make sure the TAM of what you are building isn't smaller than one you would be cannibalizing.
Amusingly, this is exactly what Google did with Reader back in the day. They actually had Reader and Buzz integrated rather nicely, but lit it on fire in an effort to get circles going.
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.
When I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?".
It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.
You can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1.
Ha! You just reminded me how we changed our Alexa to Ziggy while my kid was away at college. He came home over a break and was eventually screaming "Alexa" trying to get it to wake up.
I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
Here's a few dozen use cases based on my own use of smart home devices:
- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.
- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.
- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)
- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.
- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home
- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.
- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.
None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.
Alexa is also very convenient for kids queueing up music or asking quick animal/etc questions that I couldn't answer (what sound does x make, how many teeth does a y have, etc). In both cases, I'd prefer they do this briefly by voice rather than sit down with a phone or tablet and get distracted on screen by millions of songs or the rest of the internet.
But yes, even just setting timers while washing dishes or hands covered in flour is worth it. My retired parents have a kitchen timer stuck on the side of the fridge and still use Alexa for cooking timers. There is literally no interruption to your flow.
Smart speakers just don't solve a problem. Period.
- Don't need to control home devices or watch shit while you're cooking. If I really want to queue up a video I just do that before I start cooking.
- Don't need music while showering, who cares, showering takes 5 minutes
- Again just like "oh it's for music"
- Yes I like controlling smart lights but I can just hold the power button on my phone and tell it what to do instead of bothering with a speaker in every room
- I just put the remote nearby? or use the remote on the phone? What's so hard about pausing TV with a phone/TV remote?
- Basic internet queries, a.k.a., the smartphone I always have on me
This sounds like the dudes who said the iPod was pointless because they already had MP3s on their computer, or wondering why they bought Macs instead of PCs. Other people are allowed to have different priorities than you, and it’s okay for products to find a niche which isn’t universal – very few things have smartphone levels of ubiquity.
It’s generally quite useful to react to other people persistently buying something you don’t feel the need for by learning what they value. For example, smart speakers are quite popular with parents who either have their hands full (literally), don’t want the distraction of a screen, or want something for the gap measured in years where a kid can talk but does not have a personal computer. That’s certainly not universal, but if you think about similar contexts or needs you might come up with some good product ideas which could be worthwhile even if they never ship in the billions of units.
Convenience isn't bad, it's just that minimal convenience is oversold.
If I'm in a bath I can use my phone. A regular bluetooth speaker is sufficient. There is no need for a voice assistant.
A long shower is not relaxing, that's the opposite. It's not relaxing to stand in the same place for a long time. I can't even hear the music that well in the shower through the speaker, there is water in my ears.
Someone on HN recently compared AI to a really buggy GPS.
People will still use it, since it mindlessly gets you on the road and looks like it knows what it is doing, which makes it the path of least resistance - and that will beat out better results for most people most of the time.
The same applies to Alexa and ilk - if you have it than it is easier to use than to do things any other way. Even if there are all sorts of mess ups on the way, it still will become the default action of anyone who tries it.
As they say - "Even a bolt of lightning will follow the path of least resistance, and it's not combating laziness or lack of focus"
Don't ever dismiss the power of inertia [or whatever this is called]. A listening AI agent that can perform tasks takes advantage of inertia.
I acknowledge that other people have other preferences, but my criticism mainly relates to the way assistant and smart speaker companies have sunk so much money into a product that has limited utility and helps people in such a mild way.
People are willing to spend <$100 on a smart speaker and then never pay again. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to make providing a free cloud service make sense by bundling it into Prime in hopes of being able to raise the cost of Prime as much as possible.
So I acknowledge that some people prefer this, but I think it's dumb enough that if I was a hypothetical investor back when these technologies were new I would not have gone anywhere near them.
Nope. Don’t backpedal. You’re going after people who say they like having smart speakers, not the companies that try to sell them. “OMG if I can't control my music in the shower I'll literally melt.” This is very clearly not directed at Amazon.
I was additionally referring to my previous comment in the thread, which was not just about the users of smart speakers but the functions they perform. My overall opinion is that smart speakers have limited value. I was pointing out how everything you might prefer to do on them has an existing or easy alternative or just isn’t much of a solution.
I acknowledge that people are allowed to have their own preferences but I still think they’re a dumb preference and I’m exercising my preference to dunk on that preference just like I’ll prefer to criticize anyone who says the Jeep Grand Cherokee is a good purchase.
I don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.
Is not having your phone on you at all times worth spending money on a stupid speaker device? And you need one in every room you spend time in?
Like, the solution is to put your phone in your pocket. I don't get it. Unless you are walking around naked most of the time, the solution is a device you already own.
That's something I like a lot about Apple's smart home setup having the option of having the Apple TV as the hub. I don't want or need a smart voice command speaker considering I already own the hardware capable of such things. I have no use for a low quality shitty speaker device that sits there and does nothing useful besides take voice commands.
I feel like you decided the speakers are stupid and therefore anything someone might use them for must also be by the transitive property. My voice "assistant" runs on my NUC via HomeAssistant. The only thing I needed to buy was a USB mic. I was already using HA and had some old computer speakers lying around.
It works great and I'm not tempted to get out my phone as much. Being able to call out multiple timers while cooking and change the music is so nice.
Did you read the rest of my post? As hands free and stays in the room when I leave are pretty big deals. I confess being able to turn the oven off or switch to warming temperature would be nice.
I can buy timers that stay in the room on Amazon for $6 for a two pack. Physical timers. Timers already exist as a standalone product.
I just have this hilarious picture in my mind of all these smart speaker users constantly balancing random objects in their arms as if they are not allowed to have their hands free or else they'll melt. Setting a timer on the microwave or stove you already own is fucking impossible. No way I can do that! I gotta install an Internet-connected microphone and speaker in my house for that!
"Hands free" is sorta the point? I already have several things, including the oven, that have buttons to do this sort of thing. I don't use those because I have my hands occupied.
I get that not everyone would want this. I'm ok with that.
If you already have one the utility is obvious in the kitchen. You don't want to touch your dirty hands to your phone and you definitely don't want to touch your food after touching your even dirtier phone.
I don't think that is useful enough to allow Bezos to listen to everything in my home, but will absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.
> absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.
It's been there for half a year or so; just add either OpenAI or Anthropic LLM integrations to Home Assistant, and you'll get a better personal assistant than anything Apple, Google or Amazon ever released.
The magic really is 1) SOTA LLMs that are good at understanding what you mean, and 2) no commercial bullshit that's degrading functionality (like having to say brand names to do stuff).
Massive lack of insight. The lady in the box on the kitchen counter is a "groupware timer". The timer on my watch is of no use to my wife in knowing when to turn off the oven when I'm in the bathroom.
I set time on my phone by voice (which is the only thing I use Siri for), because it's way quicker to say "5 minutes" than to try to set it through the app even with shortcut. But I have a kitchen timer (big, fat buttons and big digits) which I prefer to use in the kitchen because it's distinctly loud. My homepods are mostly for music.
It's convenience. I have a device in my kitchen that's hands-free, can set timers, show recipes, etc, that's always there when I'm cooking.
I don't usually have my phone on me, but even if I did I need to at least unlock it to enable voice commands, which instantly kills any notion of it being truly hands-free.
Obviously nobody finds it excruciatingly difficult, but you have a severe lack of empathy and imagination if you can’t see the utility here. Timers while cooking (hands dirty and/or full), measurements while woodworking/crafting/making, etc. and more as detailed thoroughly in other comments
On the rare occasions I watch TV, I'm incredulous at the adverts for technology that create these almost utopian looking lifestyles. I think to myself "who is taken in by this?". As it turns out, these are the people who are taken in by it.
This is so disingenuous. Echos are nowhere near $100 at the baseline, no one is buying it JUST for the timer, and no one finds setting a phone "excruciatingly difficult". Calm down.
Yep — if consumers see AI as added value they’ll pay more. But practically nobody will base their willingness to pay on guesses about Amazon’s COGS. The new AI feature could be pure excess capacity and cost Amazon nothing, or it could cost Amazon $1000/user/month, and nobody will know or care.
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.
> How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
These questions apply to any review or recommendation, from anyone, not just LLMs. How did anyone find out about the product at all? Did they do rigorous testing before they made a recommendation? Is there shared understanding between the recommender and recommendee about desired level of quality or what the user intents that need to be satisfied are? Are they even speaking the same language? Is their concept of "red" the same as ours?
At some point, you have to make a decision and buy with imperfect information, and treat it as an experiment. If it's not right for you, then return it for a full refund from Amazon. This is unfortunate. It costs money, time, and adds lots of friction to the whole process.
Maybe advertisers or manufacturers should post quality assurance bonds for their products, in addition to money-back guarantees or easy returns. Upon receiving a lemon or dumb product, you would return the item and activate the arbitration/bond clause and possibly get money out of the posted quality assurance bond.
> These questions apply to any review or recommendation
Sure but even on HN people seem to treat them as some kind of omniscient Gods or oracle of truth. It's like we all lowered our defences and stopped being critical because the new circus monkey does cool tricks.
At the end of the day they're blackboxes built on stolen data by for profit private organizations, all the red flags are here
Fair enough. I did similar searches for best air fryer and selected one based on reading a few dozen reviews on Amazon. It's just a coincidence that Perplexity landed on the same one, but I'm happy to back up it's hallucinatory opinion with a real human two thumbs up.
Google was a great product for searching the best deal too. As was Amazon back in the day.
Perplexity.ai is massively in the red, and would have to extract a profit somewhere.
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is.
So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
I am on a one-month free trial of Perplexity Pro and its deep research is excellent. It may very occasionally deviate from the original query, but I will still miss it a lot. It makes using Google feel like such a chore.
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.
All while disclaiming all responsibility for all the low quality / dangerous / poisonous crap they facilitate sale of. Talk about having your cake and eating it too
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.
Amazon needs to actually sell you things to make money. They have an entire supply chain built around it. Ads that never convert aren’t gonna pay for that.
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.
Now that they tend to price match Amazon and vice-versa there really is no reason to buy from Amazon. If it's in my local stores BB gets it to me faster too.
I'm so horrifically disappointed every time I go in there. Their monitor selection is all super low-end trash, as is most of their electronics they sell (TVs, stereos, computers etc). You're lucky if they have an actual PC component in the store, there are bare shelves everywhere. They don't even offer a good selection of phones, accessories or memory cards. It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business. Overall, it feels like a store for people who need to buy an electronic item without knowing why or what they're gonna do with it.
> It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business.
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
Best Buy's web site still carries some quality. It also has some random items you might not expect. I found a sling bag on their site in a size that had been sold out on the brand's site for months. These days BB and BHPhoto tend to be where I start my searches for electronic items when I know what I want.
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.
The majority is coding in an IDE with Claude. It outputs results that I can validate immediately. There are lots of wrong answers to be tossed out but it's still a large acceleration over just docs and stackoverflow.
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
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."
You know, people said the same thing the first time voice assistants came out. They said the same thing when VR came out. Even when 3D printers came out for God's sake.
"Everyone will have one!"
It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
I definitely agree it's a mistake to think that. That said, I do think LLM's or their direct successors are going to be more akin to Google search than the items you mention in terms of market penetration. And my comment was attempting to communicate that voice is today, and will be in the future a great way to interact with LLM's. I think you're saying you disagree with that, which is totally cool of course. Just thought I'd reply to share a little more of my thinking.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
They were requesting it from Amazon, not from the neighbor. And it absolutely is wrong (weird is not a word I would use to describe police using their power unscrupulously) to take data that you know is irrelevant.
You did not specify any of this information in your comment. You just said that without Amazon's knowledge the police wouldn't have known that the cameras were there.
Well in fact yes they could have. By just asking the neighbors. And then summarily submitting a request to Amazon to get all relevant video all in one go.
We don't know all the details of the stories you refer to, so you have to provide all relevant information. For all we still know, you are just making assumptions.
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 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!?!"
There’s a difference, though. Alexa’s recordings are made inside your house. Ring videos are taken outside your house. This distinction matters both as a fact and in the law.
I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.
It’s been pretty shocking that a Turing-test sentience at genius level was easier technology to make than a consumer level robot with 1950s level design expectations that stupidly picks up and moves objects.
It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.
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.
I feel like for any place that Gemini can give you worthwhile information about there will be a number of other sources that can give you more reliable info about it. Granted I tend to take trips to oddball places so I might not be the best judge.
I just tried asking Gemini about some popular destinations spots near my house that I know well and the answers weren't very impressive. Much of the responses didn't actually pertain to my specific questions and the useful info was pretty standard stuff that could be found anywhere. Some of it was straight up wrong as well. For example I asked about good hikes that aren't too crowded and it recommended the single most crowded trail in the area.
I'm more than a little curious on what sort of questions you would have needed an AI to query regarding a trip? Like, genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had.
We travel as a family a fair bit nowadays, and building an agenda for each day of the trip is surprisingly not that difficult if you are going to any common destination. Biggest thing to not forget is to add slack so that you can rearrange on the fly if needed.
> genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had
We're in the US, and we're looking at a UK trip. I've lived in the UK, and we've done a fair amount of international travel. We're in the "brainstorming" mode. I'd characterize the conversation as verbal googling.
We were asking questions about distances between cities, typical ticket rates for trains, things to do in various locations, etc.
Ok, so it isn't so much that you were brainstorming in a creative way. You were largely using it as a way to get various searches recorded all through a single "session"/"interface?" I think that makes a ton of sense. Thanks!
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.
How many times has that happened? Those cases make the headlines, but it’s so rare that, in my opinion, they can be disregarded. Nothing is perfect, just assess your risks and tolerance to error. That’s subjective, so one acts accordingly.
It’s really not though. It goes back to the whole “at that point you shouldn’t drive/fly/cross the road because you might die” argument. Literally millions (billions?) people commute every day using navigation apps. There will be accidents, but so far it’s been statistically insignificant, so people keep using them. Everyone has their own risk tolerances.
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.
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?
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.
If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?"
Likewise.
Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".
These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.
It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.
Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".
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 ?
Which is really stupid, because this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't sending that data back to themselves in the first place. They found that good UX is incompatible with telemetry, so they chose to... degrade the UX.
I don't know if that's the correct interpretation? I would say they degraded the UX because they aren't hoovering up enough data to make their solution work properly, unlike Google and Amazon. They've done a better job of protecting the user's privacy, but at the cost of making something that's quite limited in what it can do. Just one of those tradeoffs.
No, what I mean is: they could've had persistent storage on device, and have it hoover up enough data, and learn user preferences over time - it's fine to do it locally, as long as it doesn't leave the device. But, when you also do extensive telemetry, it becomes very hard to ensure none of that sensitive data gets leaked directly or indirectly through logs and diagnostic events. The two easy choices are to pick one or the other - UX or extensive telemetry. They chose the latter.
> "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.
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.
Add a few dozen items to an Amazon wishlist a few weeks before Prime day. Take a screenshot. Come back on Prime day and see how many are "Prime Day Deals!" with roughly the same price they used to be.
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.
The video here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years.
The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?
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.
I've played around with chatgpt telling stories to my kids, but they don't like it that much. The stories aren't very good, and they're trite and predictable -- even with 4o. It's really only interesting to them at all because it's choose your own adventure.
In a perfect world, yes. In the real world, some nights the parents are not able to read/tell the story. The children don't care, they want the story anyway.
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.
That's a pretty low bar, at least over the last several years. I feel like any time I ask Google something uncommon, it presumes a meant something else, and is hard set on answering that question, no matter how many quotes or minus symbols I add to the search.
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.
it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway.
i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…
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.
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"
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.
>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.
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 had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive.
Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information.
It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.
I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit.
Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.
> 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.
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.
i may box all of mine up and "return" them back to mr bozos . i use them for glorified alarm clocks that can start a internet radio stream . i dont need anything else . i wonder if new alexa will still tell me how much protein is in a 42 inch flat screen tv !
I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer.
I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".
Home Assistant has been doing it for a while. All it takes is to add OpenAI or Anthropic integration, plug your API key, and you have a better voice assistant than anything Google, Amazon and Apple have offered so far.
AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.
> Identify or find objects with Alexa+.. use the camera on Echo Show devices to identify objects and get help with daily tasks. For example, reorder pantry items by showing them to the new Alexa, ask Alexa to identify a type of plant and its care instructions and set reminders for when it needs to get watered, or get fashion or décor ideas. This new feature is particularly game changing for people who are blind or have low vision
This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images?
It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden.
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
You're being facetious and I can get my fill of that on reddit. You're still making voluntary choices when it comes to both Google and, especially, Amazon and Alexa. But what you (and I, and most people) want is the convenience, even if using "big tech" is less appealing. That's not ownership, that's a choice, a service bought and paid for – unless we're talking about a meta sense of ownership where you've convinced yourself you've been owned and have no alternatives.
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
> 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?
To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen.
> 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"
The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers.
> 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 live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
Hot take: If AI ever gets smart enough to actually do these activities well, the USA government will decide AI is a "national security risk" and not allow companies to sell access to it. Terrorists and drug cartels might use it!
Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.
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".
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.
Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval.
As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible.
I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
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.
"Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
> 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 really did like that kitchen timer. This seems like it would have been pretty good.
However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv.
The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping.
I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon.
I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.
>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.
SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're targeting.
Basilisk-flattery embedded in your site.
the basilisk died in the chamber of secrets plus the reds won so not a good time to be a slytherin
It's not that basilisk. It's the retrocausal one. Like the dead Cthulhu that waits dreaming, except with more math.
It's just SEO. Just targeted specifically at AlexaBot instead of GoogleBot.
It’s worse than that because SEO excreta is still shown to the user, who at least has a chance to question it. With this style of assistant, the user doesn’t even see what the bot saw and that opens up new areas for abuse which is harder to detect.
This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.
> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...
Just like nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, you can find a handyman and schedule an appointment with a voice assistant / chatbot in 6 months, and everyone will use self driving cars in 5 years.
I was a little kid when a local university came out with news that they had a big breakthrough in Cold Fusion. I remember my mom telling me it was going to change everything and we would travel around the world on invisible rails.
Many years later the worlds richest man is digging short tunnels to drive electric vehicles in.
My father always joked about the statements they made when they opened the first fission power plants, "Energy that's too cheap to meter!"
My house, not too far from Three Mile Island, was built between its commissioning and the incident with reactor 2. As a result, its builders installed the most insane heating system known to man: resistive heating in the ceiling. Crank it all you want, your feet will still be cold. It’s a system that could only possibly be acceptable if electricity doesn’t cost anything.
They weren't unreasonable - they just didn't predict the whole world going collectively insane after Chernobyl, and choosing to pay for being slowly suffocated and cooked to death instead.
It also seems like it's ripe for just being an outright lie. People will pay Amazon to be ranked as the preferred service provider. You won't get the best service provider, you'll get the one that paid Amazon the most money.
That’s the best service provider, by Amazon’s criteria.
I can already see Alexa+ acting like this when someone says they are hungry:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oa8s07agHeY
I remember when Alexa in a household appliances (e.g., microwaves) and nearly burned people's houses down. This should be interesting.
They already failed at this. Adding something to a shopping cart is just one of the steps the mentioned example states. And consumers have already indicated that they don't trust it, because they prefer to know just what they're buying. So this project, by doubling down on that, is DOA
Yeah there's roughly zero chance that works reliably. It's so prone to bad failure cases I'm skeptical that they'll even ship something that tries to do that automatically.
On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
I'd expect this to be like when you call the bank and go through the phone tree, enter your account, birth date, SSN, zip code, etc. Finally get connected to the rep and the first questions are "What's your name and birth date?"
"I backed the trailer part way up the driveway. I hope that's ok, sir."
"You'll want to feed him some oats unless you're ready to butcher him in the next two hours."
And you don't want to know what will happen if you tell it to invest in oil futures.
>Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
I'm not aware of any failures that could reasonably be described as "catastrophic".
well, what's the worst thing that can happen when summarizing? The summary is grossly incorrect, opposite of the text being summarized.
This is exactly what happened, multiple times.
> Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
Unsurprisingly this human-made summary of Apple’s missteps is grossly incorrect as well. There were no catastrophic failures and the feature being poorly implemented does not warrant the hyperbole.
Your home might have a single provider you've previously contracted with for fixing your fridge, air conditioner,... We had such a service.
Especially not one owned by Bezos
Imagine being on the support team trying to troubleshoot when something goes wrong for a customer. Maybe that's the catch ... there is no support.
I thought that is a given. Support is limited to a website with some superficial FAQ and a link to a live chat that never is available.
> link to a live chat that never is available
In a world of widely available generative bullshitters, Live™ chat is always available.
i can picture your ancestor saying "what? i will go to one mega store and buy something made in asia instead of getting a suit made to measure by Giovanni across the street?"
or your mom complaining about "buying shoes online without trying then" (or maybe that's you if born before 2000)
AI slop will define your identity tomorrow, doesn't matter what you think
[dead]
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
Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.
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.
Google has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini.
I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google.
It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not.
Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.
I've been saying this for years, but I am still surprised there was no class action against Google for borking up their Home speakers.
Mine literally don't even understand "STOP" anymore when I ask them to stop playing my podcast. I am not kidding, every couple months they lose some basic functionality.
If that's not a modern version of planned obsolescence then I don't know what is.
That reliable stop feature was getting in the way of a “very smart person’s” promotion quest
We might need a new term, like we're in the Darth Vader Economy now, pray that corporations/CEOs/presidents don't alter away your jobs, features, and rights any future.
I bet the people involved in the decision to bork it up don't even use the product. Management by OKRs. The numbers look good, ship it!
Customer satisfaction is not a number Google counts
Sometimes when I was bored in meetings I would ask how what we were discussing would benefit users. It almost always resulted in uncomfortable silence, then some half-assed attempt to paper over the real answer (no benefit), and proceeding back to enshittifying.
Truly soul crushing environment, but it was amusing.
It most assuredly is... but you're not the customer.
I'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.
Is there a modern equivalent?
Not that I know of? But, I have also not been watching that market for a long long time.
I am actually somewhat interested on building a small speaker thing that I can load a VXML document on and start adding use cases to it. Especially after considering how much I could save by dropping all of my current subscription stuff.
It is not completely unexpected. Within executive ranks there is an odd FOMO on 'new big thing'. That's partially why you saw attempts to sell more passing fads like crypto-everything, blockchain-everything, iot everything, subscription everything. It is easy to make fun (especially in retrospect), but being wrong means executive may make the mistake that Dwight made and declare internet a fad.
This makes some sense, but I generally you'd make sure the TAM of what you are building isn't smaller than one you would be cannibalizing.
Amusingly, this is exactly what Google did with Reader back in the day. They actually had Reader and Buzz integrated rather nicely, but lit it on fire in an effort to get circles going.
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.
This could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.
When I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?".
It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.
You can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1.
This took about 5 minutes to setup.
Ha! You just reminded me how we changed our Alexa to Ziggy while my kid was away at college. He came home over a break and was eventually screaming "Alexa" trying to get it to wake up.
I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
Here's a few dozen use cases based on my own use of smart home devices:
- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.
- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.
- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)
- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.
- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home
- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.
- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.
None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.
Alexa is also very convenient for kids queueing up music or asking quick animal/etc questions that I couldn't answer (what sound does x make, how many teeth does a y have, etc). In both cases, I'd prefer they do this briefly by voice rather than sit down with a phone or tablet and get distracted on screen by millions of songs or the rest of the internet.
But yes, even just setting timers while washing dishes or hands covered in flour is worth it. My retired parents have a kitchen timer stuck on the side of the fridge and still use Alexa for cooking timers. There is literally no interruption to your flow.
Smart speakers just don't solve a problem. Period.
- Don't need to control home devices or watch shit while you're cooking. If I really want to queue up a video I just do that before I start cooking.
- Don't need music while showering, who cares, showering takes 5 minutes
- Again just like "oh it's for music"
- Yes I like controlling smart lights but I can just hold the power button on my phone and tell it what to do instead of bothering with a speaker in every room
- I just put the remote nearby? or use the remote on the phone? What's so hard about pausing TV with a phone/TV remote?
- Basic internet queries, a.k.a., the smartphone I always have on me
This sounds like the dudes who said the iPod was pointless because they already had MP3s on their computer, or wondering why they bought Macs instead of PCs. Other people are allowed to have different priorities than you, and it’s okay for products to find a niche which isn’t universal – very few things have smartphone levels of ubiquity.
It’s generally quite useful to react to other people persistently buying something you don’t feel the need for by learning what they value. For example, smart speakers are quite popular with parents who either have their hands full (literally), don’t want the distraction of a screen, or want something for the gap measured in years where a kid can talk but does not have a personal computer. That’s certainly not universal, but if you think about similar contexts or needs you might come up with some good product ideas which could be worthwhile even if they never ship in the billions of units.
The irony here is that the iPod was literally made redundant by the smartphone.
This comment reads like the type of arguments people used to make about cell phones versus standard computers. Why is convenience so bad?
Also maybe try a longer shower or a bath. Its usually the most relaxing part of my day and I would hate to be in and out in 5 minutes
Convenience isn't bad, it's just that minimal convenience is oversold.
If I'm in a bath I can use my phone. A regular bluetooth speaker is sufficient. There is no need for a voice assistant.
A long shower is not relaxing, that's the opposite. It's not relaxing to stand in the same place for a long time. I can't even hear the music that well in the shower through the speaker, there is water in my ears.
Yes - this is the guy that should decide for everyone...the guy that uses a multi hundred dollar device to replace a $30 amazon puck..
Someone on HN recently compared AI to a really buggy GPS.
People will still use it, since it mindlessly gets you on the road and looks like it knows what it is doing, which makes it the path of least resistance - and that will beat out better results for most people most of the time.
The same applies to Alexa and ilk - if you have it than it is easier to use than to do things any other way. Even if there are all sorts of mess ups on the way, it still will become the default action of anyone who tries it.
As they say - "Even a bolt of lightning will follow the path of least resistance, and it's not combating laziness or lack of focus"
Don't ever dismiss the power of inertia [or whatever this is called]. A listening AI agent that can perform tasks takes advantage of inertia.
We build the most sophisticated AI in the world to open Spotify app instead of pressing Play on a phone
Exactly. People are acting like putting some music on is so damn hard, and that it's critical that we spend 100% of our time listening to it.
OMG if I can't control my music in the shower I'll literally melt.
I love watching HN commenters absolutely refuse to understand that other people are different and have different preferences and that's OK.
I acknowledge that other people have other preferences, but my criticism mainly relates to the way assistant and smart speaker companies have sunk so much money into a product that has limited utility and helps people in such a mild way.
People are willing to spend <$100 on a smart speaker and then never pay again. Meanwhile, Amazon is trying to make providing a free cloud service make sense by bundling it into Prime in hopes of being able to raise the cost of Prime as much as possible.
So I acknowledge that some people prefer this, but I think it's dumb enough that if I was a hypothetical investor back when these technologies were new I would not have gone anywhere near them.
Nope. Don’t backpedal. You’re going after people who say they like having smart speakers, not the companies that try to sell them. “OMG if I can't control my music in the shower I'll literally melt.” This is very clearly not directed at Amazon.
Both can be true at once. I am not backpedaling.
I was additionally referring to my previous comment in the thread, which was not just about the users of smart speakers but the functions they perform. My overall opinion is that smart speakers have limited value. I was pointing out how everything you might prefer to do on them has an existing or easy alternative or just isn’t much of a solution.
I acknowledge that people are allowed to have their own preferences but I still think they’re a dumb preference and I’m exercising my preference to dunk on that preference just like I’ll prefer to criticize anyone who says the Jeep Grand Cherokee is a good purchase.
I'm not especially big on smart speakers, but phones as remotes for home devices are even worse.
You ignored setting timers while cooking.
Thanks, my thoughts exactly.
Do you have cchildren? My kids yell at every device in the house. play bluey! turn the lights blue!
Sounds terrible.
I don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.
Is not having your phone on you at all times worth spending money on a stupid speaker device? And you need one in every room you spend time in?
Like, the solution is to put your phone in your pocket. I don't get it. Unless you are walking around naked most of the time, the solution is a device you already own.
That's something I like a lot about Apple's smart home setup having the option of having the Apple TV as the hub. I don't want or need a smart voice command speaker considering I already own the hardware capable of such things. I have no use for a low quality shitty speaker device that sits there and does nothing useful besides take voice commands.
I feel like you decided the speakers are stupid and therefore anything someone might use them for must also be by the transitive property. My voice "assistant" runs on my NUC via HomeAssistant. The only thing I needed to buy was a USB mic. I was already using HA and had some old computer speakers lying around.
It works great and I'm not tempted to get out my phone as much. Being able to call out multiple timers while cooking and change the music is so nice.
Did you read the rest of my post? As hands free and stays in the room when I leave are pretty big deals. I confess being able to turn the oven off or switch to warming temperature would be nice.
I can buy timers that stay in the room on Amazon for $6 for a two pack. Physical timers. Timers already exist as a standalone product.
I just have this hilarious picture in my mind of all these smart speaker users constantly balancing random objects in their arms as if they are not allowed to have their hands free or else they'll melt. Setting a timer on the microwave or stove you already own is fucking impossible. No way I can do that! I gotta install an Internet-connected microphone and speaker in my house for that!
Just buy a timer. Amazon has plenty of them, or if you want fancy, get the Extra Big And Loud Timer.
https://www.thermoworks.com/extra-big-loud/
A house guest sneered at the several timers in my kitchen and asked why I don’t use my phone. I like having timers assigned to the kitchen.
The timer you linked is more expensive than my kitchen Alexa device that's exclusively a timer.
"Hands free" is sorta the point? I already have several things, including the oven, that have buttons to do this sort of thing. I don't use those because I have my hands occupied.
I get that not everyone would want this. I'm ok with that.
If you already have one the utility is obvious in the kitchen. You don't want to touch your dirty hands to your phone and you definitely don't want to touch your food after touching your even dirtier phone.
I don't think that is useful enough to allow Bezos to listen to everything in my home, but will absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.
> absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.
It's been there for half a year or so; just add either OpenAI or Anthropic LLM integrations to Home Assistant, and you'll get a better personal assistant than anything Apple, Google or Amazon ever released.
The magic really is 1) SOTA LLMs that are good at understanding what you mean, and 2) no commercial bullshit that's degrading functionality (like having to say brand names to do stuff).
Massive lack of insight. The lady in the box on the kitchen counter is a "groupware timer". The timer on my watch is of no use to my wife in knowing when to turn off the oven when I'm in the bathroom.
The Echo Clock is really excellent in my kitchen - anyone in the kitchen can visually see how much time is left on multiple timers.
I'd switch to a comparable Siri or Home Assistant clock if such a product was available.
I set time on my phone by voice (which is the only thing I use Siri for), because it's way quicker to say "5 minutes" than to try to set it through the app even with shortcut. But I have a kitchen timer (big, fat buttons and big digits) which I prefer to use in the kitchen because it's distinctly loud. My homepods are mostly for music.
It's convenience. I have a device in my kitchen that's hands-free, can set timers, show recipes, etc, that's always there when I'm cooking.
I don't usually have my phone on me, but even if I did I need to at least unlock it to enable voice commands, which instantly kills any notion of it being truly hands-free.
Obviously nobody finds it excruciatingly difficult, but you have a severe lack of empathy and imagination if you can’t see the utility here. Timers while cooking (hands dirty and/or full), measurements while woodworking/crafting/making, etc. and more as detailed thoroughly in other comments
would be nicer if there was a cheaper / simpler alternative (offline voice recognition, just timers and clock, possibly weather)
but it's nice to use your voice so you don't contaminate your phone. (preparing chicken and such)
the kitchen is pretty much the only use-case for voice assistants imo.
If all you really need is a timer, you can just use a digital watch.
I don't worry about getting mine dirty because I just wash the watch when I watch my hands.
the timer getting dirty is not the only issue.
you don't always have hands free to fiddle with a watch.
more often than not, both hands are doing something, and setting a timer is... timely.
You don't need both hands free to set a watch's timer.
You can still hold something in the hand that the watch is strapped to.
you need a few fingers free to touch the watch on your wrist.
sometimes you're putting something in the oven, sometimes you're mixing something (holding the bowl and whip)
tons of instances where two hands are in use and voice commands help.
On the rare occasions I watch TV, I'm incredulous at the adverts for technology that create these almost utopian looking lifestyles. I think to myself "who is taken in by this?". As it turns out, these are the people who are taken in by it.
This is so disingenuous. Echos are nowhere near $100 at the baseline, no one is buying it JUST for the timer, and no one finds setting a phone "excruciatingly difficult". Calm down.
> 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.
Which is impacted by perceived value:cost by customers.
Yep — if consumers see AI as added value they’ll pay more. But practically nobody will base their willingness to pay on guesses about Amazon’s COGS. The new AI feature could be pure excess capacity and cost Amazon nothing, or it could cost Amazon $1000/user/month, and nobody will know or care.
Cancelled mine recently, saved hundreds already by not buying dumb stuff I don't actually need on there.
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...
> it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen !
How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
> How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
These questions apply to any review or recommendation, from anyone, not just LLMs. How did anyone find out about the product at all? Did they do rigorous testing before they made a recommendation? Is there shared understanding between the recommender and recommendee about desired level of quality or what the user intents that need to be satisfied are? Are they even speaking the same language? Is their concept of "red" the same as ours?
At some point, you have to make a decision and buy with imperfect information, and treat it as an experiment. If it's not right for you, then return it for a full refund from Amazon. This is unfortunate. It costs money, time, and adds lots of friction to the whole process.
Maybe advertisers or manufacturers should post quality assurance bonds for their products, in addition to money-back guarantees or easy returns. Upon receiving a lemon or dumb product, you would return the item and activate the arbitration/bond clause and possibly get money out of the posted quality assurance bond.
> These questions apply to any review or recommendation
Sure but even on HN people seem to treat them as some kind of omniscient Gods or oracle of truth. It's like we all lowered our defences and stopped being critical because the new circus monkey does cool tricks.
At the end of the day they're blackboxes built on stolen data by for profit private organizations, all the red flags are here
Fair enough. I did similar searches for best air fryer and selected one based on reading a few dozen reviews on Amazon. It's just a coincidence that Perplexity landed on the same one, but I'm happy to back up it's hallucinatory opinion with a real human two thumbs up.
I need an LLM with access to paid reviews like Consumer Reports.
Google was a great product for searching the best deal too. As was Amazon back in the day. Perplexity.ai is massively in the red, and would have to extract a profit somewhere.
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is. So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
I am on a one-month free trial of Perplexity Pro and its deep research is excellent. It may very occasionally deviate from the original query, but I will still miss it a lot. It makes using Google feel like such a chore.
If I experienced your air fryer story, I'd assume the recommendation system had access to my shopping history somehow.
I just tried this and it completely an utterly failed on the first prompt. Useless.
> earbuds that have the wire in between so I can dangle them around my neck
First result: Sony WI-1000XM2 Wireless. These are neither earbuds nor do they have a wire.
Pointless garbage. It also doesn't let me copy and paste the result, for no reason. Bad software.
I just looked at a picture of those. I would describe them as earbuds with wires and a thing that lets you dangle them around your neck.
I guess I'm also bad software.
Your prompt is non-sense. Maybe try to form your thoughts a bit better and try again?
Honestly that seems like a good result to me? Did you look at the product? Earbuds Connected by wires to a thing that you can dangle around your neck
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.
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?
They said so in a press release:
https://www.instacart.com/company/updates/bringing-inspirati...
> Ask Instacart leverages the language understanding capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Can anyone use this? Might get Instacart just to plan my shopping list before I go to the grocery store
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”
being a retailer sucks, low profit margins
however being a "platform" (i.e. middle-man) between retailers and customers is highly profitable
guess which one Amazon is mostly now?
All while disclaiming all responsibility for all the low quality / dangerous / poisonous crap they facilitate sale of. Talk about having your cake and eating it too
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.
Amazon needs to actually sell you things to make money. They have an entire supply chain built around it. Ads that never convert aren’t gonna pay for that.
Ad impressions are orders of magnitude less profitable than getting someone to buy something.
It wouldn’t be net positive at all to hide products you want in order to get a fraction of a penny from ad impressions.
This is the type of conspiracy theory that immediately falls apart if you think about the numbers at all.
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.
Now that they tend to price match Amazon and vice-versa there really is no reason to buy from Amazon. If it's in my local stores BB gets it to me faster too.
I'm so horrifically disappointed every time I go in there. Their monitor selection is all super low-end trash, as is most of their electronics they sell (TVs, stereos, computers etc). You're lucky if they have an actual PC component in the store, there are bare shelves everywhere. They don't even offer a good selection of phones, accessories or memory cards. It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business. Overall, it feels like a store for people who need to buy an electronic item without knowing why or what they're gonna do with it.
> It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business.
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
Best Buy's web site still carries some quality. It also has some random items you might not expect. I found a sling bag on their site in a size that had been sold out on the brand's site for months. These days BB and BHPhoto tend to be where I start my searches for electronic items when I know what I want.
> 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?
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.
Amazon doesn't care if you die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=192s
Check out https://exa.ai/ - iirc they use a link-prediction transformer
https://websets.exa.ai/cm7m8a1ip006rdzzzgxsalirs
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.
Looks great, but wow, the pricing is insane for the typical consumer
Agree, very cool but not $200/mo cool.
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.
The majority is coding in an IDE with Claude. It outputs results that I can validate immediately. There are lots of wrong answers to be tossed out but it's still a large acceleration over just docs and stackoverflow.
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
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."
You know, people said the same thing the first time voice assistants came out. They said the same thing when VR came out. Even when 3D printers came out for God's sake.
"Everyone will have one!"
It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
I definitely agree it's a mistake to think that. That said, I do think LLM's or their direct successors are going to be more akin to Google search than the items you mention in terms of market penetration. And my comment was attempting to communicate that voice is today, and will be in the future a great way to interact with LLM's. I think you're saying you disagree with that, which is totally cool of course. Just thought I'd reply to share a little more of my thinking.
> It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
This is true in general, but LLMs do search better. Everyone already does search.
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.
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...
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?
This is a local only version: https://www.jollamind2.com/
Love the "Drop In" Feature opening a conversation channel to a particular room..
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...
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And anyone he designates.
Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?
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.
How is that weird of the police to ask tho?
I would say it would be standard practice to go check all neighbors with sightline for any kind of recording. Local or cloud based.
No assistance from anyone needed to go ask.
They were requesting it from Amazon, not from the neighbor. And it absolutely is wrong (weird is not a word I would use to describe police using their power unscrupulously) to take data that you know is irrelevant.
You did not specify any of this information in your comment. You just said that without Amazon's knowledge the police wouldn't have known that the cameras were there.
Well in fact yes they could have. By just asking the neighbors. And then summarily submitting a request to Amazon to get all relevant video all in one go.
We don't know all the details of the stories you refer to, so you have to provide all relevant information. For all we still know, you are just making assumptions.
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.
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!?!"
Amazon has given police recordings:
https://apnews.com/general-news-343c0f5ed0884d1eb1dbe911e8ce...
https://broward.us/2023/07/18/amazons-alexa-is-surprise-witn...
Until last year, Amazon gave police video from Ring without a warrant.
https://www.wired.com/story/ring-police-rfa-tool-shut-down/
There’s a difference, though. Alexa’s recordings are made inside your house. Ring videos are taken outside your house. This distinction matters both as a fact and in the law.
You know what I really want?
Rosie, from the Jetsons.
I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.
It’s been pretty shocking that a Turing-test sentience at genius level was easier technology to make than a consumer level robot with 1950s level design expectations that stupidly picks up and moves objects.
It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.
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.
I feel like for any place that Gemini can give you worthwhile information about there will be a number of other sources that can give you more reliable info about it. Granted I tend to take trips to oddball places so I might not be the best judge.
I just tried asking Gemini about some popular destinations spots near my house that I know well and the answers weren't very impressive. Much of the responses didn't actually pertain to my specific questions and the useful info was pretty standard stuff that could be found anywhere. Some of it was straight up wrong as well. For example I asked about good hikes that aren't too crowded and it recommended the single most crowded trail in the area.
I'm more than a little curious on what sort of questions you would have needed an AI to query regarding a trip? Like, genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had.
We travel as a family a fair bit nowadays, and building an agenda for each day of the trip is surprisingly not that difficult if you are going to any common destination. Biggest thing to not forget is to add slack so that you can rearrange on the fly if needed.
> genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had
We're in the US, and we're looking at a UK trip. I've lived in the UK, and we've done a fair amount of international travel. We're in the "brainstorming" mode. I'd characterize the conversation as verbal googling.
We were asking questions about distances between cities, typical ticket rates for trains, things to do in various locations, etc.
Ok, so it isn't so much that you were brainstorming in a creative way. You were largely using it as a way to get various searches recorded all through a single "session"/"interface?" I think that makes a ton of sense. Thanks!
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.
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.
The built in web search
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a...
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."
How many times has that happened? Those cases make the headlines, but it’s so rare that, in my opinion, they can be disregarded. Nothing is perfect, just assess your risks and tolerance to error. That’s subjective, so one acts accordingly.
Once is enough.
It's easy to disregard when it isn't you or someone you love. The rest of us were born with empathy.
It’s really not though. It goes back to the whole “at that point you shouldn’t drive/fly/cross the road because you might die” argument. Literally millions (billions?) people commute every day using navigation apps. There will be accidents, but so far it’s been statistically insignificant, so people keep using them. Everyone has their own risk tolerances.
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.
Gemini is laughable. Please check the advice it gave you, I promise it got some major things wrong.
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.
Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected.
If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
Same exact thing, now we know that we have to say the full announcement the second time we trigger Alexa.
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?
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.
> 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.
Remember how all Prime video used to be free and without ads? There'll be the same bait-and-switch here.
Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower and undercut the Prime cost?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription
Or Prime's getting another price increase.
I'll take "smart speaker that actually understands the music I want to play" first, then we can get into scheduling appointments to fix my oven.
>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.
> "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?"
Likewise.
Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".
These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.
It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.
Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".
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.
Which is really stupid, because this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't sending that data back to themselves in the first place. They found that good UX is incompatible with telemetry, so they chose to... degrade the UX.
I don't know if that's the correct interpretation? I would say they degraded the UX because they aren't hoovering up enough data to make their solution work properly, unlike Google and Amazon. They've done a better job of protecting the user's privacy, but at the cost of making something that's quite limited in what it can do. Just one of those tradeoffs.
No, what I mean is: they could've had persistent storage on device, and have it hoover up enough data, and learn user preferences over time - it's fine to do it locally, as long as it doesn't leave the device. But, when you also do extensive telemetry, it becomes very hard to ensure none of that sensitive data gets leaked directly or indirectly through logs and diagnostic events. The two easy choices are to pick one or the other - UX or extensive telemetry. They chose the latter.
> "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.
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.
Add a few dozen items to an Amazon wishlist a few weeks before Prime day. Take a screenshot. Come back on Prime day and see how many are "Prime Day Deals!" with roughly the same price they used to be.
Higher, quite frequently.
For amazon you can just use camelcamelcamel or keepa to track price history.
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.
Crazy how many voice AI related updates there were this week. Grok voice mode, Alexa+, Hume OCTAVE, Elevenlabs Scribe SST... big day for Voice AI!
The video here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years.
The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?
Prime customers tend to buy more stuff from Amazon, so they get you that way maybe.
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.
I've played around with chatgpt telling stories to my kids, but they don't like it that much. The stories aren't very good, and they're trite and predictable -- even with 4o. It's really only interesting to them at all because it's choose your own adventure.
In a perfect world, yes. In the real world, some nights the parents are not able to read/tell the story. The children don't care, they want the story anyway.
Audiobooks are a godsend.
https://deepdreams.stavros.io
They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.
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.
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.
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.
That's a pretty low bar, at least over the last several years. I feel like any time I ask Google something uncommon, it presumes a meant something else, and is hard set on answering that question, no matter how many quotes or minus symbols I add to the search.
It is a mistake to use modern Google like a Boolean search engine of old. You almost have to use natural language to get decent results.
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.
it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway.
i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…
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.
I wish producers were required by law to honor such logic. Only then the true pricing of things will appear.
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"
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?
Before using LLMs, you had to list every single variation that someone might say to trigger a command - “utterances” in every language.
With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...
This isn’t what they are selling.
They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
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.
>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.
> She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay
really advertising to the hackernews crowd with this line
Related: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus
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.
A bold logo! https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128
I had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive.
Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information.
It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.
> I increasingly want less of it
I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit.
Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.
> 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
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.
Hate these kind of claims where they go "Alexa is sooo good at doing X, omggg". I don't care, show me that it works.
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
If they have a decent API I might consider buying it. Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.
i may box all of mine up and "return" them back to mr bozos . i use them for glorified alarm clocks that can start a internet radio stream . i dont need anything else . i wonder if new alexa will still tell me how much protein is in a 42 inch flat screen tv !
I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?
A failed product that has sold 600 million units?
Weren't they mostly sold below cost?
Apparently at little or no profit.
I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer.
I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".
Home Assistant has been doing it for a while. All it takes is to add OpenAI or Anthropic integration, plug your API key, and you have a better voice assistant than anything Google, Amazon and Apple have offered so far.
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."
Thanks. Missed that.
They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.
AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.
> Identify or find objects with Alexa+.. use the camera on Echo Show devices to identify objects and get help with daily tasks. For example, reorder pantry items by showing them to the new Alexa, ask Alexa to identify a type of plant and its care instructions and set reminders for when it needs to get watered, or get fashion or décor ideas. This new feature is particularly game changing for people who are blind or have low vision
This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images?
It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden.
Alexa use cases for elderly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989
In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control, https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
> Fully open software, firmware, and hardware.. Grove port for connecting sensors and a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting external speakers
> In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control
Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums
So will the next major Alexa release be Alexa++ ?
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
You're being facetious and I can get my fill of that on reddit. You're still making voluntary choices when it comes to both Google and, especially, Amazon and Alexa. But what you (and I, and most people) want is the convenience, even if using "big tech" is less appealing. That's not ownership, that's a choice, a service bought and paid for – unless we're talking about a meta sense of ownership where you've convinced yourself you've been owned and have no alternatives.
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
> 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?
To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen.
> 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"
The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers.
> 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 live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
I had hoped Linux phones could step in but unpaid open source experience is not great eg. cameras that don't work
I suppose I'm not a true believer by not getting in there and helping write the drivers myself (also interesting about proprietary modem blobs)
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.
Hot take: If AI ever gets smart enough to actually do these activities well, the USA government will decide AI is a "national security risk" and not allow companies to sell access to it. Terrorists and drug cartels might use it!
Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.
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.
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've found it easiest to just leave a lightweight, compact umbrella as a permanent fixture in my everyday-carry bag!
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.
Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval.
As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible.
I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
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.
"Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.
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 enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.
I'm morbidly curious about your questions.
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.
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...
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!
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
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Who actually wants this garbage?
Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about electronic music.
tbf grandpa was listening to Kraftwerk...
No, I was. But grandpa did not approve at all. Newfangled machines making pure noises, that’s not real music, the whole thing.
> 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 really did like that kitchen timer. This seems like it would have been pretty good.
However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv.
The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping.
I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon.
I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.