This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Alexa is so bad though. Who's going to pay for that?
“By the way, you can now pay for Alexa AI option if you want me to reply in a slightly smarter way, but I will still cut you off with ads and other useless things. To activate AlexaAI say activate”
"No"
"I heard 'activate'. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there's no way we're letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it."
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It'll eventually be very affordable.
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off... but noooooooooooo
AI is being touted as the solution to everything these days. It's really not, and we are going to find that out the hard way.
I get what you’re saying, but voice assistants are one of the main places LLMs belong.
Alexa is more like a telemarketer disguised as an assistant. Every interaction is followed by a “by the way . Its a shit experience so I stopped using mine.
Setting all my Alexa's to UK English got rid of all marketing "by the ways." I still regret going with the Alexa ecosystem but at least for now there is a workaround for the most rage inducing part of it.
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
It's like charging you for cable and then shoving ads down your throat.
It's like charging you for Prime Video and then shoving ads down your throat.
That's often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
So they expect that people pay for being spied upon and seriously data mined?
Yes and people will pay for it.
Sometimes I can't help thinking some people deserve to be taken advantage of.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you're leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
I already don't use it, you don't have to sell me on it.
Just FYI, Alexa records everything you speak into it, you can listen to it here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW
...charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
Good luck, I guess? Got the first Google home, at first it was great, I was asking it tons of questions. Then the questions stopped, used it for turning on the lights and other automations. Then I installed Home Assistant and the only command Google Home got was to set a timer to know when to pull things out of the oven. Eventually I stopped doing that.
At the moment all Google/Nest Homes have their mic cut off, I only use them to stream music in my house from my NAS via Plex. So yeah..
Something tells me that they'll still listen to you for free.
How to make me go back to buying shit in person, by Amazon.com
I use Alexa as a way to use an old speaker system. I wouldn't pay to use any "smart" speaker systems. They are pretty dumb and I've already paid once
Ok. I'll be the weirdo. If it's actually useful, I would pay for it.
Not if it's just the parlor trick that it currently is.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I'm concerned. All of it lives squarely in "huh...neat" territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
Their using the public to train AI. Then charging the public for the AI it trained.
They thought people would be like "Alexa, but me a ton of shit on Amazon" but people just use it for timers and the weather
Oh no!
I'll just have to install a weather app and use the timer on my stove instead of using Alexa.
All I want alexa to do is turn my lights on and off, set timers, and show me my own pictures. And it can BARELY do that without fucking it up. Everyone I know wants the same, they expect nothing more from it. "AI" features of Alexa aren't t needed or wanted by anyone I've talked to about it.
Well so far my Google Smart speakers have two functions:
Don't think I'll miss that if they decide to charge for it.
My Google homes have gotten progressively worse over the years. Half the time it will say it's setting a timer but nope, no timer. Recently I'll tell it to play music and it will reply that I don't have any devices with that feature.... they're all Google homes or Chromecast which absolutely play music. Really like the hardware but the software is utter shit
They won't be charging me, because I don't buy shit from Amazon, and don't use their spy platform.
Running AI may be currently expensive, but the hardware will continue to improve and get cheaper. If they institute a subscription fee and people actually pay for it, they'll never remove that fee even after it becomes super cheap to run.
