[HN Gopher] Alexa+
___________________________________________________________________
Alexa+
Author : fgblanch
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-02-26 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aboutamazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aboutamazon.com)
| mdasen wrote:
| 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.
| bthrn wrote:
| Anchoring
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Or Prime's getting another price increase.
| yapyap wrote:
| Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription
| neofrommatrix wrote:
| 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.
| bbor wrote:
| 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?
| beastman82 wrote:
| No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this
| terrible offer.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| mixedCase wrote:
| 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_.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often
| enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone
| spoken ones.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| > 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.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| 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.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| "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."
| zamalek wrote:
| > 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.
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| creshal wrote:
| Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit
| fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure their search results intentionally suck to
| make their ads more valuable.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| cy_hauser wrote:
| _> 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?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| 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.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Amazon doesn't care if you die.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=192s
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I can't believe that in 2025 BestBuy is my go to for
| electronics. Wild times.
| olyjohn wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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"
| richwater wrote:
| 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.
| dcrazy wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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.
| blibble wrote:
| 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?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| 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?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| 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
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| pr337h4m wrote:
| Check out https://exa.ai/ - iirc they use a link-prediction
| transformer
|
| https://websets.exa.ai/cm7m8a1ip006rdzzzgxsalirs
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| firejake308 wrote:
| Looks great, but wow, the pricing is insane for the typical
| consumer
| pbronez wrote:
| Agree, very cool but not $200/mo cool.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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.
| delichon wrote:
| 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.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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...
| lm28469 wrote:
| > 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?
| kanzure wrote:
| > 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| eric_cc wrote:
| Your prompt is non-sense. Maybe try to form your thoughts a
| bit better and try again?
| mh- wrote:
| 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.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| 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.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| 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.
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| sixothree wrote:
| 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.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| "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.
| FredPret wrote:
| What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest
| plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the
| last five minutes straight.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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".
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| Personally, I think they'll move some of the Alexa+
| functionality to prime subscribers and increase the prime
| rate again to subsidize.
| nunez wrote:
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| 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".
| Mistletoe wrote:
| 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.
| mikeInAlaska wrote:
| I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically
| incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'm morbidly curious about your questions.
| pflenker wrote:
| 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.
| goosedragons wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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?
| Marsymars wrote:
| I've found it easiest to just leave a lightweight, compact
| umbrella as a permanent fixture in my everyday-carry bag!
| stronglikedan wrote:
| 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.
| bb88 wrote:
| 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!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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...
| rockbruno wrote:
| 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
| rolph wrote:
| model agnostic, meaning a model is enlisted based on specific
| task, rather than a shoehorn and a single model.
| 827a wrote:
| > 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?
| stirlo wrote:
| Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower
| and undercut the Prime cost?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Remember how all Prime video used to be free and without ads?
| There'll be the same bait-and-switch here.
| spacemannoslen wrote:
| 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.
| antasvara wrote:
| 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.
| spacemannoslen wrote:
| 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
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| 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?
| jxyxfinite wrote:
| This isn't what they are selling.
|
| They are selling "Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after
| her breakup with xxx"
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| 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...
| junto wrote:
| Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current
| Echo?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners
| in the early access period."
| junto wrote:
| Thanks. Missed that.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "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.
| 1shooner wrote:
| 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.
| mikestew wrote:
| 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 ?
| happyopossum wrote:
| > 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| Philpax wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > "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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| For amazon you can just use camelcamelcamel or keepa to
| track price history.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > 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.
| advisedwang wrote:
| 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.
| hbosch wrote:
| >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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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...
| californical wrote:
| 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
| lasermike026 wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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?
| dmix wrote:
| Most people using Alexa heavily probably already have Prime.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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 !
| qwertox wrote:
| > 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."
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| jxyxfinite wrote:
| The website says there will be browser support
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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"?
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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."
| drpossum wrote:
| 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.
| com2kid wrote:
| 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-...
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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...
| msh wrote:
| This is a local only version: https://www.jollamind2.com/
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| harmmonica wrote:
| 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?
| joshbaptiste wrote:
| Love the "Drop In" Feature opening a conversation channel to a
| particular room..
| 65 wrote:
| 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.
| JadoJodo wrote:
| 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.
| GratiaTerra wrote:
| Smile? No, it's a penis.
| esafak wrote:
| A bold logo! https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128
| toddmorey wrote:
| They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.
| beardyw wrote:
| I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why
| use the name of a failed product?
| ascorbic wrote:
| A failed product that has sold 600 million units?
| hennell wrote:
| 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.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| 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"
| terminalbraid wrote:
| 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.
| qmr wrote:
| Why did you let Alexa in in the first place?
| bronco21016 wrote:
| Given how Apple Intelligence has gone so far, I'm not going to
| hold my breath.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > _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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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)
| mvieira38 wrote:
| 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
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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.
| gotts wrote:
| If they have a decent API I might consider buying it.
| Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I have 4 echos. This stuff looks like a lot of things I will
| never use.
| hbosch wrote:
| Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more
| pleasurable!
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| https://deepdreams.stavros.io
|
| They were definitely more entertaining when they were written
| by GPT-2.
| 0898 wrote:
| 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?
| Dnguyen wrote:
| Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...
| calamity_elf wrote:
| 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.
| 0898 wrote:
| This is what's happening to us.
| Domenic_S wrote:
| 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.
| Chico75 wrote:
| Same exact thing, now we know that we have to say the
| full announcement the second time we trigger Alexa.
| rdtsc wrote:
| 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".
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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?
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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...
| nashashmi wrote:
| Try these searches: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&pag
| e=0&prefix=false&qu...
| dboreham wrote:
| > They can't choose to ignore the law.
|
| Only president Musk can do that.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how
| exactly does that happen during a murder?
| deadmutex wrote:
| 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.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| With an unfortunately named victim, I suppose.
| waltbosz wrote:
| 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!?!"
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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.
| plorg wrote:
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Until last year, Amazon gave police video from Ring without a
| warrant.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/ring-police-rfa-tool-shut-down/
| bakugo wrote:
| Related: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| 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.
| wiremine wrote:
| 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.
| bhhaskin wrote:
| 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.
| kahmeal wrote:
| 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.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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."
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The built in web search
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a.
| ..
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Gemini is laughable. Please check the advice it gave you, I
| promise it got some major things wrong.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| lostmsu wrote:
| How can I try it? My Prime expires in 3 days.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 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.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| 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...
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| 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.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| stacktrust wrote:
| Is there a modern equivalent?
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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!
| miohtama wrote:
| Customer satisfaction is not a number Google counts
| cromka wrote:
| 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.
| 65 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| massysett wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| "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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| The timer you linked is more expensive than my kitchen
| Alexa device that's exclusively a timer.
| theultdev wrote:
| 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.
| nix0n wrote:
| 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.
| theultdev wrote:
| 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.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| drusepth wrote:
| 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.
| kemitche wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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
| miohtama wrote:
| We build the most sophisticated AI in the world to open
| Spotify app instead of pressing Play on a phone
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I love watching HN commenters absolutely refuse to
| understand that other people are different and have
| different preferences and that's OK.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Thanks, my thoughts exactly.
| tzs wrote:
| You ignored setting timers while cooking.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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
| Gothmog69 wrote:
| Do you have cchildren? My kids yell at every device in
| the house. play bluey! turn the lights blue!
| Marsymars wrote:
| I'm not especially big on smart speakers, but phones as
| remotes for home devices are even worse.
| prawn wrote:
| 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.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| 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.
| Underphil wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| 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.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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.
| brookst wrote:
| Pricing for Prime is totally disconnected from costs. They will
| price at whatever maximizes p*q.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Cancelled mine recently, saved hundreds already by not buying
| dumb stuff I don't actually need on there.
| rabuse wrote:
| Who actually wants this garbage?
| brookst wrote:
| Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about
| electronic music.
| dboreham wrote:
| tbf grandpa was listening to Kraftwerk...
| mkayle wrote:
| 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.
| Arthanos wrote:
| _> 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.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Apple didn't try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize
| the headline and that was the issue.
| MattJ100 wrote:
| 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
| rs186 wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks
| for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're
| targeting.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| It's just SEO. Just targeted specifically at AlexaBot instead
| of GoogleBot.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Basilisk-flattery embedded in your site.
| gunian wrote:
| the basilisk died in the chamber of secrets plus the reds
| won so not a good time to be a slytherin
| david422 wrote:
| 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.
| seb1204 wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| codebje wrote:
| That's the best service provider, by Amazon's criteria.
| OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote:
| I can already see Alexa+ acting like this when someone says
| they are hungry:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oa8s07agHeY
| rurp wrote:
| 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!"
| smcleod wrote:
| Especially not one owned by Bezos
| system7rocks wrote:
| 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?
| cyberax wrote:
| 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".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 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.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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.
| yuehhangalt wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| > 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.
| modeless wrote:
| 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?
| _xerces_ wrote:
| Prime customers tend to buy more stuff from Amazon, so they get
| you that way maybe.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| 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.
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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.
| wayeq wrote:
| > 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
| stacktrust wrote:
| _> 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 decor 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_
| twitchard wrote:
| 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!
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| So will the next major Alexa release be Alexa++ ?
| SteveJS wrote:
| 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.
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