Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
“How much ya gunna pay for what you used to get for free…” Tom Petty, Last DJ. Underrated tune about the demise of free and independent radio and radio DJs.
We’ve learned with assistants we mostly need them to… turn off the lights and play music. I don’t want to have a conversation with my smart speaker, I don’t care about it being hooked up to an LLM. As soon as I can’t turn off the lights or play music it goes in the bin.
This right here.
I do like being able to ask simple questions like, how many tablespoons in a cup, convert oz to mg, e.g. Which Alexa is generally quite good at. Siri is complete shit with that. You ask Siri (on a Homepod), and she’ll tell you to open your phone to see the answer, more often than not. And it’s extremely frustrating. Siri is very good about turning lights on and off and playing music (mostly). But I’m absolutely not shopping for things with Alexa or Siri, or adding things to grocery lists or shopping lists, or rating a purchase, or any of that shit. I’m not going to do anything with them that would make me spend money. They wanted to sell us a razor and then keep making money off the blades (by us buying shit through Alexa), and people just simply do not want to do that.
That’s it.
I already bought the fucking device. I already pay Amazon, what is it now, like $180/year for Prime? I’m not subscribing to Alexa. If it can’t give that basic functionality for the price I’ve already paid, then it can definitely go straight in the fucking bin
Don’t throw it out… without first looking if you can flash a different firmware or somehow else reuse the hardware.
Unfortunately echo dots are very hard to repurpose. I have tried.
I see. There is some info from 2017 that looks promising, but seems like nobody had the proper incentive to fully root them… except maybe some Russian actors. Let’s hope some “right to repair” gets to unlock them for legitimate owners too.
That would be great. It’s pretty amazing hardware. It was very heavily subsidized, I paid 20 bucks for them IIRC. I’m sure the BOM (bill of materials) alone would have been higher than that.
I would actually. It’s not even good at turning off the lights. Half the time it turns off the wrong light, starts playing music I don’t want or other crap.
Having better recognition and the ability to actually answer a question I ask it, or to tell it to do things proactively would be amazing.