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I feel like you're being purposefully reductive here. You know they're different right? The entire value proposition (and marketing strategy) of Alexa and rela

I feel like you're being purposefully reductive here. You know they're different right? The entire value proposition (and marketing strategy) of Alexa and related devices is that they are voice activated, so you don't have to physically interact with the device to make a request. Given that, it would be ridiculous to expect paying customers to switch it off when not in use. The onus on Amazon is to protect their customers' privacy while the device is being used as intended. If you really want to pick apart the car analogy, maybe this is closer to having automatic start and driving capability on a car, but the car sometimes randomly starts and drives away. Are you really going to blame the customer for that, even though they could disable the feature every time they exit the car?

chapium 8y ago
The car analogies are usually quite poor. However, it depends on your use case. Echo Dot's have a mute button which prevents monitoring, or at least it seems so. I'm not an echo power user, so my needs are definitely different than for intended uses like home automation. I think for some, at least users like me would like a feature similar to "su". I'd like to confirm that Alexa should start doing stuff if it has not been confirmed for x number of minutes. I think the real problem with these home assistant devices is they are not designed with a confirmation message. This would be annoying in some cases, but surely a balance can be struck. I'm not trying to be reductive at all about the car analogy. When you turn on a car, you acknowledge that the engine is running. You can also mute an echo if you have the foreknowledge that you will not be doing activities that require voice activation.