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At first, it seemed like a pretty useful device, but as time has gone on, Alexa has become increasingly problematic. It seems to have trouble understanding even

At first, it seemed like a pretty useful device, but as time has gone on, Alexa has become increasingly problematic. It seems to have trouble understanding even basic commands. How many times have you asked Alexa to do something, only to have it respond with something completely irrelevant? Like it is regressing, which is curious. The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying. Do we really need a robot voice constantly interrupting our conversations and playing cheesy music on command? But perhaps the most frustrating thing about Alexa is its constant attempts to upsell us on Amazon products. Every time you ask it for something, it tries to sell you on a product that you didn't ask for. It's like having a pushy salesperson in your own home.

l33tman 4y ago
It blows my mind how anybody who bought this couldn't see that it was a device to sell amazon products.. still, yeah, perhaps it could have had a better balance to both be useful and both sell stuff..
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- screamingninja 4y ago
  It actually came free with another product that I wanted to buy. These companies throw away their spy devices at dirt cheap prices in exchange for an ongoing stream of your personal information.
makeitdouble 4y ago
I think the regression is the natural evolution of these kind of tools. At first the range of acceptable command is pretty small and once we find some that work well we start to rely on them. But I´d suspect we´re not using the optimal incatations or pronounciations for those, and they work because there is no competing commands for the recognized sounds/words. But as the repertory grows, fuzzy orders will be harder to reliably map to the same commands every time, and the more the voice assistant needs precise and spot on instructions. At least that´s my mental image of why ours results are degrading over time. Interestingly on the Google side, ours got less sensitive over time, with fewer random activations but it also became harder to trigger it.
Semaphor 4y ago
I'm guessing you are in the USA? My Alexa had never tried to sell me anything, and I never had "by the way".
pioneer42 4y ago
On your last point, "Alexa, turn off By The Way" will dramatically cut down (but not fully eliminate) the up-selling and recommendations.
- screamingninja 4y ago
  That's good to know!
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  But what if you're listening to RHCP?
- walterbell 4y ago
  Thanks, just tried that and received this response: > Ok, I will snooze my suggestions for now.
- loco5niner 4y ago
  Note that saying this to Alexa only works for the next 24 hours, but you can create a custom Alexa routine to run this exact command every day (I run it on the Alexa in my garage since it responds audibly).
tzs 4y ago
In case you didn't know, you can go to the app and look at recent activity to see what it thought you said. That can sometimes at least make why it did the wrong thing make some sense. For example I have lights on the left and right side of the room named, rather unimaginatively, "left" and "right". It sometimes hears "turn on right" as "turn on light". Sometimes though it definitely does just go nuts. It will occasionally start answering "what time is sunset" with "Sunset today in Washington DC will be <time>". I am in Washington but the one on the other side of the country, which is about 2300 miles west of DC and (more important for sunset time) about 10° north of DC. It's not like it has decided I'm in DC. Asking it "what time is sunset here" will give me "Sunset today in <my_city> will be <time>". This usually lasts maybe a day.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
> The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying. In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Only audio that includes and follows that word should ever exit the device to the network. That reduces the privacy risk to accidental triggers, which happen sometimes (but relatively rarely.) I've been told by security experts that this is (or rather was, as of 2018) the behavior of Alexa. I'd like to believe that we live in a world where Amazon/Apple/Google respect privacy and won't change that behavior via a software update (and if they do, they will be smacked hard by regulators.) I'm not 100% convinced we do live in that world, unfortunately.
- ajdude 4y ago
  Whenever I think about this, I'm reminded of that time someone asked Amazon for their personal data via gdpr, and Amazon sent them recordings from alexia of entire conversations and even clips from in the shower -- from an entirely family by mistake! https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-recordings-to-wrong-person-2018-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-re...
  - kkielhofner 4y ago
    You can review all of your Alexa sessions (with recordings!) in the Alexa app[0]. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW#:~:text=Open%20the%20Alexa%20app%20.,by%20device%20or%20voice%20ID https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=....
    - hellweaver666 4y ago
      Or via the web! https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh
- Aperocky 4y ago
  > In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Should this be easy to verify with network monitoring? audio data is quite heavy. I'm assuming if audio information gets uploaded, it will be quite obvious on the data. We haven't heard about it, and I'm for that reason I don't think it actually does not do it (i.e. the ring buffer hypothesis is likely correct).
danjoredd 4y ago
What is really annoying is trying to get a specific song or playlist going in Spotify thats not in your library. For example I tried asking it for the Elder Scrolls Oblivion soundtrack for me to sleep to but it didn't understand my command until I added a playlist with the specific tracks I wanted to my library. This has happened a few times with other playlists. Very very annoying.
toss1 4y ago
Yup. The one in my home got unplugged years ago due to general un-utility and constant listening. So I never got to the point of pushy salesperson impersonation — that just seems like a perfect example of enshittification... (the tech version of Jumping The Shark). Ugh
8note 4y ago
It turns on the lights, it turns off the lights, but 2/3 of the time, it understands "lights" as "light" and can't tell which light to turn on.
guluarte 4y ago
Alexa: "This is what I found on the web: (starts reading long ass wikipedia article)"
amerkhalid 4y ago
Yeah, absolutely hate notifications which are just marketing spam. Getting very close to chucking it but kids love it. They ask it endless questions, so that’s good for their curiosity.
- richwater 4y ago
  you can actually turn this off in the alexa app if you go into settings and blah blah. Ridiclous that it's on by default
  - wussboy 4y ago
    But completely expected
    - XCSme 4y ago
      Yeah, some things in life seem "stupid" or wrong to be the default when viewed from one side, and seem smart and the obvious thing to do when viewed from the opposite side.
      - amerkhalid 4y ago
        I had Alexa devices almost since day 1. The notification spam started only in last couple of years. Which annoys me as that means they enabled a disabled setting. But it is business and if it really annoyed it me, I would have gotten rid of it. Now I just ignore notifications, until I am stepping out of the room. Then I would Alexa for notifications and walk away.
        avh02 4y ago
        "Alexa, delete notifications" should be more effective.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
fisherjeff 4y ago
We used to use Alexa on our Sonos devices, and immediately moved to the Sonos voice command tool when it was released. I still find it wild that, in my experience at least, even the very first public release was just so much better than Amazon’s solution despite a staggering resource gap between the companies.
jrumbut 4y ago
Beyond all the other issues, voice just isn't that convenient an interface. This is especially true for Amazon, whose massive catalogue of products and services all but requires the speed available from reading and typing to navigate effectively. Plus if you live with other people, voice interface use is disruptive.
- pony_sheared 4y ago
  We use todoist for our home shopping (grocery) list. Connecting this to Alexa has been one of the better quality of life improvements for us. After a bit of trial and error we figured out that you don't have to say "Alexa, add milk to my todoist shopping list", just "Alexa, add milk". So, for this specific purpose I don't think there is a better interface than voice. It does occur to me that taking my shopping list on the phone to Tesco and putting things in a basket manually is probably not the future that Bezos had in mind for Alexa. But ultimately I don't trust Alexa / Amazon to actually do the buying.
- XCSme 4y ago
  > Beyond all the other issues, voice just isn't that convenient an interface. This is an excellent point, and not only related to voice. We often try to invent "smarter" ways to communicate, that are actually harder to use. Like having an app to control your toaster, which seems to be the next step, but simply having a physical device on it that takes 1 second to press is a lot faster, easier and feels more rewarding from the tactile feedback (I love pressing clicky buttons). Voice is the same, turning up the volume on your TV is easier by simply pressing a button on the remote (assuming you have it in reach) than saying a voice command. This is also true in human interactions, sometimes it's easier and faster to just do something by yourself than having to ask someone to do that thing for you. Also, voice commands have to be perfect in the same way physical buttons are, whenever you press them the result is always the same. It's hard to keep using an unreliable input method, that has only 60% chances of doing what you expect.
sam0x17 4y ago
The more commands they add they worse it gets at all commands. This is the problem with an extensible ecosystem -- all voice parsing is affected by every change to the voice parsing, so as the complexity goes up, it gets shittier. I'm holding out for some really cool chat GPT-based assistant, preferably open source, that I could run on a raspberry pi or something. Even better would be something based on one of the open alternatives to chatgpt
firecall 4y ago
We dont seem to have the upsell problem in Australia! Never once had it tried!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

l33tman 4y ago

It blows my mind how anybody who bought this couldn't see that it was a device to sell amazon products.. still, yeah, perhaps it could have had a better balance to both be useful and both sell stuff..

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
screamingninja 4y ago
It actually came free with another product that I wanted to buy. These companies throw away their spy devices at dirt cheap prices in exchange for an ongoing stream of your personal information.

makeitdouble 4y ago

I think the regression is the natural evolution of these kind of tools. At first the range of acceptable command is pretty small and once we find some that work well we start to rely on them. But I´d suspect we´re not using the optimal incatations or pronounciations for those, and they work because there is no competing commands for the recognized sounds/words. But as the repertory grows, fuzzy orders will be harder to reliably map to the same commands every time, and the more the voice assistant needs precise and spot on instructions. At least that´s my mental image of why ours results are degrading over time. Interestingly on the Google side, ours got less sensitive over time, with fewer random activations but it also became harder to trigger it.

Semaphor 4y ago

I'm guessing you are in the USA? My Alexa had never tried to sell me anything, and I never had "by the way".

pioneer42 4y ago

On your last point, "Alexa, turn off By The Way" will dramatically cut down (but not fully eliminate) the up-selling and recommendations.

screamingninja 4y ago
That's good to know!
red-iron-pine 4y ago
But what if you're listening to RHCP?
walterbell 4y ago
Thanks, just tried that and received this response: > Ok, I will snooze my suggestions for now.
loco5niner 4y ago
Note that saying this to Alexa only works for the next 24 hours, but you can create a custom Alexa routine to run this exact command every day (I run it on the Alexa in my garage since it responds audibly).

tzs 4y ago

In case you didn't know, you can go to the app and look at recent activity to see what it thought you said. That can sometimes at least make why it did the wrong thing make some sense. For example I have lights on the left and right side of the room named, rather unimaginatively, "left" and "right". It sometimes hears "turn on right" as "turn on light". Sometimes though it definitely does just go nuts. It will occasionally start answering "what time is sunset" with "Sunset today in Washington DC will be <time>". I am in Washington but the one on the other side of the country, which is about 2300 miles west of DC and (more important for sunset time) about 10° north of DC. It's not like it has decided I'm in DC. Asking it "what time is sunset here" will give me "Sunset today in <my_city> will be <time>". This usually lasts maybe a day.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

> The fact that Alexa is always listening, even when you're not talking to it, is straight up creepy. Also just plain annoying. In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Only audio that includes and follows that word should ever exit the device to the network. That reduces the privacy risk to accidental triggers, which happen sometimes (but relatively rarely.) I've been told by security experts that this is (or rather was, as of 2018) the behavior of Alexa. I'd like to believe that we live in a world where Amazon/Apple/Google respect privacy and won't change that behavior via a software update (and if they do, they will be smacked hard by regulators.) I'm not 100% convinced we do live in that world, unfortunately.

ajdude 4y ago
Whenever I think about this, I'm reminded of that time someone asked Amazon for their personal data via gdpr, and Amazon sent them recordings from alexia of entire conversations and even clips from in the shower -- from an entirely family by mistake! https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-recordings-to-wrong-person-2018-12?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-re...
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  You can review all of your Alexa sessions (with recordings!) in the Alexa app[0]. [0] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW#:~:text=Open%20the%20Alexa%20app%20.,by%20device%20or%20voice%20ID https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=....
  - hellweaver666 4y ago
    Or via the web! https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh https://www.amazon.co.uk/alexa-privacy/apd/rvh
Aperocky 4y ago
> In principle a home assistant should maintain a ring-buffer that listens for its "wake word" and then immediately discards any audio that doesn't match the trigger. Should this be easy to verify with network monitoring? audio data is quite heavy. I'm assuming if audio information gets uploaded, it will be quite obvious on the data. We haven't heard about it, and I'm for that reason I don't think it actually does not do it (i.e. the ring buffer hypothesis is likely correct).

danjoredd 4y ago

What is really annoying is trying to get a specific song or playlist going in Spotify thats not in your library. For example I tried asking it for the Elder Scrolls Oblivion soundtrack for me to sleep to but it didn't understand my command until I added a playlist with the specific tracks I wanted to my library. This has happened a few times with other playlists. Very very annoying.

toss1 4y ago

Yup. The one in my home got unplugged years ago due to general un-utility and constant listening. So I never got to the point of pushy salesperson impersonation — that just seems like a perfect example of enshittification... (the tech version of Jumping The Shark). Ugh

8note 4y ago

It turns on the lights, it turns off the lights, but 2/3 of the time, it understands "lights" as "light" and can't tell which light to turn on.

guluarte 4y ago

Alexa: "This is what I found on the web: (starts reading long ass wikipedia article)"

amerkhalid 4y ago

Yeah, absolutely hate notifications which are just marketing spam. Getting very close to chucking it but kids love it. They ask it endless questions, so that’s good for their curiosity.

richwater 4y ago
you can actually turn this off in the alexa app if you go into settings and blah blah. Ridiclous that it's on by default
- wussboy 4y ago
  But completely expected
  - XCSme 4y ago
    Yeah, some things in life seem "stupid" or wrong to be the default when viewed from one side, and seem smart and the obvious thing to do when viewed from the opposite side.
    - amerkhalid 4y ago
      I had Alexa devices almost since day 1. The notification spam started only in last couple of years. Which annoys me as that means they enabled a disabled setting. But it is business and if it really annoyed it me, I would have gotten rid of it. Now I just ignore notifications, until I am stepping out of the room. Then I would Alexa for notifications and walk away.
      - avh02 4y ago
        "Alexa, delete notifications" should be more effective.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

fisherjeff 4y ago

We used to use Alexa on our Sonos devices, and immediately moved to the Sonos voice command tool when it was released. I still find it wild that, in my experience at least, even the very first public release was just so much better than Amazon’s solution despite a staggering resource gap between the companies.

jrumbut 4y ago

Beyond all the other issues, voice just isn't that convenient an interface. This is especially true for Amazon, whose massive catalogue of products and services all but requires the speed available from reading and typing to navigate effectively. Plus if you live with other people, voice interface use is disruptive.

pony_sheared 4y ago
We use todoist for our home shopping (grocery) list. Connecting this to Alexa has been one of the better quality of life improvements for us. After a bit of trial and error we figured out that you don't have to say "Alexa, add milk to my todoist shopping list", just "Alexa, add milk". So, for this specific purpose I don't think there is a better interface than voice. It does occur to me that taking my shopping list on the phone to Tesco and putting things in a basket manually is probably not the future that Bezos had in mind for Alexa. But ultimately I don't trust Alexa / Amazon to actually do the buying.
XCSme 4y ago
> Beyond all the other issues, voice just isn't that convenient an interface. This is an excellent point, and not only related to voice. We often try to invent "smarter" ways to communicate, that are actually harder to use. Like having an app to control your toaster, which seems to be the next step, but simply having a physical device on it that takes 1 second to press is a lot faster, easier and feels more rewarding from the tactile feedback (I love pressing clicky buttons). Voice is the same, turning up the volume on your TV is easier by simply pressing a button on the remote (assuming you have it in reach) than saying a voice command. This is also true in human interactions, sometimes it's easier and faster to just do something by yourself than having to ask someone to do that thing for you. Also, voice commands have to be perfect in the same way physical buttons are, whenever you press them the result is always the same. It's hard to keep using an unreliable input method, that has only 60% chances of doing what you expect.

sam0x17 4y ago

The more commands they add they worse it gets at all commands. This is the problem with an extensible ecosystem -- all voice parsing is affected by every change to the voice parsing, so as the complexity goes up, it gets shittier. I'm holding out for some really cool chat GPT-based assistant, preferably open source, that I could run on a raspberry pi or something. Even better would be something based on one of the open alternatives to chatgpt

firecall 4y ago

We dont seem to have the upsell problem in Australia! Never once had it tried!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]