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Possible tangent enabler, but as an Australian i've felt the same + have the same perplexion. I've bought I think three things from amazon just to try it out.

Possible tangent enabler, but as an Australian i've felt the same + have the same perplexion. I've bought I think three things from amazon just to try it out. My lesson is that the entire site has a toxic interface and my credit card got falsely charged sometime afterward, which I cannot prove but I'm pretty sure was related to my use on their site. It looks like a cheap scam bazaar. I don't understand its apparent US ubiquity...but then I don't understand the desire for something like Alexa either.

phrotoma 3y ago
Canadian here who lived in the US for a few years. One thing I discovered while living stateside is that there are a lot of features in the big tech companies services which only exist for American users. When I put a US SIM card into my google pixel and got a US number, a bunch of stuff I had never seen before started appearing. Similarly the number of products available to me on Amazon grew by what felt like at least an order of magnitude, and I could have nearly all of them on my doorstep in days, sometimes on the same day I ordered them. And that was in a small city in a flyover state. Agreed, the ubiquity of this stuff is hard to understand from the outside but for me it was extremely clear from within.
dspillett 3y ago
> I don't understand the desire for something like Alexa either What people value them for varies. I had smart bulbs anyway (so I can vary between soft low light for watching TV and bright white for crafting, etc) and a compatible remotely control able heating control, I wanted to be even lazier than needing to pick up my phone to change things, and a pair of them were dirt cheap in an offer. Setting of timing reminders in the kitchen is pretty handy too. I don't use them for much else them that though. Occasionally I'll have an audiobook play that way via Audible, but the speaker isn't great for music. I looked into open source variants for simple home automation like this. I look back every now and then and, while things are improving at a pace, it still seems like a chore to setup and potentially flaky (not that Amazon devices don't need resetting almost monthly because they are a bit flaky too) and more expensive in terms of getting good microphones/speakers/etc together. [All the above would apply the same would to Google's offering; I went with Echo devices because they were cheap at a time that my wallet control was weak, and you can call them “computer” rather than “brand-name”]

phrotoma 3y ago

Canadian here who lived in the US for a few years. One thing I discovered while living stateside is that there are a lot of features in the big tech companies services which only exist for American users. When I put a US SIM card into my google pixel and got a US number, a bunch of stuff I had never seen before started appearing. Similarly the number of products available to me on Amazon grew by what felt like at least an order of magnitude, and I could have nearly all of them on my doorstep in days, sometimes on the same day I ordered them. And that was in a small city in a flyover state. Agreed, the ubiquity of this stuff is hard to understand from the outside but for me it was extremely clear from within.

dspillett 3y ago

> I don't understand the desire for something like Alexa either What people value them for varies. I had smart bulbs anyway (so I can vary between soft low light for watching TV and bright white for crafting, etc) and a compatible remotely control able heating control, I wanted to be even lazier than needing to pick up my phone to change things, and a pair of them were dirt cheap in an offer. Setting of timing reminders in the kitchen is pretty handy too. I don't use them for much else them that though. Occasionally I'll have an audiobook play that way via Audible, but the speaker isn't great for music. I looked into open source variants for simple home automation like this. I look back every now and then and, while things are improving at a pace, it still seems like a chore to setup and potentially flaky (not that Amazon devices don't need resetting almost monthly because they are a bit flaky too) and more expensive in terms of getting good microphones/speakers/etc together. [All the above would apply the same would to Google's offering; I went with Echo devices because they were cheap at a time that my wallet control was weak, and you can call them “computer” rather than “brand-name”]