5 ms·

I think we will see a persistent divestment from the space in the next five years. Smart speakers/devices have been a tremendous financial failure and virtual a

by boh 3y ago

I think we will see a persistent divestment from the space in the next five years. Smart speakers/devices have been a tremendous financial failure and virtual assistants in general are pretty much outdated tech since the release of ChatGPT.

AdamN 3y ago
They work ok as a side feature. It is nice to ask Siri to play music and that wasn't possible a few years ago. But it's a value add for the Apple ecosystem - not a capital P Product.
nickthegreek 3y ago
the AI will just be integrated into the speakers/devices making them more useful. I see this space actually growing.
- throwaway4aday 3y ago
  I honestly have no idea what's taking them so long. It's tempting at this point to build a custom integration for Home Assistant that just uses function calling to trigger various actions.
  - boh 3y ago
    Because it costs too much. They're already losing money on every speaker sold (Google/Amazon anyway), plus the infrastructure required to maintain service. Adding an LLM is a huge expense for an already failing form factor.
pnathan 3y ago
Alexa & Google Home work fantastic in these areas: - Playing music - Playing audiobooks - Telling the time - Setting timers for cooking. - Giving the day's weather. Alexa beats Google solidly in kid-friendly material. I subscribe to the Amazon PrimeFancyMusic thing, and that works well for my Echo Studio. I would agree that a GPT driven voice controlled system might be great. What I would actually prefer would be a speaker system that I could drive with a command line tool _or_ voice. Arguably, a tidy enough installation on a RPi Zero connected to a dumb speaker would be sufficient for the CLI... A "smart" speaker that simply did the above 5 tasks reliably and was driven off of music/audiobook subscriptions would be fantastic. It wouldn't shoot for the moon, but it would be a workhorse.

by boh 3y ago

AdamN 3y ago

They work ok as a side feature. It is nice to ask Siri to play music and that wasn't possible a few years ago. But it's a value add for the Apple ecosystem - not a capital P Product.

nickthegreek 3y ago

the AI will just be integrated into the speakers/devices making them more useful. I see this space actually growing.

throwaway4aday 3y ago
I honestly have no idea what's taking them so long. It's tempting at this point to build a custom integration for Home Assistant that just uses function calling to trigger various actions.
- boh 3y ago
  Because it costs too much. They're already losing money on every speaker sold (Google/Amazon anyway), plus the infrastructure required to maintain service. Adding an LLM is a huge expense for an already failing form factor.

pnathan 3y ago

Alexa & Google Home work fantastic in these areas: - Playing music - Playing audiobooks - Telling the time - Setting timers for cooking. - Giving the day's weather. Alexa beats Google solidly in kid-friendly material. I subscribe to the Amazon PrimeFancyMusic thing, and that works well for my Echo Studio. I would agree that a GPT driven voice controlled system might be great. What I would actually prefer would be a speaker system that I could drive with a command line tool _or_ voice. Arguably, a tidy enough installation on a RPi Zero connected to a dumb speaker would be sufficient for the CLI... A "smart" speaker that simply did the above 5 tasks reliably and was driven off of music/audiobook subscriptions would be fantastic. It wouldn't shoot for the moon, but it would be a workhorse.