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Amazon plans to charge for Alexa in June–unless internal conflict delays revamp
- ramshanker 3y agoUnless it is complimentary with prime, I am not adding one more SUBSCRIPTION to my life.
- echelon 3y agoWhere do I get my refund?
- echelon 3y agoThis got downvoted, but the product I bought will no longer be functioning due to no action of my own. It will have zero utility. I can't think of anything else that I own that got obsoleted in that way. Presumably it won't even be able to play music anymore.
- echelon 3y agoI'd be fine if Amazon unlocks it or gives us the source. Let us at least save the devices from the dump.
- jeffmc 3y agoAnd more enshittifaction
- ARandomerDude 3y ago> Would you pay to use Alexa? I won’t even use it for free. We already live in a surveillance state. At this point the wisest course of action is to launder your thoughtcrimes through multiple privacy-enhancing services.
- sgtnoodle 3y agoMy recently purchased truck came with Alexia. I think they wanted $10/month to enable it's full functionality. Today I figured out how to hide the Alexia button from the main UI, and I celebrated.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI am thinking they must know this and that this is actually a 3.5D chess move that they can use to get the political will to finally axe the product or at least significantly gut it. It’s well known how much of a money loser voice assistants have been and Alexa is one of the largest. A bet that didn’t really pay off.
- iknowstuff 3y agoSiri seems fine. Runs on device, does homekit things really well…
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoSiri is not fine in the slightest. It was great in previous iOS versions, but after the recent update to iOS 17 it doesn’t function. Misses at least half of my “Hey Siris”, doesn’t respond to a fair portion of requests, and what it does respond to it does so in a way that was inferior than pre-17, either by being painfully slow or failing in some fashion.
- iknowstuff 3y agoWeird, it’s significantly better for me. Definitely faster. “siri all lights on” is near instant on Siri but multiple seconds of waiting via google/nest home. You also dont have to say “hey siri” anymore, “siri” is enough.
- ViktorRay 3y agoI use Siri on my phone every day. Mainly to set timers and alarm clocks or to check the weather. I don’t believe I’ve ever used it regularly for anything else. Maybe once in a while I’ll be driving and I’ll ask Siri for directions to some place. It’s difficult to see why anybody would bother paying monthly subscription money for Alexa. If you have an iPhone Siri can do all the basic stuff (set timers, look up the weather) that Alexa can. Do some people use Alexa to adjust their home lights and stuff? Would non-wealthy people actually pay money in the form of a monthly subscription just so Alexa can adjust your home lights? Seems like Amazon’s strategy here doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m not Jeff Bezos so what do I know….
- ekianjo 3y agois Jeff still involved in this kind of decisions?
- mft_ 3y agoIndeed; to my eyes, Amazon has set course more directly towards enshittification since Bezos left day-to-day involvement. I wonder if ‘customer obsession’ means less to his successor;or maybe the new boss’ success is judged differently (eg profit) than in Bezos’ time?
- ekianjo 3y ago> Amazon has set course more directly towards enshittification Maybe, but I have not noticed any significant change in the day to day quality of the service compared to when Jeff was around. Have you?
- jjulius 3y ago>"If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble.” They oughta just save themselves the time and effort and just call it now.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y agoExecs think progress towards human level intelligence is on a linear trajectory, inevitably to be finished soon after waiting out some development delays, just like any CRUD app. And it's adorable.
- gzer0 3y agoSorry to say this, but even if Amazon paid ME $10/mo to use it, I wouldn't. It's that awful.
- fbdab103 3y agoDo the current Alexa devices do their voice recognition on device on in cloud? Curious what are their operational costs for the service, because I naively thought that the device handled the basic operations (timer, weather) with some API calls which should be minimal data. Switching out to a novel AI model just to stay hip sounds expensive.
- pchristensen 3y agoAlexa is almost entirely cloud-based. The devices are mostly just a speaker, a microphone, and a power supply. That s why they’re so cheap and why Alexa has been added to so many different form factors and device types.
- lolinder 3y agoSpeech recognition on edge devices is still very compute intensive—it's either too slow or inaccurate or constrained in what it can recognize. Alexa and Google both still stream audio to the cloud for processing, though the wake word detection is typically done locally. Modern phones are starting to do more processing locally and I could see that making its way to the smart speakers as well if they survive as a product category, but they're definitely paying for compute on most existing devices.
- fbdab103 3y agoGood to know. I realize Whisper is new, but I have been blown away by its performance. I would think a revamped device could do all of the processing locally. Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient.
- lolinder 3y agoYeah, whisper is the closest thing we have, but even it requires more processing power than is present in most of these edge devices in order to feel smooth. I've started a voice interface project on a Raspberry Pi 4, and it takes about 3 seconds to produce a result. That's impressive, but not fast enough for Alexa. From what I gather a Pi 5 can do it in 1.5 seconds, which is closer, so I suspect it's only a matter of time before we do have fully local STT running directly on speakers. > Probably anathema to the space, but if the devices leaned into the ~five tasks people use them for (timers, weather, todo list?) could probably tighten up the AI models to be more accurate and/or resource efficient. Yes, this is the approach taken by a lot of streaming STT systems, like Kaldi [0]. Rather than use a fully capable model, you train a specialized one that knows what kinds of things people are likely to say to it. [0] http://kaldi-asr.org/ http://kaldi-asr.org/
- donatj 3y agoI am very doubtful this will happen. If it does it's among the most boneheaded moves of the century. No one's interested in paying for it. It's a mild convenience at the cost of letting Amazon into your home. It's not something I believe basically anyone is willing to pay for. It's something we use begrudgingly because it's convenient. The only reason I even have Alexa devices in my house at all is Amazon kept throwing them at be for free when attending Amazon events like Re:Invent - I wanted to go Google Home, but I just got buried in devices. I control my lights with Alexa and listen to podcasts. I'll just use my phone if they try to charge me.
- anonimo37 3y agoI've avoided Alexa for years. I've never had any interest in anything voice controlled. Anyway one day at the Amazon checkout, Amazon wanted to sell me an Echo Pop for I think it was $20. I figured I'll give it a try, I can afford to lose $20 and not be too grumpy about it. I found the whole experience very underwhelming. Alexa frequently misunderstood me. At one time I tried asking it to play a particular type of music and it said I require a subscription. I tried some of the skills and they were total garbage. And then there are the privacy issues. I live alone so I was not too concerned but I would always make sure it was off before using the phone. The only thing I would really want to use a product like Alexa for and pay for it with a subscription is if I could use it for language learning. But my bar for this is very high. I'm not interested in something that just feeds me phrases to learn. It would need to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the ability to adapt its output to my level, provide useful feedback, and have excellent voice recognition for bad accents and the ability to suggest improvements to my pronunciation and grammar. I don't see this happening any time soon.
- colechristensen 3y agoLLMs can write fanfiction and Alexa/Siri fail to understand a single sentence unless it's in the one word order they get.
- ninth_ant 3y agoHey Siri, set an alarm for 5pm and call it “take out trash” Got it. Your alarm for 5pm “collet take out trash” is set.
- eastbound 3y agoActually my Siri can’t start a chronometer or read the last SMS. Starting a chronometer by voice is especially useful while jogging, since the iPhone is tucked deep in pockets.
- lagadu 3y agoI use my Alexa to start my vacuum cleaner (maybe 3-5 times a week), to set timers (about once a week) and to check the temperature outside (less than once a month). I wouldn't pay $1 for this, it's all stuff that my phone can already do.
- klipklop 3y agoZero percent chance I would pay for these assistants. Due to how useless they are I have been considering removing my Google home devices. In some ways they are worse now than launch. I suspect Alexa devices are similar.
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- jader201 3y agoOther than sometimes not understanding what I’m calling my devices (mostly lights, and mostly because I don’t have them named consistently), my Google Home devices work just fine. I keep seeing articles about complaints with Alexa, but we use Google Home quite a bit without any of these problems. It’s not perfect, but any issues we have with them now are the same issues we’ve always had with them. I don’t know of any regressions. But maybe we don’t use those features? We mostly use it to control our smart devices (lights, vacuums), set timers, ask it questions (that we would otherwise Google), and play music on Spotify. The most common uses, I would think.
- justinhj 3y agoAs a standalone service I think most people would switch to Siri or Google assistant rather than pay Alexa plus unless it was significantly more useful. I think people would pay for an all encompassing home awareness ai integrating smart devices but also Blink cameras. Subscribing to Blink is already compelling, if you add control and identification of people and intentions into Blink along with an ai controlled home that could be worth a subscription
- menacingly 3y agoI used to find my Alexa devices useful, until they took the widely-discussed quality nosedive and started understanding less than half of what they used to. I can't think of anything else I've purchased that became so markedly worse of a thing after I bought it. 1 experience of misunderstanding stomps out 10 of it working perfectly. I'd read a book on the inside story of the failure of this product. From cute, moderately useful novelty to glitchy, nagging revenue grab that takes it upon itself to come into your home with "offers". Eroding goodwill, missing the boat on AI you're naturally leveraged to integrate with your large installed base, it's shiny object middle management bingo.
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- spaceman_2020 3y agoWhy are Siri and Alexa so bad at understanding instructions? I have to be precise and clear if I want anything done. Meanwhile with VoiceGPT, I can fill my instructions with awkward pauses, unclear language, and it still gets what I’m trying to say.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoMakes sense to me. We already have a term for mishearing something: eggcorn. Now multiply by many languages, dialects, accents. Unless they had regional interpreters down to the accent level, why would it understand anything? Humans don’t understand each other with different accents even if the language is the same.
- dymk 3y agoNo, for it to only be an accent, humans kind of have to understand each other - mutual intelligibility and all that. We’re pretty good at interpreting imperfect input.
- Zandikar 3y agoThat doesn't make any sense at all. Doesn't matter how many languages or accents there are. The problem is that there was an established, large subset of those that it once understood and could comprehend, and now, that allegedly same technology - with several years of opportunities to mature and improve - is now struggling to understand those same people that it once could. That as nothing to do with accents. Now, while I acknowledge and agree that Siri, Alexa, and the other pre-AI voice activated assistance have declined in apparent comprehension, I'm not convinced it's entirely a degradation of the tech itself, but a significant increase in expectations and a subsequent decrease in articulation and diction thanks to VoiceGPT being able to handle it. As a result, we talk more naturally, with "uh"s, "um"s, pauses, bad grammar, slang, etc. Let's also acknowledge there's probably a statistically significant number of people (if for no other reason than them aging up into being able to afford/have said devices) that never used that "old" tech "Back in the day" of 2-3 years ago, who's only experience with it is using VoiceGPT first, then trying Siri or what have you and coming to the conclusion that the other voice assistant sucks. That's obviously not a "Fair" comparison, but it's one that gets made in the real all the time regardless when it comes to the court of public opinion, and informs pubic perception at large anyway. Truthfully I think it's both, but regardless, it's failing to perform in an area where it once did. How much of that is the people changing, and how much of that is the technology, I'm not sure. But I doubt the cause is because we all suddenly switched accents on it.
- yeknoda 3y agoThey are considering charging because Alexa is about to get a massive update with agent capabilities. If you are paying 20/month for gpt4, you are probably willing to pay much more for amazons equivalent but that can actually do things for you like get groceries, get things delivered, one command purchase, etc. maybe even buy plane lowest cost plane tickets or make reservations.
- NewJazz 3y agoIf it could really do all that stuff then wouldn't amazon just earn a commission on all those purchases and call it a win? Also funny how all of the capabilities noted boil down to "Alexa can spend your money more easily and quickly".
- troupo 3y agoNatrator: as it turned out, the update was mediocre at best, and did none of the things advertised
- ascorbic 3y agoIf it gets good LLM abilities then I'm sure I'd use it more, but I still won't use it to buy things and I don't think many people will. I genuinely wonder how many people are happy to routinely buy things without the most cursory ability to compare prices and options.
- sircastor 3y agoWe used our Echo daily for years until one day I factory reset it and couldn't get it to connect to my network. After that it got unplugged and never replaced. I really liked having a home assistant, and wished for an even-better TNG-type voice computer. The shopping list app wasn't very good (bad sync). Now I use Siri on my Apple watch, and most of the time it works fine. My demands aren't complex. I wish the voice assistant field got more complex and better. It was a neat tech diversion.
- whycome 3y agoSeeing what chatgpt can do with voice, it's pretty obvious just how bad googlehome/alexa/siri are. It would be logical for them to get into the 'voice assistant' space in some way.
- Crunchified 3y agoBut how will Amazon sell all those Echo products without Alexa?
- AndrewDucker 3y agoFrom the article it sounds like it will only be the AI-"improved" version that is charged for. Which is fine, because I really don't want that version.
- aSithLord 3y ago"by the way"... is why I will be glad to have an excuse to cancel in June.
- doubtfuluser 3y agoI was pretty bought into the Alexa ecosystem, however I started selling devices with a screen, and never connected my wired smart-home to it. It’s pretty stupid that I can’t easily watch YouTube on it. Also it’s becoming really annoying with talking a lot more instead of just doing what I asked for. With moves towards LLM integration I fear we will soon get dialogues like „switch on the light“ - „I’m sorry, Dave - I can’t do that“.
- thomukas 3y agoI’d not be surprised if the hardware division of MSFT (Surface) is working on a personal assistant product powered by OpenAI. It’s easy to see how good it could be : I find the hands-free voice interface of the ChatGPT iOS app really good at handling conversations, some slight improvement above that (eg dealing with latency on either side) in a polished MSFT hardware product would beamazing