17 ms·

Alexa+

222 points by fgblanch 2y ago

spacemannoslen 2y ago
I remember reading an article about how Amazon would lose money every year on the Alexa service. I wonder if /how that will change now after this.
- antasvara 2y ago
  IIRC, Alexa lost money because: 1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop. 2. The devices were sold at a huge loss. What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
- spacemannoslen 2y ago
  Specifically, if they’re going to lose even more on this venture now cranking it up to 11. Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too
mdasen 2y ago
The pricing seems odd. $20/mo for Alexa+, but it's free with a $15/mo Prime subscription? It makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Or Prime's getting another price increase.
- bthrn 2y ago
  Anchoring
- yapyap 2y ago
  Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription
- neofrommatrix 2y ago
  That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription. Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.
- bbor 2y ago
  Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
  - beastman82 2y ago
    No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this terrible offer.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.
mixedCase 2y ago
Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs. I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
- dlcarrier 2y ago
  I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone spoken ones.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
    Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings. Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
  - brookst 2y ago
    That’s wild. What kinds of things do you ask about? I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.
    - dlcarrier 2y ago
      That's a pretty low bar, at least over the last several years. I feel like any time I ask Google something uncommon, it presumes a meant something else, and is hard set on answering that question, no matter how many quotes or minus symbols I add to the search.
      - brookst 2y ago
        It is a mistake to use modern Google like a Boolean search engine of old. You almost have to use natural language to get decent results.
echelon 2y ago
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels. > Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members. Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
- laweijfmvo 2y ago
  It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    "Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."
- zamalek 2y ago
  > She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
  - esotericimpl 2y ago
    [dead]
delichon 2y ago
I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.
- creshal 2y ago
  Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure their search results intentionally suck to make their ads more valuable.
    - daveguy 2y ago
      I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products. Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge. Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
      - cy_hauser 2y ago
        > Too much overhead figuring out the good products ... How does changing stores help. If the products are still the same but on Walmart, how are you getting better information?
        doctoboggan 2y ago
doctoboggan 2y ago
I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years. But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
- dlcarrier 2y ago
  That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not. Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
rolph 2y ago
model agnostic, meaning a model is enlisted based on specific task, rather than a shoehorn and a single model.
827a 2y ago
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members. Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
- stirlo 2y ago
  Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower and undercut the Prime cost?
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing? Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!" The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
- baggachipz 2y ago
  Remember how all Prime video used to be free and without ads? There'll be the same bait-and-switch here.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?
- jxyxfinite 2y ago
  This isn’t what they are selling. They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mvieira38 2y ago
  In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Before using LLMs, you had to list every single variation that someone might say to trigger a command - “utterances” in every language. With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts. https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d27 https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...
junto 2y ago
Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  "We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period."
  - junto 2y ago
    Thanks. Missed that.
1shooner 2y ago
>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale. I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials. On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for. Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573 Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-buttons-discontinued https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  "On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience. Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
  - 1shooner 2y ago
    Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.
  - 2y ago
lasermike026 2y ago
Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? None of this makes any sense.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa. > Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? Because it isn't out yet?
- dmix 2y ago
  Most people using Alexa heavily probably already have Prime.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand. Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?! People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
qwertox 2y ago
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free. > We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now. Thank you for nothing, then? I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser? -- Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
  - qwertox 2y ago
    And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+? I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
    - jxyxfinite 2y ago
      The website says there will be browser support
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      > And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+? I presume via the "new browser-based experience at Alexa.com"?
harmmonica 2y ago
If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key). That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!). One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
- drpossum 2y ago
  I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.
  - com2kid 2y ago
    Do it all locally. I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it? The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple). [1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-innovative-sht https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...
babypuncher 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
JadoJodo 2y ago
I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.
- GratiaTerra 2y ago
  Smile? No, it's a penis.
  - esafak 2y ago
    A bold logo! https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128 https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128
toddmorey 2y ago
They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.
- grg0 2y ago
  AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.
beardyw 2y ago
I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?
- ascorbic 2y ago
  A failed product that has sold 600 million units?
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    Weren't they mostly sold below cost?
  - beardyw 2y ago
    Apparently at little or no profit.
hennell 2y ago
I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can. My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead. Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up. Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean? They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean? And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong. I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless. But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did. Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
- JamesSwift 2y ago
  Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"
terminalbraid 2y ago
I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop. I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
- qmr 2y ago
  Why did you let Alexa in in the first place?
bronco21016 2y ago
Given how Apple Intelligence has gone so far, I'm not going to hold my breath.
dmix 2y ago
Finally, Alexa hasn't improved at all in years. I half love half hate mine. I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.
1970-01-01 2y ago
>continue on the go with your phone or in the car, I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
ge96 2y ago
The fusion of the different devices is cool but man it feels odd to be owned by some company, integrated into all aspects of your life idk. My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
  - ge96 2y ago
    Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device? edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is" movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
    - nozzlegear 2y ago
      > Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device? To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen. > edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is" The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers. > movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC I live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
gotts 2y ago
If they have a decent API I might consider buying it. Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.
jccalhoun 2y ago
I have 4 echos. This stuff looks like a lot of things I will never use.
- hbosch 2y ago
  Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more pleasurable!
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      In a perfect world, yes. In the real world, some nights the parents are not able to read/tell the story. The children don't care, they want the story anyway. Audiobooks are a godsend.
    - empath75 2y ago
      I've played around with chatgpt telling stories to my kids, but they don't like it that much. The stories aren't very good, and they're trite and predictable -- even with 4o. It's really only interesting to them at all because it's choose your own adventure.
  - stavros 2y ago
    https://deepdreams.stavros.io https://deepdreams.stavros.io They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.
0898 2y ago
The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly. I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?
- Dnguyen 2y ago
  Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...
  - calamity_elf 2y ago
    then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.
    - 0898 2y ago
      This is what’s happening to us.
      - Domenic_S 2y ago
        Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected. If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
        Chico75 2y ago
        Same exact thing, now we know that we have to say the full announcement the second time we trigger Alexa.
rdtsc 2y ago
Wait till she "mishears" you: "I thought you said you wanted to purchase 10 gallons of Amazon basics hand soap. Sorry about that. The shipping is arriving today, but you can return it back at the nearest UPS location". I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Wait til Alexa+ becoms "Alexa+ thinking", and tells you she's replaced the Ice Cream on your Amazon Fresh order with oatmeal because its healthier.
dogethrowaway42 2y ago
[dead]
nashashmi 2y ago
I remember when law officers wanted the Alexa recording at the home of a murder. Amazon did not give it up. I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?
- Aurornis 2y ago
  I think your memory is mistaken. Amazon will give up recordings when legally obligated to do so, because that’s the law. They can’t choose to ignore the law. However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive). Here’s a case where the Alexa command was used as part of the case, though it didn’t have recordings of the actual crime: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-jailed-life-voice-recordings-Amazon-device-helped-bring-justice.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
  - nashashmi 2y ago
    Try these searches: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=alexa%20murder&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
  - dboreham 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - r00fus 2y ago
      And anyone he designates.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?
bakugo 2y ago
Related: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Can Prime users instead get a discounted prime without this Alexa stuff? Seems like it should be $20 cheaper per month. In other words Prime shipping should be free.
- alok-g 2y ago
  I wish producers were required by law to honor such logic. Only then the true pricing of things will appear.
wiremine 2y ago
I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism. My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation. If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.
- bhhaskin 2y ago
  The big issue with LLM is how can you trust the information it gives you? It could be flat out making all or some of it up.
  - kahmeal 2y ago
    I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.
    - reaperducer 2y ago
      It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. And yet people still drive into rivers because Google Maps tells them to. Never underestimate the power of "computers are never wrong."
      - tokioyoyo 2y ago
        How many times has that happened? Those cases make the headlines, but it’s so rare that, in my opinion, they can be disregarded. Nothing is perfect, just assess your risks and tolerance to error. That’s subjective, so one acts accordingly.
dandsupernig 2y ago
[flagged]
lostmsu 2y ago
How can I try it? My Prime expires in 3 days.
bookofjoe 2y ago
The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.
- lurking_swe 2y ago
  it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway. i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…
taeric 2y ago
I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree. Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed. To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.
- cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.
  - taeric 2y ago
    This could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.
    - criddell 2y ago
      When I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?". It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.
  - mgiampapa 2y ago
    You can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1. This took about 5 minutes to setup.
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
> and free with Prime Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.
- brookst 2y ago
  Pricing for Prime is totally disconnected from costs. They will price at whatever maximizes p*q.
  - Exoristos 2y ago
    Which is impacted by perceived value:cost by customers.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Yep — if consumers see AI as added value they’ll pay more. But practically nobody will base their willingness to pay on guesses about Amazon’s COGS. The new AI feature could be pure excess capacity and cost Amazon nothing, or it could cost Amazon $1000/user/month, and nobody will know or care.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Cancelled mine recently, saved hundreds already by not buying dumb stuff I don't actually need on there.
rabuse 2y ago
Who actually wants this garbage?
- brookst 2y ago
  Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about electronic music.
  - dboreham 2y ago
    tbf grandpa was listening to Kraftwerk...
    - brookst 2y ago
      No, I was. But grandpa did not approve at all. Newfangled machines making pure noises, that’s not real music, the whole thing.
mkayle 2y ago
My main request is to add the functionality to inquire about the progress of running tasks, such as checking the time remaining on a timer.
Arthanos 2y ago
>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market. Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.
  - MattJ100 2y ago
    I don't think you can say that is the problem. It may have exacerbated the issue, but problems exist when summarising full news content too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko
  - rs186 2y ago
    Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're targeting.
system7rocks 2y ago
I think this is an interesting curiosity, but I am a little worn out on every company announcing AI as some kind of major upgrade. Alexa has already been sort of a waning product, and in some ways, it was already kind of cute since you could play goofy games. But cute gets old. With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?
cyberax 2y ago
I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer. I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Home Assistant has been doing it for a while. All it takes is to add OpenAI or Anthropic integration, plug your API key, and you have a better voice assistant than anything Google, Amazon and Apple have offered so far.
phillipcarter 2y ago
I'll take "smart speaker that actually understands the music I want to play" first, then we can get into scheduling appointments to fix my oven.
yuehhangalt 2y ago
I had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive. Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information. It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.
- criddell 2y ago
  > I increasingly want less of it I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit. Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.
modeless 2y ago
The video here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years. The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?
- _xerces_ 2y ago
  Prime customers tend to buy more stuff from Amazon, so they get you that way maybe.
gwbas1c 2y ago
You know what I really want? Rosie, from the Jetsons. I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  It’s been pretty shocking that a Turing-test sentience at genius level was easier technology to make than a consumer level robot with 1950s level design expectations that stupidly picks up and moves objects. It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.
ramon156 2y ago
Hate these kind of claims where they go "Alexa is sooo good at doing X, omggg". I don't care, show me that it works.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
wayeq 2y ago
> She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay really advertising to the hackernews crowd with this line
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
stacktrust 2y ago
> Identify or find objects with Alexa+.. use the camera on Echo Show devices to identify objects and get help with daily tasks. For example, reorder pantry items by showing them to the new Alexa, ask Alexa to identify a type of plant and its care instructions and set reminders for when it needs to get watered, or get fashion or décor ideas. This new feature is particularly game changing for people who are blind or have low vision This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.0/ios/18.0 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images? It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden. Alexa use cases for elderly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989 In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control, https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ > Fully open software, firmware, and hardware.. Grove port for connecting sensors and a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting external speakers
- haddonist 2y ago
  > In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums
twitchard 2y ago
Crazy how many voice AI related updates there were this week. Grok voice mode, Alexa+, Hume OCTAVE, Elevenlabs Scribe SST... big day for Voice AI!
insane_dreamer 2y ago
So will the next major Alexa release be Alexa++ ?
SteveJS 2y ago
I really did like that kitchen timer. This seems like it would have been pretty good. However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv. The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping. I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon. I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.
j_timberlake 2y ago
Hot take: If AI ever gets smart enough to actually do these activities well, the USA government will decide AI is a "national security risk" and not allow companies to sell access to it. Terrorists and drug cartels might use it! Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.
bluesounddirect 2y ago
i may box all of mine up and "return" them back to mr bozos . i use them for glorified alarm clocks that can start a internet radio stream . i dont need anything else . i wonder if new alexa will still tell me how much protein is in a 42 inch flat screen tv !

222 points by fgblanch 2y ago

I remember reading an article about how Amazon would lose money every year on the Alexa service. I wonder if /how that will change now after this.

antasvara 2y ago
IIRC, Alexa lost money because: 1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop. 2. The devices were sold at a huge loss. What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
spacemannoslen 2y ago
Specifically, if they’re going to lose even more on this venture now cranking it up to 11. Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too

mdasen 2y ago

The pricing seems odd. $20/mo for Alexa+, but it's free with a $15/mo Prime subscription? It makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Or Prime's getting another price increase.
bthrn 2y ago
Anchoring
yapyap 2y ago
Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription
neofrommatrix 2y ago
That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription. Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.
bbor 2y ago
Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
- beastman82 2y ago
  No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this terrible offer.
deleted 2y ago
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HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.

mixedCase 2y ago

Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs. I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.

dlcarrier 2y ago
I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone spoken ones.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings. Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
- brookst 2y ago
  That’s wild. What kinds of things do you ask about? I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.
  - dlcarrier 2y ago
    That's a pretty low bar, at least over the last several years. I feel like any time I ask Google something uncommon, it presumes a meant something else, and is hard set on answering that question, no matter how many quotes or minus symbols I add to the search.
    - brookst 2y ago
      It is a mistake to use modern Google like a Boolean search engine of old. You almost have to use natural language to get decent results.

echelon 2y ago

> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels. > Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members. Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.

laweijfmvo 2y ago
It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  "Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."
zamalek 2y ago
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests. The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
- esotericimpl 2y ago
  [dead]

delichon 2y ago

I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.

creshal 2y ago
Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.
- reginald78 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure their search results intentionally suck to make their ads more valuable.
  - daveguy 2y ago
    I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products. Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge. Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
    - cy_hauser 2y ago
      > Too much overhead figuring out the good products ... How does changing stores help. If the products are still the same but on Walmart, how are you getting better information?
      - doctoboggan 2y ago

doctoboggan 2y ago

I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years. But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.

dlcarrier 2y ago
That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not. Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.

rolph 2y ago

model agnostic, meaning a model is enlisted based on specific task, rather than a shoehorn and a single model.

827a 2y ago

> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members. Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?

stirlo 2y ago
Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower and undercut the Prime cost?
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing? Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!" The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
baggachipz 2y ago
Remember how all Prime video used to be free and without ads? There'll be the same bait-and-switch here.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?

jxyxfinite 2y ago
This isn’t what they are selling. They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mvieira38 2y ago
In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.
scarface_74 2y ago
Before using LLMs, you had to list every single variation that someone might say to trigger a command - “utterances” in every language. With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts. https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d27 https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...

junto 2y ago

Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?

ceejayoz 2y ago
"We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period."
- junto 2y ago
  Thanks. Missed that.

1shooner 2y ago

>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale. I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials. On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for. Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573 Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc. https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-buttons-discontinued https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...
ceejayoz 2y ago
"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience. Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
- 1shooner 2y ago
  Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.
- 2y ago

lasermike026 2y ago

Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? None of this makes any sense.

ceejayoz 2y ago
> Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa. > Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? Because it isn't out yet?
dmix 2y ago
Most people using Alexa heavily probably already have Prime.
HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand. Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?! People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !

qwertox 2y ago

> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free. > We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now. Thank you for nothing, then? I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser? -- Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."

ceejayoz 2y ago
> Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
- qwertox 2y ago
  And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+? I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
  - jxyxfinite 2y ago
    The website says there will be browser support
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+? I presume via the "new browser-based experience at Alexa.com"?

harmmonica 2y ago

If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key). That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!). One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."

drpossum 2y ago
I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.
- com2kid 2y ago
  Do it all locally. I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it? The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple). [1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-innovative-sht https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...

babypuncher 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
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JadoJodo 2y ago

I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.

GratiaTerra 2y ago
Smile? No, it's a penis.
- esafak 2y ago
  A bold logo! https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128 https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128

toddmorey 2y ago

They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.

grg0 2y ago
AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.

beardyw 2y ago

I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?

ascorbic 2y ago
A failed product that has sold 600 million units?
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Weren't they mostly sold below cost?
- beardyw 2y ago
  Apparently at little or no profit.

hennell 2y ago

I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can. My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead. Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up. Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean? They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean? And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong. I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless. But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did. Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.

JamesSwift 2y ago
Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"

terminalbraid 2y ago

I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop. I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.

qmr 2y ago
Why did you let Alexa in in the first place?

bronco21016 2y ago

Given how Apple Intelligence has gone so far, I'm not going to hold my breath.

dmix 2y ago

Finally, Alexa hasn't improved at all in years. I half love half hate mine. I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.

1970-01-01 2y ago

>continue on the go with your phone or in the car, I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.

ge96 2y ago

The fusion of the different devices is cool but man it feels odd to be owned by some company, integrated into all aspects of your life idk. My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically

nozzlegear 2y ago
What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
- ge96 2y ago
  Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device? edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is" movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
  - nozzlegear 2y ago
    > Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device? To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen. > edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is" The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers. > movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC I live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.

gotts 2y ago

If they have a decent API I might consider buying it. Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.

jccalhoun 2y ago

I have 4 echos. This stuff looks like a lot of things I will never use.

hbosch 2y ago
Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more pleasurable!
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    In a perfect world, yes. In the real world, some nights the parents are not able to read/tell the story. The children don't care, they want the story anyway. Audiobooks are a godsend.
  - empath75 2y ago
    I've played around with chatgpt telling stories to my kids, but they don't like it that much. The stories aren't very good, and they're trite and predictable -- even with 4o. It's really only interesting to them at all because it's choose your own adventure.
- stavros 2y ago
  https://deepdreams.stavros.io https://deepdreams.stavros.io They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.

0898 2y ago

The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly. I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house. I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?

Dnguyen 2y ago
Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...
- calamity_elf 2y ago
  then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.
  - 0898 2y ago
    This is what’s happening to us.
    - Domenic_S 2y ago
      Same, announcements are kind of flaky. My usual command is "Alexa, announce <whatever to announce>" - half the time she asks what I want to announce, 20% of the time she announces "announce", 30% of the time it works as expected. If i'm already on my phone sometimes I'll just type the announcement in the Alexa app instead.
      - Chico75 2y ago
        Same exact thing, now we know that we have to say the full announcement the second time we trigger Alexa.

rdtsc 2y ago

Wait till she "mishears" you: "I thought you said you wanted to purchase 10 gallons of Amazon basics hand soap. Sorry about that. The shipping is arriving today, but you can return it back at the nearest UPS location". I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
Wait til Alexa+ becoms "Alexa+ thinking", and tells you she's replaced the Ice Cream on your Amazon Fresh order with oatmeal because its healthier.

dogethrowaway42 2y ago

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nashashmi 2y ago

I remember when law officers wanted the Alexa recording at the home of a murder. Amazon did not give it up. I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?

Aurornis 2y ago
I think your memory is mistaken. Amazon will give up recordings when legally obligated to do so, because that’s the law. They can’t choose to ignore the law. However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive). Here’s a case where the Alexa command was used as part of the case, though it didn’t have recordings of the actual crime: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-jailed-life-voice-recordings-Amazon-device-helped-bring-justice.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
- nashashmi 2y ago
  Try these searches: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=alexa%20murder&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- dboreham 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - r00fus 2y ago
    And anyone he designates.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?

bakugo 2y ago

Related: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-and-alexa-plus

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Can Prime users instead get a discounted prime without this Alexa stuff? Seems like it should be $20 cheaper per month. In other words Prime shipping should be free.

alok-g 2y ago
I wish producers were required by law to honor such logic. Only then the true pricing of things will appear.

wiremine 2y ago

I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism. My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation. If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.

bhhaskin 2y ago
The big issue with LLM is how can you trust the information it gives you? It could be flat out making all or some of it up.
- kahmeal 2y ago
  I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.
  - reaperducer 2y ago
    It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. And yet people still drive into rivers because Google Maps tells them to. Never underestimate the power of "computers are never wrong."
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      How many times has that happened? Those cases make the headlines, but it’s so rare that, in my opinion, they can be disregarded. Nothing is perfect, just assess your risks and tolerance to error. That’s subjective, so one acts accordingly.

dandsupernig 2y ago

[flagged]

lostmsu 2y ago

How can I try it? My Prime expires in 3 days.

bookofjoe 2y ago

The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

lurking_swe 2y ago
it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway. i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…

taeric 2y ago

I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree. Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed. To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.

cruffle_duffle 2y ago
If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.
- taeric 2y ago
  This could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.
  - criddell 2y ago
    When I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?". It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.
- mgiampapa 2y ago
  You can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1. This took about 5 minutes to setup.

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

> and free with Prime Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.

brookst 2y ago
Pricing for Prime is totally disconnected from costs. They will price at whatever maximizes p*q.
- Exoristos 2y ago
  Which is impacted by perceived value:cost by customers.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Yep — if consumers see AI as added value they’ll pay more. But practically nobody will base their willingness to pay on guesses about Amazon’s COGS. The new AI feature could be pure excess capacity and cost Amazon nothing, or it could cost Amazon $1000/user/month, and nobody will know or care.
NegativeLatency 2y ago
Cancelled mine recently, saved hundreds already by not buying dumb stuff I don't actually need on there.

rabuse 2y ago

Who actually wants this garbage?

brookst 2y ago
Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about electronic music.
- dboreham 2y ago
  tbf grandpa was listening to Kraftwerk...
  - brookst 2y ago
    No, I was. But grandpa did not approve at all. Newfangled machines making pure noises, that’s not real music, the whole thing.

mkayle 2y ago

My main request is to add the functionality to inquire about the progress of running tasks, such as checking the time remaining on a timer.

Arthanos 2y ago

>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market. Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.

scarface_74 2y ago
Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.
- MattJ100 2y ago
  I don't think you can say that is the problem. It may have exacerbated the issue, but problems exist when summarising full news content too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko
- rs186 2y ago
  Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.
Marsymars 2y ago
SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're targeting.

system7rocks 2y ago

I think this is an interesting curiosity, but I am a little worn out on every company announcing AI as some kind of major upgrade. Alexa has already been sort of a waning product, and in some ways, it was already kind of cute since you could play goofy games. But cute gets old. With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?

cyberax 2y ago

I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer. I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Home Assistant has been doing it for a while. All it takes is to add OpenAI or Anthropic integration, plug your API key, and you have a better voice assistant than anything Google, Amazon and Apple have offered so far.

phillipcarter 2y ago

I'll take "smart speaker that actually understands the music I want to play" first, then we can get into scheduling appointments to fix my oven.

yuehhangalt 2y ago

I had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive. Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information. It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.

criddell 2y ago
> I increasingly want less of it I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit. Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.

modeless 2y ago

The video here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years. The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?

_xerces_ 2y ago
Prime customers tend to buy more stuff from Amazon, so they get you that way maybe.

gwbas1c 2y ago

You know what I really want? Rosie, from the Jetsons. I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.

kridsdale1 2y ago
It’s been pretty shocking that a Turing-test sentience at genius level was easier technology to make than a consumer level robot with 1950s level design expectations that stupidly picks up and moves objects. It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.

ramon156 2y ago

Hate these kind of claims where they go "Alexa is sooo good at doing X, omggg". I don't care, show me that it works.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wayeq 2y ago

> She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay really advertising to the hackernews crowd with this line

wetpaws 2y ago

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stacktrust 2y ago

> Identify or find objects with Alexa+.. use the camera on Echo Show devices to identify objects and get help with daily tasks. For example, reorder pantry items by showing them to the new Alexa, ask Alexa to identify a type of plant and its care instructions and set reminders for when it needs to get watered, or get fashion or décor ideas. This new feature is particularly game changing for people who are blind or have low vision This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.0/ios/18.0 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images? It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden. Alexa use cases for elderly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989 In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control, https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/ > Fully open software, firmware, and hardware.. Grove port for connecting sensors and a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting external speakers

haddonist 2y ago
> In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums

twitchard 2y ago

Crazy how many voice AI related updates there were this week. Grok voice mode, Alexa+, Hume OCTAVE, Elevenlabs Scribe SST... big day for Voice AI!

insane_dreamer 2y ago

So will the next major Alexa release be Alexa++ ?

SteveJS 2y ago

I really did like that kitchen timer. This seems like it would have been pretty good. However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv. The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping. I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon. I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.

j_timberlake 2y ago

Hot take: If AI ever gets smart enough to actually do these activities well, the USA government will decide AI is a "national security risk" and not allow companies to sell access to it. Terrorists and drug cartels might use it! Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.

bluesounddirect 2y ago

i may box all of mine up and "return" them back to mr bozos . i use them for glorified alarm clocks that can start a internet radio stream . i dont need anything else . i wonder if new alexa will still tell me how much protein is in a 42 inch flat screen tv !