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The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

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Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#81
post #31

Google might be ahead in some conversational things, but functionality wise, Alexa is way better. Probably has something to do with being on the market first, but developing a skill is a much better experience than it is with Google (imo). I think that's a big reason why. I've developed a number of skills for some big companies, and I'm fighting Amazon right now about getting my open source one published ( https://gi…

Out of curiosity, what are you fighting Amazon about on this?

(full disclosure: I work on Alexa, but not on the team that handles skills)

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#82
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google literally makes its money from advertising directly keyed on your personal information and searches. Amazon makes money because you buy things from it. Google can't not share your information with advertisers if it wants to survive. Amazon, on the other hand, is extremely protective of private information to the point of defying law enforcement in a murder case ( https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/28/tech/amazon-echo…

The advertisers don't get my life, they get the ability to insert their ad into my life based on my life. I've never understood personally how targeted advertising is really anyone violating my privacy (in terms of how I practically use the term). We have the technical know-how here - we know it's not Jim at Coke deciding to place an ad into my life personally because I just made a phone call that he was listening to…

You might want to read up on PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

I'll give you a hint: First Ctrl+F "Google", then Ctrl+F "Amazon"

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it different though? Publishing YouTube app on Windows Phone requires Google to put extra effort into developing an app for a completely new platform which I assume requires lot of engineering effort. Selling Chromecast on Amazon probably does not cost Amazon any extra engineering effort. So, I do not believe that the two situations are equivalent.

Microsoft put out their own YouTube app, no development needed from Google. Google then blocked that app: https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/15/4624706/google-blocks-win...

Sure, since Microsoft didn’t show any ads for google. I think Microsoft might be pissed if google started hosting free copies of their software on their servers.

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#84
post #31

Google might be ahead in some conversational things, but functionality wise, Alexa is way better. Probably has something to do with being on the market first, but developing a skill is a much better experience than it is with Google (imo). I think that's a big reason why. I've developed a number of skills for some big companies, and I'm fighting Amazon right now about getting my open source one published ( https://gi…

Out of curiosity, what are you fighting Amazon about on this? (full disclosure: I work on Alexa, but not on the team that handles skills)

According to the 'feedback' I received when I submitted the skill, they won't publish anything that enables or supports piracy. Seems they have a pretty negative view of Kodi.

I've responded and asked to have the issue escalated and posted on the dev forums, but the support is pretty sad, despite the otherwise good documentation and developer experience on the platform.

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#85
post #30

Who could imagine that people would install telescreens voluntarily, and pay for the privilege?

I think pretty much every 1970's era visionary foresaw video phones in everyone's home

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/bc/c9/70bcc9ab4c2ab6e22e29...

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#86
post #4

Ok, it is cheap. It is also cool. But does the techies here find it really useful? If so, why?

I don't find it useful at all. The things it's good at (timer, lights, playing music, etc) are not hard to do to begin with.

They aren't that hard if you have an interface nearby to do it - my phone usually sits upstairs in my bedroom after I come home from work, so the Echo is a convenient voice interface to do exactly that set of things (timer, lights, playing music, etc). One thing it's super convenient for is when I'm upstairs and going to bed and I realize that I left the lights on downstairs, I can just call down "Alexa, turn off downstairs lights" -- it beats getting my glasses and opening up the app that controls my lights.

One thing I don't find it useful for is what Amazon most want me to use it for -- to buy things. I rarely buy the same thing twice from Amazon, so I can't just say "Alexa, buy more toilet paper" -- when I shop, I generally want to look at other options, compare different retailers, read reviews, etc... which is hard to do with a pure voice interface.

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#87

Google is miles ahead in terms of a conversational assistant. There is a lot of friction in using voice activated services. If I have a choice of typing "Weather in XXXXX zip" in the address bar vs. asking an assistant, I choose the former. Therefore, every time I use anything else but Google, I am afraid it won't recognize my command and I immediately feel like throwing that thing out of the window. I need to be 100…

"Alexa, what's the weather?" This isn't too difficult. I know Google is well off in this space but Alexa is pretty damn good too.

"Alexa, what's the weather?" It proceeds to tell me the weather for a state over.

"Alexa, set my location to XXXXX." It can't do that.

Actually getting correct location details requires downloading a separate smart phone application and digging through its menus to figure out how to set the location for each individual Alexa device.

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#88

Google is miles ahead in terms of a conversational assistant. There is a lot of friction in using voice activated services. If I have a choice of typing "Weather in XXXXX zip" in the address bar vs. asking an assistant, I choose the former. Therefore, every time I use anything else but Google, I am afraid it won't recognize my command and I immediately feel like throwing that thing out of the window. I need to be 100…

This sounds a bit extreme: >I need to be 100% sure that I will get a return on my time invested when it comes to searching or asking for information

Re: The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on Amazon this holiday season

#90
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advertisers don't get my life, they get the ability to insert their ad into my life based on my life. I've never understood personally how targeted advertising is really anyone violating my privacy (in terms of how I practically use the term). We have the technical know-how here - we know it's not Jim at Coke deciding to place an ad into my life personally because I just made a phone call that he was listening to…

You might want to read up on PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) I'll give you a hint: First Ctrl+F "Google", then Ctrl+F "Amazon"

I'm aware of PRISM, though I misremembered that Amazon was involved too.

Still, I'd argue they are absent because they store little of the things the NSA cared for at the time, reference slide 3:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

Amazon at the time didn't have widely used social media, personal photo or video storage, person to person chat, email, etc. The basic info input by people was already collected via all the other companies. What does the NSA really gain from the Amazon dataset at the time?

I bet if Alexa was out and the NSA wanted data from these devices, however they got the rest to agree would have applied to Amazon. I'm inclined to believe it was pretty unavoidable extortion. That said, I hope that Apple / Google / Amazon can temper assistant always on recording by not doing it, let alone sending to a server. If they don't have the data it's hard to turn over when extorted.

Still, I concede my NSA standard looks to be failed by Google. That said, Google or Alexa, they have it all anyways, and I don't believe for a second that if the government decides to use these types of devices to collect voice data that they all won't take the same stance, whatever it may be. At that point, I'll be unplugging whatever one I have any serious conversations. Heck, I already do that to be safe now.

I'd still point to the industry breadth of Amazon as a concern. Though, these posts illustrate pretty well that privacy is a lost cause for most cases, or at least one technologically agnostic within our current major choices. Noted in case the Alexa / Amazon ecosystem improves.

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