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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

#241

Post by bsenftner »

barrkel wrote: post #179
fermienrico wrote: post #7

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…

I trust Amazon more than Google, though; I both expect products to be less aggressively discontinued, and data collection to be less rapacious with Amazon. Amazon also have a known and reasonably moral means of making money. Advertising OTOH is mass manipulation. And Google have too much other information on me especially from search, I need to keep things distributed. I'm one of the people who bought my partner a Do…

Trusting a corporation, any corporation, is a bad idea. There is nothing there to trust; any ethical behavior by a corporation is a calculated behavior, executed purely for the maximization of profits. Hell, working for a corporation should be viewed as a calculated behavior, as one is working for an entity with a legally mandated anti-human profit incentive. Speaking as a person with a graduate degree in economics, we're on a bad path that needs to be revised soon, or Fermi's Paradox of technological destruction will be our fate.

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

#242

Post by coolso »

endorphone wrote: post #185
touristtam wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General public has probably been sold on the potential & novelty of the device, without realizing how little there is to it (feature wise). It feels like it is similar to VR and personal drones; it sounds exiting, but it isn't that practical in everyday setting to replace other activities, and setting it up can feel tedious.

>General public has probably been sold on the potential & novelty of the device, without realizing how little there is to it (feature wise). There is an outrageous amount to it, feature wise. Voice is the holy grail for a pretty large amount of the public, and it is finally there. The setup is surprisingly unintuitive (even the simple step to connect to a specific wifi network is beyond many users, and it is notable…

> but I'm sure the techie niece will do it for most.

For most it would probably instead be a techie nephew. Very cool that you (I’m assuming) have a techie niece though! Always great to see that sort of thing.

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

#243

Post by dilap »

tjoff wrote: post #127
dilap wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have, and it's pretty funny. We quickly adapted to just saying "A." or "her". Probably in a few years this whole debate topic will seem quant, as devices will be much at figuring out when we're addressing them than the primitive idea of a wake-word. :-)

You're assuming that these devices have anything to offer even if they worked.

they do! for me, anyway.

i bought an echo dot on a whim, since it's so cheap, assuming it'd be fun to play with, but not very useful.

to my surprise, it's really handy. setting timers, adding food to the shopping list, and playing music are all super-convenient with alexa. turning lights on and off with her is fun too, although i admit, it was already a fairly easy task to do using a conventional, physical switch. :-)

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

afpx wrote: post #200
b4lancesh33t wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of my closest 100 friends and family bought either product How do you know that?

Because I’m close to them. Maybe 100 is a slight overestimate. But, it isn’t all that many, is it? There are 30 people just within 0.5 miles that I visit regularly. Edit: I was totally wrong. I did an informal survey, and several people said they did have them. I just never saw them use them. Just seeing what I want to see ...

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by ghaff »

tmm wrote: post #181
neves wrote: post #4

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

I use it primarily to control lights and my thermostat. In theory I can use it to control my entertainment system, but that seems less convenient than an app on my phone. The lighting control is great. I see a lot of people saying a physical button or switch is better, but voice control is a button that is always exactly where you are. I live in an older house which with the exception of the kitchen and bathroom is l…

>I live in an older house which with the exception of the kitchen and bathroom is lit entirely with tabletop lamps. Adding modern recessed lighting with convenient switches would be a major undertaking. Installing a bunch of Insteon lamp controllers took 15 minutes and pairing with Alexa was pretty simple.

This is one use case for lighting IoT that seems genuinely useful to me. Most of my house lighting has been upgraded over the years as part of bigger renovation projects but I had a bunch of X-10 gear at one point to handle the various lights that weren't controlled by wall switches. If current smarthome gear had been available then it would have been very useful.

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

#246

Post by foobarian »

sigi45 wrote: post #217
bamboozled wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might I suggest some simple reasons for the increase in sales for the Dot? * Novelty value, it's a fun idea. It looks cool to buy an "edgy" product for your nephew / niece etc. * The marketing team worked hard to direct prime customers to buy one for their family / friends as gifts. * People are out of ideas and it's something new, novel and affordable. I really don't think people put much thought into presents in ge…

Easy to get in and already usefull. My wife didn't like the idea of having a microphone in our rooms, now she asked me if i don't want to buy another one. And yeah it is only used for timer, reminder, light on/off and music. I love it too.

I didn't like the idea of my 4 year old having an easy way out of learning to read/write. I disable all voice recognition on our tablets/phones too. Next birthday it will be C64 time. :-)

(Edit P.S.) Don't get me started on Unix REPLs suitable for young kids. A simple for loop still reads best in BASIC.

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

#248

Post by wmeredith »

notahacker wrote: post #159
bamboozled wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might I suggest some simple reasons for the increase in sales for the Dot? * Novelty value, it's a fun idea. It looks cool to buy an "edgy" product for your nephew / niece etc. * The marketing team worked hard to direct prime customers to buy one for their family / friends as gifts. * People are out of ideas and it's something new, novel and affordable. I really don't think people put much thought into presents in ge…

The aggressive price cuts in competition with Google also put it at the perfect price for "novelty electronic good that may or may not be useful" (We bought one for a pretty tech savvy 89 year old who we thought might actually get practical benefits from IoT plugs as well as enjoy the novelty value of something that interacts vaguely like a human since he doesn't go out so much these days. But that's something of an…

> But that's something of an edge case

The Baby Boomers are retiring in droves right now. It's becoming less and less so (in the USA).

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

#249

Post by steveeq1 »

foobarian wrote: post #246
sigi45 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to get in and already usefull. My wife didn't like the idea of having a microphone in our rooms, now she asked me if i don't want to buy another one. And yeah it is only used for timer, reminder, light on/off and music. I love it too.

I didn't like the idea of my 4 year old having an easy way out of learning to read/write. I disable all voice recognition on our tablets/phones too. Next birthday it will be C64 time. :-) (Edit P.S.) Don't get me started on Unix REPLs suitable for young kids. A simple for loop still reads best in BASIC.

Or Scratch.

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

#250

Post by francisofascii »

throwaway9980 wrote: post #234
toyg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think millions of people bought an Echo Dot or a Google Home? Duh, because this has been the holy grail of personal computers since forever: you ask and computers do, no questions asked, no training, nothing. It's having servants without the pesky societal thing. In any scifi story ever there is something like that. It's the first time it really feels like AI dreams are getting real. Interpreting speech…

Servants? Alexa, wash the dishes! Alexa, change my kid’s diaper! Alexa, pickup my kid from school! Alexa, vacuum the living room! Alexa, take out the trash! She can’t help me with any of that. I guess everyday people need to have lower barriers to interacting with computers, but I’m good. I like to read HN the way I would have read the newspaper. I listen to some podcasts the way I would have listened to the radio. B…

Actually, there are a few robotic vacuums that can be controlled with Alexa.
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