Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Besides [a bunch of useful stuff], Alexa is useless! Therefore it's a gimmick." I have an Echo Dot which I use almost exclusively for a few static purposes: the weather, setting alarms, turning my lights on and off, and asking what time it is. I also ask it basic questions like whether various sports teams won or what time they're playing, which it also answers well. Not sure why you think it is useless just because…
The point is that these few useful things can be all achieved much cheaper with much greater ergonomics. > the weather, setting alarms, (...) and asking what time it is. You can do that on your phone. Even assuming you wanted it hands-free, it doesn't justify an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud . We had the tech to do this level of voice recognition reliably in the 2000s. > It allows me to turn off the…
This is a dishonest characterization of how every smart speaker in existence works. There is no continuous stream as this statement implies.
There is a continuous buffer of a couple of seconds for the device to locally catch a wake word. (You can verify this by disabling the device's internet connectivity - it will still catch the wake word and speak an apologetic message about not being able to connect). Also, changing the wake word requires a full restart, which says "firmware" to me.
After the wake word is spoken, that buffer and anything immediately after it is what gets sent up to the cloud for voice recognition.
The buffer serves a purpose in that it prevents an awkward pause between the wake word and the action reqeusted. (So you get to do "Alexa, turn on the lights" rather than "Alexa? bong Turn on the lights.")
The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have.
I'd say it beats the alternative from a pure functionality standpoint.