61–70 of 99 posts
Why people are acting surprised about this? To me it has been always more than obvious that whatever you say to any of the internet connected “assistants” will be stored and kept as long as the assistant owning company likes.
Just yet another reminder that GDPR is the bare minimum for something like internet to be tolerable.
I can’t believe that people actually pay for these things... Alexa has always seemed like a gimmick to me. I have an Ecobee smart thermostat that has integrated Alexa, which I promptly disabled after installation.
What's wrong with gimmicks? Voice control itself is not a bad idea, the interface to control your technology is something you are born with :)
I can’t believe that people actually pay for these things... Alexa has always seemed like a gimmick to me. I have an Ecobee smart thermostat that has integrated Alexa, which I promptly disabled after installation.
On the 3rd one, voice actually made the smart home easier. To use a smart light bulb you had to unlock your phone, open an app, login, and do your thing. Now I tell my Alexa/Google to do it and it's super easy.
Also the chromecast integration on Google Home is killer "OK google play pandora on TV" or "Play xyz on youtube on tv"
I can’t believe that people actually pay for these things... Alexa has always seemed like a gimmick to me. I have an Ecobee smart thermostat that has integrated Alexa, which I promptly disabled after installation.
I can't believe people actually pay for mobile phones. They seem like a gimmick to me. My rotary phone works just as well.
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Call me crazy but, but paying 30 dollars to lose all of my privacy just so I don't have to get up to turn off the light at night seems like a poor trade. Maybe not useless, but I honestly think you can do better. And a basic raspberry pi could be programmed to cycle through the weather, alarms, lights, time. I guess the crux of doing it that way however, is taking personal responsibility for security, which still see…
I already own other microphones, for example my smartphone, laptop, various earbud/microphone combos, etc. I already trust all those manufacturers not to secretly upload everything I say to the cloud. Why is amazon any different?
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"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…
You use case almost exactly mirrors my own. Even if weather, alarms, time & lights was all it ever did, it has 100% been worth the purchase price. It is genuinely useful to have a no-hands-required timer in the kitchen, and being able to turn off the bedroom lights when I'm done reading for the night without having to reach for a switch is great. I was even pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Alexa's Skyrim. S…
I can’t believe that people actually pay for these things... Alexa has always seemed like a gimmick to me. I have an Ecobee smart thermostat that has integrated Alexa, which I promptly disabled after installation.
I use my voice controls for 3 big reasons daily: 1) Timers (laundry, cooking, etc) 2) Music 3) Smart home stuff On the 3rd one, voice actually made the smart home easier. To use a smart light bulb you had to unlock your phone, open an app, login, and do your thing. Now I tell my Alexa/Google to do it and it's super easy. Also the chromecast integration on Google Home is killer "OK google play pandora on TV" or "Play…
(10% of the time she responds with, "OK, your six a-m alarm is off." I don't know why.)
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I already own other microphones, for example my smartphone, laptop, various earbud/microphone combos, etc. I already trust all those manufacturers not to secretly upload everything I say to the cloud. Why is amazon any different?
Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud, and saves it for undisclosed amount of time, and has the ability to link those recordings to your account and the motivation to exploit it for business purposes? Not to mention possible data breaches in case that data is not perfectly secured.
What evidence do you have of this?
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> Thanks to the sacrifice of these clueless users (or at least a good part of them are) the era of offline assistants is near looking at what Google has shown recently. I think I'm being clueless, but I can't figure out what this sentence means. Is there a typo in it?
I was referring, in a convolute way, to the fact that all the data collected have been/will be used to train the models that will allow offline voice recognition (like the one google has shown at i/o last week).