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?
Alexa+
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Re: Alexa+
#12> 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…
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.
Re: Alexa+
#13I 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.
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.
Re: Alexa+
#14The 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.
Anchoring
Re: Alexa+
#15The 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.
Or Prime's getting another price increase.
Re: Alexa+
#16Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?
Re: Alexa+
#17>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.
Re: Alexa+
#18Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?
"We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period."
Re: Alexa+
#19Finally 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 .
I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone spoken ones.
Re: Alexa+
#20>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 purpo…
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
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-butt...