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Alexa+

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Re: Alexa+

#121

Post by sixothree »

crooked-v wrote: post #96
dlcarrier wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It'…

A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.

Re: Alexa+

#122

Post by 0898 »

calamity_elf wrote: post #115
Dnguyen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...

then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.

This is what’s happening to us.

Re: Alexa+

#123

Post by taeric »

I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality.

This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.

Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.

To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.

Re: Alexa+

#124

Post by crazygringo »

hbosch wrote: post #94
1shooner wrote: post #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 purpo…

>On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface. On a bus or plane, no, absolutely not. In the kitchen of a busy household, yes, definitely.

Yup. Or rewinding your podcast or skipping to the next music track in the shower.

Asking what the name of the artist is while running with earbuds.

And so forth. We have different interfaces to adapt to the outputs we have available at the moment...

Re: Alexa+

#125

Post by cruffle_duffle »

taeric wrote: post #123

I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality. This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that w…

If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.

Re: Alexa+

#126

Post by taeric »

pflenker wrote: post #97
doctoboggan wrote: post #6

I 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.

Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If…

The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?

Re: Alexa+

#127

Post by mikestew »

ceejayoz wrote: post #21
1shooner wrote: post #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 purpo…

"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience. Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneab…

Every time I hear that, I think “you mean like I’ve been doing for, what, the last five years?” How does Siri not know that I know this already? Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?

Re: Alexa+

#128

Post by taeric »

dlcarrier wrote: post #13
doctoboggan wrote: post #6

I 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.

Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.

Re: Alexa+

#129

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

> and free with Prime

Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.

Re: Alexa+

#130

Post by cruffle_duffle »

sixothree wrote: post #121
crooked-v wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It'…

A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.

Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
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