221–230 of 355 posts
The video here [ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5 ] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years. The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?
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We build the most sophisticated AI in the world to open Spotify app instead of pressing Play on a phone
Exactly. People are acting like putting some music on is so damn hard, and that it's critical that we spend 100% of our time listening to it. OMG if I can't control my music in the shower I'll literally melt.
>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a…
On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
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> Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ? Essentially, yes - for various privacy/marketing/whatever reasons what information Siri collects is heavily anonymized and can't be tied back to you.
Which is really stupid, because this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't sending that data back to themselves in the first place. They found that good UX is incompatible with telemetry, so they chose to... degrade the UX.
>Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene. This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a…
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I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.
I don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.
https://www.thermoworks.com/extra-big-loud/
A house guest sneered at the several timers in my kitchen and asked why I don’t use my phone. I like having timers assigned to the kitchen.
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What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device? edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is" movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interest…
To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen.
> edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers.
> movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
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would be nicer if there was a cheaper / simpler alternative (offline voice recognition, just timers and clock, possibly weather) but it's nice to use your voice so you don't contaminate your phone. (preparing chicken and such) the kitchen is pretty much the only use-case for voice assistants imo.
If all you really need is a timer, you can just use a digital watch. I don't worry about getting mine dirty because I just wash the watch when I watch my hands.
you don't always have hands free to fiddle with a watch.
more often than not, both hands are doing something, and setting a timer is... timely.
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I can't believe that in 2025 BestBuy is my go to for electronics. Wild times.
I'm so horrifically disappointed every time I go in there. Their monitor selection is all super low-end trash, as is most of their electronics they sell (TVs, stereos, computers etc). You're lucky if they have an actual PC component in the store, there are bare shelves everywhere. They don't even offer a good selection of phones, accessories or memory cards. It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out…
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
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…
I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.