Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alexa+

aboutamazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 355 posts

Re: Alexa+

#241

Post by Aurornis »

richwater wrote: post #136
Aurornis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you. Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them. They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”

Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.

Ad impressions are orders of magnitude less profitable than getting someone to buy something.

It wouldn’t be net positive at all to hide products you want in order to get a fraction of a penny from ad impressions.

This is the type of conspiracy theory that immediately falls apart if you think about the numbers at all.

Re: Alexa+

#242

Post by criddell »

taeric wrote: post #170
cruffle_duffle wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.

When I would ask my echo to turn my reading light off it would respond with something like I don't know about a device with that name. The natural follow-up question is "what devices do you know about?".

It always drove me crazy that it couldn't answer basic and obvious questions like that.

Re: Alexa+

#243

Post by sbdbdheahhh »

Arthanos wrote: post #152

>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…

[dead]

Re: Alexa+

#244

Post by rs186 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #160
Arthanos wrote: post #152

>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…

Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.

Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.

Re: Alexa+

#245

Post by ge96 »

nozzlegear wrote: post #227
ge96 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? 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 perso…

I had hoped Linux phones could step in but unpaid open source experience is not great eg. cameras that don't work

I suppose I'm not a true believer by not getting in there and helping write the drivers myself (also interesting about proprietary modem blobs)

Re: Alexa+

#246

Post by empath75 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #116
hbosch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more pleasurable!

I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.

I've played around with chatgpt telling stories to my kids, but they don't like it that much. The stories aren't very good, and they're trite and predictable -- even with 4o. It's really only interesting to them at all because it's choose your own adventure.

Re: Alexa+

#248

Post by sbdbdheahhh »

miohtama wrote: post #213
esafak wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet the people involved in the decision to bork it up don't even use the product. Management by OKRs. The numbers look good, ship it!

Customer satisfaction is not a number Google counts

Sometimes when I was bored in meetings I would ask how what we were discussing would benefit users. It almost always resulted in uncomfortable silence, then some half-assed attempt to paper over the real answer (no benefit), and proceeding back to enshittifying.

Truly soul crushing environment, but it was amusing.

Re: Alexa+

#249

Post by taeric »

massysett wrote: post #226
taeric wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just buy a timer. Amazon has plenty of them, or if you want fancy, get the Extra Big And Loud Timer. 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.

"Hands free" is sorta the point? I already have several things, including the oven, that have buttons to do this sort of thing. I don't use those because I have my hands occupied.

I get that not everyone would want this. I'm ok with that.

Re: Alexa+

#250

Post by doctoboggan »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #144
doctoboggan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers". I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly inpu…

May I ask you what makes you so sure that it's an LLM-based search - and not any other kind of NLP search tech?

They said so in a press release:

https://www.instacart.com/company/updates/bringing-inspirati...

> Ask Instacart leverages the language understanding capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Post reply on HN