I hear the early beta testers kept getting sex tips... It was even worse when their partner was named Alexa.
Amazon Echo
31–40 of 746 posts
Re: Amazon Echo
#32> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
Yes. Seeing how big Amazon has come with its web services, cloud storage etc and now with technology like this, I wonder why we haven't read about Amazon in any of the Snowden leaks. Or have I missed something?
Re: Amazon Echo
#33> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
I'd still be interested, if and only if, the "wake word" processing is done locally and it THEN sends the recording that occurred after the wake word up to the cloud. If it is the case that even the wake word processing is done in the cloud, non-starter for all the reasons you state.
Re: Amazon Echo
#34[deleted]
Because they are good at convincing their parents to buy stuff?
Re: Amazon Echo
#35So the product is named "Echo" but you ask it questions by calling it "Alexa"? That's just odd.
Strange choice for a wake-up word, given that it's a person's name.
It's likely the easiest applicable trademark Amazon had available, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Internet .
Re: Amazon Echo
#36> With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what." It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
Absolute first thought was along similar lines. If it did all the processing locally and just fetched results I might be interested. But this? Not so much.
Why are you saying things you don't want the cloud to know about anyway?
Re: Amazon Echo
#37This sounds like the creepiest tech product you could put in your home: an internet-connected microphone that can "hear you from across the room". Love the slick design, but I'll pass.
Being far from an industry expert, it seems to me that Amazon just at least wants to try to get some smart device of their own into your proximity.
Re: Amazon Echo
#38It's great to see Amazon using its huge profits to fund this kind of bleeding edge technology. (Maybe someday engineers will figure out how to squeeze this functionality into handheld devices.)
Amazon (in)famously has lots of revenue, but weak profits.
Not an accountant, but I believe Amazon's "weak" profits are due to they reinvesting their profits back into the business, rather than accumulating cash.
Re: Amazon Echo
#39That was an incredibly painful video to watch, what's wrong with just demonstrating the product's features in home environments? Why do we need these ads that make it seem like this "is a real conversation happening in a family home".
Re: Amazon Echo
#40Nice, but the added "convenience" isn't worth the notion that everything in my house is being recorded and stored somewhere.