371–380 of 467 posts
This is more like an iPad with a better Siri. I guess talking to parents, watching child cams are the target audience for this. A device which sits in living room or bed room need not show me CNN in there.
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So people buying Alexa products are delirious or what are you suggesting? Because saying there's no market for them is obviously incorrect.
>Because saying there's no market for them is obviously incorrect. No I'm not saying that at all. Of course people will buy these things. It's just really creepy to me that we've gotten to this point as society where people willingly accept having a webcam and microphone connected to the biggest corporation in the world sitting in their living room, able to monitor anything at any time. People don't realize how much…
People aren't good at preemptively adjusting behaviours if it is beneficial to them in the short term. Just look at saving money or the economics of gym memberships.
Once there are news stories about the privacy costs of using an always-on microphone in your home then people will become wary of purchasing such a device. The conceptual threat will become a real threat.
But in the meantime, as these devices are new and the real life human interest stories of lost privacy are still rare, it's easy for people to look beyond those risks for what they see a significant gain. And not everyone is oblivious to the risks, they just don't care or hide behind the "I've got nothing to hide" fantasy.
Being able to ask a digital assistant questions at anytime is a very useful thing. I would personally love to have such a device if the cost was more accessible (as I don't need it that badly) but the privacy stuff is also a road block for me. But regardless most of the people I know would probably be able to look past that.
That being said, there are a number of cases where products became less popular as the risks became better known and it was harder to look beyond them. And the social pressures is also another factor. Such as having a friend visit who is uncomfortable talking in a room with a listening Alexa - that type of thing could ultimately put downward pressure on the service.
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The instant on feature is generally just a standby mode, which can consume a fairly substantial amount of power. I've also found that disabling the 'instant on' feature of my TV makes it perform much better. When I used the standby mode, apps would occasionally crash or stop responding after a few hours. The only way to get them to work again was to unplug the TV. I never have to unplug the TV now that I've disabled…
TV manufacturers seem to be really averse to just making an awesome display. They have to value add features that open security holes and are so poorly maintained that in a couple years you'll need to buy a new TV.
I think they consider that a feature. For the record, I absolutely agree as a consumer that TVs just need to be awesome display panels with a recent remote and sufficient inputs. But I understand why the manufacturers may not want to buy into that.
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No. I won't install a privacy invasive app (which they all are) just because you have it, never. SMS or nothing if we don't already use something else we'd rather use.
Mobile operators can scan your SMS messages just as Google can scan Gmail (etc.)...
(I believe that operators generally have much tighter regulations and laws governing what they could actually do with that, but regardless - besides the point)
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When I saw this, I actually had the opposite reaction. I remember when I first saw an iPod Nano with the color screen and the scroll wheel that magically scrolled up and down by just moving your finger around it without actually turning a wheel. It seemed like magic. Same thing when I first saw the iPhone/iPod Touch. Apple's products were very carefully designed and only released when they were perfect, and very rare…
My latest gen Apple TV wants to disagree with you. As does my wife's first gen Apple Watch ... both are magical turds IMHO.
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Not to mention they add all those useless post-processing effects that increase latency to the point where it's almost impossible to play games on them. I don't understand why a signal coming in through HDMI signal has 9 milliseconds of lag on my cheap monitor, and 46 seconds on my fairly nice tv. In gaming mode the tv has something like 35 ms of lag. I've seen TVs that have enough input lag that you get noticeable a…
AFAIK most TVs have a "Game" picture mode that will disable post-processing.
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Presumably you only listen to chart-topping american pop and music made by people with common english names? Because so far I've never had any luck whatsoever with anything else.
I literally asked my Google home this morning: "Hey Google, play some Peruvian psychedelic cumbia" and it found exactly what I wanted (using Spotify). For me, these home assistants are the best thing I have bought since my first smartphone.
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FWIW, email only sorta interoperates...try running your own mail server and unless you get all the elements of server reputation exactly right, your email will probably not get delivered to people using the large email providers. Thanks to spammers, we've allowed our open, interoperable standard to be much more closed. And SMS is also frustratingly non-universal. After years of having cell service with one of the lar…
"And SMS is also frustratingly non-universal. After years of having cell service with one of the large providers" .. "Each SMS shortcode is only supported on a provider-by-provider basis." Yes, each provider does support their own short codes, but this is not a great example of SMS being "non-universal" A short code is just "dialling sugar" for {country_code} + {network_code} + {short_code}. Think about it this way:…
Source: used to work with SMS gateways for a living.
That said, short codes are rapidly becoming obsolete since data has become ubiquitous and everything is online now. The only one I ever use is voicemail.
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I got an echo from a company for attending a presentation. I used it a bit, but turned it of permanently after one day I logged in to my router and saw that Echo was generating noticeable amount of traffic even though no one was at home. I think the only way I could try always on device again is if company like Amazon would provide API and I would create the always-on device. In short I want to be in control what is…
Is your internet metered? I'm trying to find what people think is the likely harm to come from Amazon having a microphone in their home.
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TV manufacturers seem to be really averse to just making an awesome display. They have to value add features that open security holes and are so poorly maintained that in a couple years you'll need to buy a new TV.
>so poorly maintained that in a couple years you'll need to buy a new TV. I think they consider that a feature. For the record, I absolutely agree as a consumer that TVs just need to be awesome display panels with a recent remote and sufficient inputs. But I understand why the manufacturers may not want to buy into that.
I grew up with a TV that would immediately turn-on when you pressed the button (you could even hear an audible sound from the TV set), and the cable TV remote (it was separate in the 80s too) could change channels at 4-5 per second (this is when channels surfing was born because they would render so fast).
Vizio has a line of OTA-free displays, but they still have a Linux kernel. This is a good start, but going back to whatever RTOS they use to have would be better.
[0]http://www.lg.com/us/business/commercial-display/displays-tv...