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Amazon Echo Show

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Re: Amazon Echo Show

#441

Post by kalleboo »

Trd wrote: post #203
tyingq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can upload your own mp3s to Amazon Music and play them from the Echo. No cost until you go past 250 songs. http://www.voicedesigned.com/content/how-play-your-mp3s-echo...

The problem is not the availability of the music but Alexa's ability to understand names. If I tell an Echo to play, say, Zuntata, is it going to work? if I tell it japanese band names despite the overall language I speak being English or French, what will happen? Most voice assistants choke when you speak foreign-y names and can only understand them if you set the language of the device to the right language. A voic…

Yeah I've resigned to not being able to use voice assistants since I use 3 different languages on a daily basis.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#442

Post by aphextron »

sandov wrote: post #433
aphextron wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Well. We have smart phones, which are essentially the same, but portable.

>We have smart phones, which are essentially the same, but portable.

Yeah, I had that realization as I was typing this. I think the crucial difference here though is that having a powerful computer with GPS and an internet connection in my pocket is a life changing technology that empowers me as an individual. These new products from Amazon are nothing but another vector for collecting your personal information disguised as a convenience. It's like those "As seen on TV" products. Useless nonsense that solves a specific problem already covered by more general tools.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#443

Post by toomuchtodo »

conradev wrote: post #409
haikuginger wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This works OK in the Apple world, but only because they hack it by routing SMS through your phone. Actually, not necessarily. At least with my provider (AT&T), I can set up my Mac as a validated device for WiFi calling, so I can do SMS and actual phone calls without using the iPhone as a relay.

Yes, for those looking for more details, AT&T calls it NumberSync: https://www.att.com/shop/wireless/features/numbersync.html

T-Mobile supports this as well.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#444

Post by ericd »

curun1r wrote: post #133
mikeash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…

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…

We ran our own mail server, didn't find it very difficult. If you run it off of IP blocks that have been abused in the past, might be harder.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#445

Post by ericd »

curun1r wrote: post #133
mikeash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…

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…

We ran our own mail server, didn't find it very difficult. If you run it off of IP blocks that have been abused in the past, might be harder.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#446

Post by MurMan »

Spoom wrote: post #365
mikeash wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…

That is supposed to be what WebRTC is for. But major companies with their own motives are running the the major video chat solutions.

WebRTC defines how the browser supports audio/video/chat endpoints. A practical video calling system needs servers to manage firewall traversal, a directory of users, and ways to admin the system.

Who's going to provide that at no cost?

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#447

Post by karthkk »

thinkling wrote: post #356
mholmes680 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. Now, one more thing: Echo Car. I dunno why, i just want Alexa in my car. She's already in 4 rooms in my house (no wait, 5 including Fire Stick? 7 including the Kindles?), and in my pocket.

A bit off-topic, but: is Amazon the only company with substantial machine learning talent that doesn't seem to be working on a self-driving car? Are the people who would be doing that busy developing Amazon's drones?

I would not be surprised if they are working on consumer robots too. They are probably way ahead already in their deployment of warehouse robots.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#448

Post by a2decrow »

criddell wrote: post #426
a2decrow wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still a few sane people left that won't deliberately plant a surveillance device in their homes.

I get the sentiment, but I'm asking why. There's clearly some utility to the device, right? It has some value to some people. What negative outcomes would you expect will happen due to them having that device in their homes? What percentage of Echo owners do you think will end up with regrets about installing the device?

Seeing how 2(?) billion people are using Facebook, it's obvious that most people either don't care or don't understand the implications behind giving away their privacy.

The Echo is a neatly packaged surveillance device that's disguised as a.. What are these things called? Voice assistants?

As with pretty much every IoT device, these things can be broken into by malicious actors and then they get to listen in too. Next thing on the list is that Amazon can do whatever it wants with those recordings and I highly doubt they're only listening in after you mention certain keywords. More likely that's just the trigger to flip the "answer back" switch. And last but not least we should not forget about the surveillance agencies, who will get unrestricted access to this one way or another.

In the grand way of things, this is just another method people are letting themselves being monitored. Just another small step towards total authoritarian control by mega-corporations and dictators. We have to step up and stop this from happening while we still can, or else there won't be any privacy left for anyone of us and the next generation will just grow up with it "being normal".

And before you ask, no, I don't have a smart phone. I have a very dumb phone that I can only use to call someone with or get called myself and more often than not I don't carry it around with me.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#449

Post by brazzledazzle »

priitmaxx wrote: post #277
bhauer wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience here. No special setup, no SPF or DKIM, and yet no particular challenge in sending e-mail. I feel the challenges of operating a mail server are often exaggerated. But then, I don't tend to send spam.

Wow, I am surprised. I recently had to migrate my mailserver from my datacenter to the cloud. I lost the original IP address as a result. The new IP address got flagged immediately on gmail and everywhere else. I setup SPF and DKIM, that seems to fix the issues with the big guys. However on comcast and others I still got throttled for quite a bit. i had to request csi.cloudmark.com to unblock the ip..

It was a long time ago so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but if I remember correctly it was fairly straightforward. It was right before and as SPF really became worth doing. The thing that would get a lot of my customers running their own mail was the PTR not matching the name presented by the mail server and/or that name not being listed in the MX records for the domain it was relaying mail for. I did have to deal with the occasional IP that had been blacklisted on RBLs and that could be a pain the ass and typically the first order of business was actually blocking outbound SMTP except from their mail server.

Those were the days that I don't miss.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#450

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

alxvio wrote: post #197
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can do more things You answered your own question. Not every device used in a home (remote control, light switch, thermostat) needs to be replaced with a full tablet computer, even if it could be.

Who would want this Amazon product for every light switch, remote control, and thermostat? No, most buyers will probably just buy one for a household. In that case, I agree that a regular tablet would suffice.

My point was that you have a remote control already; you don't use a tablet instead of that, just for use as a remote control. In a similar way, a tablet might be overkill for a 'home assistant', and the Amazon Echo seems designed to address that.
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