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

Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 127 posts

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#51

Post by bodge5000 »

wirthjason wrote: post #13

I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.

I remember downloading a digital clock widget for my ipad (for some reason the only native clock widget is analog), and then finding to use it they wanted £5 a month.

iirc, it all started with DarkSky, which was very reasonable, something like £1 a year, which made subscriptions for more "basic" apps acceptable, and from there its just got worse.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#52

Post by mdp2021 »

Semaphor wrote: post #32
mdp2021 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having to learn to code At HN?! > when your hands are full One would never be empty handed while cooking?!

I can code, and I already have a tablet in the kitchen as a recipe book. But my hands are often either dirty, or in nitrile gloves, both make using the tablet either awkward or impossible. My workflow is to open the recipe I want, and then not touch the tablet until I’m done. Not to mention that voice enables me to do this while also doing something else with my hands, like cutting veggies.

Android? We should have libraries for voice command (probably around android.speech ). I checked once because I would like to be able to voice control a GPS and mapping system while driving. If you wanted to voice control the application, that would be surely much more challenging, yet possibly interesting and exportable to other future needs.

This given, for the specific needs as you presented them I would have taken an old tablet, coded the feats you needed (timer, converter etc) in a single interface, fixed it in some most appropriate part of the kitchen for that use, and covered it with some plastic wrap film (I think standard PVC should be capacitive display friendly) in order to keep electronics and mess separate.

Of course, if you are more comfortable with the assistant, that is anyone's prerogative. Just reasoning.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#53

Post by jsjohnst »

ghaff wrote: post #50
jsjohnst wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems If you want to make recipes based on imperial measurements, YES, and I’d also say the vast majority of people here would agree with me. Having a full set of imperial kitchen measuring cups costs less than any meal you are bothering to prepare and takes up less kitchen space than a single salad bowl. For your follow up edit: > to which yo…

For that matter, my measuring cups have both imperial and metric units and my digital scale handles both as well. Seems far more foolproof than doing a lot of unit conversions.

Yup. Like I don’t even get the conversion argument at all. “1 cup of flour weighs 125g”. Except when the recipe was using something other than all purpose flour. I’ve had Alexa incorrectly hear the specifics necessary to answer those type questions too many times to ever trust it, let alone to take the preposterous stance that Alexa is the only way to solve the problem.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#54

Post by dr_dshiv »

ghaff wrote: post #11
feintruled wrote: post #6

I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal, though it's funny. It was only a £1.99 a month and there was a 7-day free trial anyway. Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation. I think the issue it shows is how you can't trust voice control for anything important. It's just a bad interface for buying stuff particularly. If I am buying some dog food, I search dog food, glance over the options,…

Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK. But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss. Voice assistants have g…

Yeah, but otter is friggin awesome. Could it have more commands in it? Like “email those items to me” or “make a to do list”

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#55

Post by mongol »

bodge5000 wrote: post #51
wirthjason wrote: post #13

I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.

I remember downloading a digital clock widget for my ipad (for some reason the only native clock widget is analog), and then finding to use it they wanted £5 a month. iirc, it all started with DarkSky, which was very reasonable, something like £1 a year, which made subscriptions for more "basic" apps acceptable, and from there its just got worse.

Was that before or after the "I am rich" app? It cost something like 10000 USD I recall.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#56

Post by onion2k »

mdp2021 wrote: post #26
scrollaway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because nothing screams like "great UX" and "QOL" like a tablet in a greasy kitchen you can't operate when your hands are full, and having to learn to code in order to use a timer.

> having to learn to code At HN?! > when your hands are full One would never be empty handed while cooking?!

At HN?!

HN is a diverse bunch. There are lots of non-technical people here. But even ignoring that, there's a hell of a difference between 'knowing to how to code' and 'knowing how to write an Android app'. I've been writing code for 25 years, and I know for certain it'd take me several evenings to be able to make a working Android app, and a lot more to make one I was actually happy with to the point I'd use it.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#57

Post by philistine »

supermatt wrote: post #47
piva00 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> playing an album Only if the album you want is titled in English (or some recognised language and with actual words). I listen to a lot of music that have unpronounceable song and album titles. Hell, even artists, how could I ever tell a voice assistant to play "STRGTHS by SHXCXCHCXSH"? An extreme example but not too far from some of the top 10 recently played stuff on my Spotify: "sch.mefd 2" by Autechre, "JNSN CO…

In many cases it doesn’t matter even if the word is in English. When choosing an audiobook, I’ve had to make some leaps in phonetics to get Alexa to understand certain words in the title.

> Hey Siri, start the last podcast I was listening to in Overcast.

> I can't let you do that, Dave. Overcast has done its best to set up a shortcut, but you need to say exactly or else I'm punishing you with the enunciation of useless web searches.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#58

Post by CrazyStat »

jsjohnst wrote: post #40
Semaphor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often have multiple timers, that gets crowded fast. And even manual timers require me to touch them, while the whole point is that I can set a timer while my hands are full of raw sausage mix or whatever. And my Alexa has no display, so it’s just "Alexa, timer [Name] status" Oh, and a conversion chat is also somewhat horrible, because this one country uses volumetric measurements where the form a product is in chan…

> Oh, and a conversion chat is also somewhat horrible, because this one country uses volumetric measurements where the form a product is in changes how much X of that unit means. If it’s so hard for you, then buy measuring cups in US sizes or stop using US recipes. These are trivially solved problems in a low tech way. You’re like an addict trying desperately to defend why they need a fix. Yeesh!

> buy measuring cups in US sizes

Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit, since (1) the volume of a cup, while officially standardized, is not consistent across the measuring cups you'll find in stores, and (2) the amount (mass) of common ingredients in a cup can vary wildly--50% or more--depending on how densely packed the ingredient is.

A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed. This obviously has serious implications for whatever you're baking.

TL;DR: Don't buy measuring cups.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#59

Post by mdp2021 »

onion2k wrote: post #56
mdp2021 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having to learn to code At HN?! > when your hands are full One would never be empty handed while cooking?!

At HN?! HN is a diverse bunch. There are lots of non-technical people here. But even ignoring that, there's a hell of a difference between 'knowing to how to code' and 'knowing how to write an Android app'. I've been writing code for 25 years, and I know for certain it'd take me several evenings to be able to make a working Android app, and a lot more to make one I was actually happy with to the point I'd use it.

> HN is a diverse bunch. There are lots of non-technical people here. But even ignoring that, there's a hell of a difference between 'knowing to how to code' and 'knowing how to write an Android app'

Absolutely, and absolutely. But if one is keen on QoL boosts, coding remains a foremost helpful skill, and currently coding for mobile devices is a further booster.

> several evenings ... and a lot more

I would suggest that the amount of competence to get you started to the point of applications usable to your satisfaction is probably lower than you seem to suggest (if you are already proficient in Java); and that the amount of blasphemy you could spend against the workings of the available libraries and time lost in code that "should just work" is probably not only in general underestimated, but really in this realm you would meet it a lot in practice.

Re: Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

#60

Post by jsjohnst »

CrazyStat wrote: post #58
jsjohnst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, and a conversion chat is also somewhat horrible, because this one country uses volumetric measurements where the form a product is in changes how much X of that unit means. If it’s so hard for you, then buy measuring cups in US sizes or stop using US recipes. These are trivially solved problems in a low tech way. You’re like an addict trying desperately to defend why they need a fix. Yeesh!

> buy measuring cups in US sizes Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit, since (1) the volume of a cup, while officially standardized, is not consistent across the measuring cups you'll find in stores, and (2) the amount (mass) of common ingredients in a cup can vary wildly--50% or more--depending on how densely packed the ingredient is. A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but i…

> A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed.

I’m not debating if the US method of measurement in recipes is terrible or not (it is!). But taking an imprecise unit of measurement and lossy converting it to another is better (edit for clarity what I meant) each time you cook, while in the middle of cooking!?

Post reply on HN