581–590 of 871 posts
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Which correlates to 10% and 100%. I want for example 15%, which works with the buttons.
I thought each button press on the volume buttons corresponded to + or -10%? I always thought Alexa's volume only had 10 states (11 counting zero) regardless of buttons or voice commands? Maybe it depends on the device, I have the spherical echo.
Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
If it's not doing what you want, you can remap any arbitrary voice command to a precise Volume setting in 1% increments, via a custom Routine.
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It'd not even that I care much about small deviations--I just don't trust that something really crazy won't happen if I put it on autopilot. If I walk into Walmart and grab a big armful of Bounty I'm fairly confident things will be fine.
I'm in the process of moving. I thought maybe I'd give Prime Day a try and send some soaps ahead to my new place. In my last apartment, I used Method's pump-dispenser laundry detergent and their basil-scented kitchen hand soap. Amazon is selling the laundry detergent for $75 and the hand soap for $15. I'm guessing Method discontinued the SKUs I was used to, and there's some leftover stock on Amazon with crazy prices.
People sometimes want whatever they want, and some people are willing to pay a lot for whatever that is. That is not necessarily abusive.
eg, I like sardines, and there's some very particular sardines that I'm rather fond of. I'd love to pay $1 or $2 per tin for them, but I'll also pay $6 per tin for them if I must when they just aren't available otherwise for whatever reason.
Much of this can be explained with just supply and demand.
Don't even ask me about the price of Heinz canned beans in tomato juice or bottles of HP Sauce in grocery stores in my part of Ohio. They're inexpensive staples in some parts of the world, but if I can even find them here they're ludicrously expensive.
Amazon (and third-party sellers using Amazon) are no different than my local grocer is in that particular way.
Back in context of TFA: The problem isn't that things can be expensive; the problem is primarily that one must be able to easily compare prices and products, and an Alexa device is presently a terrible interface for letting that happen. (The Amazon website is also sometimes not very good at this, even on a real computer.)
Speaking of Alexa: Can anyone explain the thought process behind making it possible to change the volume in small increments via buttons, but not via voice command (only in 10% increments)? I only use it as an internet radio player for background music and it's extremely annoying that it can't do that.
Voice command on volume modulation used to work. Then Video, Music, Shopping and Home Automation built a "revamped" Alexa system and broke it. This is also why people struggle to turn of alarms, why Alexa Pay broke, among many other service-side performance degradations. Pretty cringe, the number of people who were promoted for this. 10/10 not worth working for Amazon.
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
> I always want to see a page with the product details and price before I click "buy". Especially given the bonfire of trust that is Amazon "sponsored results". Any time I search for anything on Amazon these days I have to spend a bunch of extra time scrolling around trying to figure which of the search results is genuinely a good deal as opposed to one that's paid for placement. Given that, why would I ever trust so…
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I can't come up with a single item that I would blind order. At most, I could ask Alexa to add an item to a shopping list and then verify the list and place the order myself.
I put baby diapers on recurring order every X weeks, it just worked, and Amazon would inform me that there was an upcoming order and give me the time to either move the date or cancel it. Super convenient for working parents!
That’s not to say that it isn’t useful, but it doesn’t do anything against the narrative that Amazon is not trustworthy like it used to be. It’s a common theme in the comments here. When I think about it, it’s been a common theme on HN for years now, ever since commingling destroyed Amazon’s reputation
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Yes, Costco is like the opposite of the Amazon experience. Costco will only carry a few brands of any given item, but they're all generally pretty good with nothing drop-shipped from a random AliExpress vendor. Their house brand - Kirkland - is pretty good as well. It's a curated set of products with a relatively small number of SKUs vs. Amazon's flea-market-like experience.
Costco really needs to get new products in or I don't think it will do well with genz and younger millennials. I hadn't been to a Costco since I was a kid so I had completely forgotten that the only stock (maybe) a few versions of specific items. I went a year or two ago thinking I'd come home with months worth of groceries and I was shocked that it STILL looked like the inside of a 1990s fridge and cabinet with such…
Costco sells a lot of junk food because Americans, as a whole, eat a lot of junk food. They also stock a lot of staples (rice, beans, flour, cooking oils, canned/frozen fruits/veggies, &c), and decent quality raw fruit/veggies/meat. Not liking the Costco shopping experience is a pretty reasonable point of view (it forces you to plan/structure your shopping and food storage in weird ways IMO), but it seems like a strange complaint to zero in on the selection of processed foods when they really do seem to try and accommodate a wide variety of needs and preferences the best they can.
The strangest thing with Alexa is how it seems to have gotten worse and worse over time. That is, my Alexa right now has issues doing the most basic thing, it can't even play music right anymore. I remember when my friend in LA first showed me Alexa, playing music was all we used it for and it worked great for that. Somehow it's degraded over time and now it barely every picks the song or band I asked for. There was…
I've set a countdown timer and then asked it "how much time is left on the timer?" and it says "You have no timers set" then inside say 30s, the timer goes off. Has happened to me a half dozen times in the last 2 months (at different amounts of time left obviously). This was my primary use case of alexa and now I just use Siri on my phone when my phone is nearby. Siri isn't ideal as I find it hard sometimes to quickl…
The core issue is that Amazon envisioned Alexa as a product that would help it increase sales. Smart home features were always an afterthought. How convenient would it be if people could shout "Alexa order me Tide Pods" from wherever they were in their home and the order got magically processed? That demo definitely got applause from a boardroom full of execs. The problem is that consumers don't behave like that. Thi…
I don't think this is right. My understanding is the average Dash Button was pressed ~5 times, which isn't bad. The problem was that "subscribe and save" generated more orders than that.
For what it's worthy, my company[1] makes a re-ordering IoT device that uses weight to re-order rather than a button click, and we generate more orders than "subscribe and save" programs. This suggests that the problem with Dash was that the habit was not easy to build, not that people wanted to see the product page.
[1] bottomless.com