Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling
techcrunch.com> The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first.
I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone.
EDIT: That's too mean spirited.
If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a position that captures a wide angle or buy a 360 degree camera as opposed to this which only seems to pick up video in the direction it's facing.
What person would ever want this "feature"? We have webcams for people who don't mind exhibiting themselves. People overwhelmingly prefer to text others rather than talk over the phone or facetime when given the chance. Even when you visit someone in person, you don't drop in, unannounced like a peeping tom. You knock on the door to announce your appearance, exactly analogous to ringing the telephone before listening in and watching.
I don't like it because the world's largest retailer has the marketing and advertising muscle to normalize this behavior by preying upon our fears, our irrational behavior, and our cognitive biases. Look at the social stigma one faces if you don't have a facebook account and you're under 35. Not just that, but you will get harassed by border and customs agents if they ask for your social media account and you don't have one, setting off red flags.
In the near future, I can see this feature becoming a requirement for remote workers with insecure managers.
EDIT: This will definitely become a feature on sites like Upwork so that buyers can make sure developers are billing them the correct hours, even though the prices are dirt cheap already.
I just placed a pre-order for 2 of the Echo Shows mostly for this Drop In feature.
My wife and I are about to be first-time parents and for us, this is a pretty exciting product for parents compared to the other devices out there in this space.
For the "drop in" feature specifically, my plan is to leave one Show in the nursery and one for my parents. They like to call us a lot, and with this device, I should be able to whitelist their device and let them "drop in" on the nursery and whatever we're doing at the time. I think a lot of people have a problem with the privacy aspect, but for us, I don't see why we would have a problem with my parents seeing the nursery at any given time, esp with the 10sec window to decline. And then once the baby is older, we'd move the Show to the kitchen for music, looking up recipes, etc.
I think there's going to be a lot of parents looking hard at this device. The intro video Amazon made is mostly for this use case as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqxCeHhmeU
> I think a lot of people have a problem with the privacy aspect, but for us, I don't see why we would have a problem with my parents seeing the nursery at any given time, esp with the 10sec window to decline.
As someone who is 16 months into being a first-year parent, I'm going to say that if you are about to be first time parents, you are about to discover the answer to a whole lot of "I don't see see why" questions, and "why we wouldn't want to have to actively refuse rather than actively allow anyone, even our parents, to see what is going on in the nursery at will" is pretty likely to feature prominently on that list.
am I the only guy in this thread worried about hackers and what they would do with such a trove of data? I simply would be more comfortable considering this product if I had a good report detailing how secure the system is first.
You're not alone. I am very surprised that people on HN of all places are so accepting of this when they are the first to tear others apart for their lack of security.
A detailed technical guide to the security features of this device would almost be enough for me to buy one if their methodology was good and their security sound.
I don't understand how an advert for a product like this does not have atleast 30 seconds dedicated to showcasing its security. Is it simply that no big data breach has ever occurred? So no one is concerned? Am I being too concerned? Is it just a matter of time before security and privacy is the priority ? Or will it never be a priority - even if a breach occurs?
It's not a priority until it affects customers enough to seriously harm their bottom line.
Even if it cost them 10% in sales they are still saving money since having solid security would cost way more and take more of the little time they have to bring the product to market.
Just a thought, is it because it's Amazon? For me, if it was D-Link, Netgear, or most other brands, I'd immediately pass. Just absolutely no trust that they'd get it anywhere near right. If it's Google, I may pass because they already have so much of my data, and I'm just generally kind of creeped out by them a little bit more every day. If it's from Apple or Amazon I'm not assuming it's bulletproof, but I'm thinking it's going to be more secure than the vast majority of their competition, and likely as secure as anything else available.
Aside: I also realize that Apple or Amazon may pillage my data just the same, but I feel like they make money by actually selling things vs. selling my personal info and thus their incentives are skewed towards chasing things I'm generally more okay with.
> If it's Google, I may pass because they already have so much of my data, and I'm just generally kind of creeped out by them a little bit more every day. If it's from Apple or Amazon I'm not assuming it's bulletproof, but I'm thinking it's going to be more secure than the vast majority of their competition, and likely as secure as anything else available.
Curious why you differentiate between Amazon and Google. Maybe you pesonally don't shop there, but they are the world's largest (maybe Ali in China is bigger by volume) online retailer and they have a metric shit ton of what advertisers really want, the data on shopping preferences.
For me, I don't care if Amazon has my shopping preferences. I don't see a list of every item I've ever bought or viewed as particularly sensitive information. If you use Chrome, Google search, Gmail, and maybe have an Android phone, then Google knows everything. Private conversations, every service you have ever used (assuming email is used for login), every thing you've ever searched for, every url you've ever viewed in your browser, basically everything of everything.
First, congrats on your soon-to-be-child. To chime in as a parent, I never have needed this feature to date. The only times our son was alone in a room was when he was sleeping and we were close enough to hear if he woke up. I'm sure YMMV so hopefully you have a good use for it but we were definitely too protective to leave him somewhere that we'd want to "drop in." As for my parents, they can message me anytime to get video chat if they want. I can't imagine them wanting to watch my child without me there but who knows.
In terms of using it when your child is older, I'm not sure you'll be using the same device 3+ years from now.
> What person would ever want this "feature"?
The disabled come to mind, for starters. The elderly, assisted living, I can think of a few use cases.
Do you remember the Nextel phones? (push to talk) They were annoying as all hell in a corporate setting, but had some very valid use cases in a lot of industries, to the point of being the #1 feature of a Nextel.
There are definitely use cases for them. I was talking to a nurse the other day who was trying to track someone down on campus and she lamented "I wish we could just go back to our old Nextels".
Given that both sides of the link are fixed, rather than mobile, devices, Nextel phones aren't quite the right comparison here. Essentially this is a video intercom.
> What person would ever want this "feature"?
Look up research on "media spaces" if you're interested in the practical applications of this kind of feature. Just one example paper, but there are many more: https://www.billbuxton.com/DGPmediaspace.pdf
Digitally creating a "portal" like this can be considered roughly analogous to connected spaces in real life. So, for example, two break rooms across different campuses of the same company, or a couple in a long-distance relationship that would ordinarily live together if not for whatever was keeping them in LDR mode stand to benefit from this sort of continuous video communication.
I love this.
I'd like to have offices in a ring around the globe, maybe one in every other time-zone, each with an open floor plan and two opposite walls set up as full video walls with cameras and two-way connections so that it supports the illusion of looking into the neighboring offices through windows. There would be sound if you're standing close enough, and several scanner/printers (FAX machines lol!) connected so that you could feed a hard-copy to someone on the "other side" of the "window".
It would be so cool to look "across" the distributed meta-office and SEE the day/night cycle all at once though the real windows in the offices.
So, for example, two break rooms across different campuses of the same company.
I once suggested that to a company which had two locations that weren't getting along. Put up a teleconferencing link in their break room and leave it up. Unfortunately, this was before bandwidth was cheap enough this was a no-brainer.
Eh, that seems like a much cooler idea implemented with untethered VR/AR lenses rather than screens everywhere. I don't like being on camera so it personally gives me the creeps.
> I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone.
Is this necessary?
The people responsible for this knew exactly what they are doing. They are putting a vice grip on society's notion of what privacy is, crushing it into an ever smaller idea. It's not for the benefit of people, it's for their own narrow self-interest and profit.
If this were bi-directional, that along with a loss of privacy came blanket transparency into how they're using the data they record, shared their data sets and open sourced their algorithms, I may not feel comfortable with it, but I wouldn't feel this existential dread that my greatest value comes from being a data point.
Yes, I can't shake the terror of everything I say or do being recorded and analyzed.
We're all politicians and celebrities now! (Except without the fame, fortune, or power)
aka micromanaged subjects
I've actually long wanted something like this and proposed it to friends but never built it.
When my friends and I got married and started having kids, contact fell off a lot -- we just didn't call as much, you get busy and you assume the others are busy putting kids to bed, etc. etc.
What I wanted was a way to say "we're available to chat right now" for a handful of people I know and trust. My idea was to create a webcam into our kitchen with a limited view, turn it on when we were interested in chatting with friends, and when on it would be displayed on a dedicated tablet in our friends' kitchen, showing them that we were around and available to chat.
It seems Alexa Drop-in is getting pretty close to this idea.
(I think chat/messaging systems are still missing this explicit "I'm available for a synchronous chat right now" flag. Being "online" in Skype is just not quite the same thing.)
> I think chat/messaging systems are still missing this explicit "I'm available for a synchronous chat right now" flag.
Seems identical to the long-established distinction between "online" and "away" status.
I think there's a difference between "I'm available if you need me" (but I'm actually busy doing something right now) and "I'm relaxing and actively interested in chatting". I think that difference does not map well to status modes I've seen in Skype and the like.
IIRC in the good old days, ICQ had separate status updates for Available and Available to Chat.
I really don't understand this anger. I can't imagine using it either, but it's optional and off by default. If people like it, why shouldn't they have it? If they don't, they won't use it.
I don't think the spying concerns are reasonable. If somebody wants to spy on somebody, there are already plenty of ways to do it. Why require that developers buy an expensive Amazon widget when you could require that they buy a $40 webcam, or better yet just say "if you don't answer the phone whenever I call you during working hours, you'd better be dead or in jail, or else you're fired."
> If people like it, why shouldn't they have it?
It may become the norm that even though it's still optional, society moves in a direction where people have it on by default, and you are met with confused/dissapointed faces when you explain it is uncomfortable. Or it simply becomes a cultural norm in the professional world
I don't see why it would change anything in that respect. Like I said, you can already achieve this without Amazon's fancy new box by saying, "Answer your phone when I call or you're fired."
> EDIT: This will definitely become a feature on sites like Upwork so that buyers can make sure developers are billing them the correct hours, even though the prices are dirt cheap already.
Upwork already does this; clients can watch your screen or your webcam whenever they want, if you sign up for a job that requires such. The Hansonian-em dystopia of barely-positive-utility working-to-live doesn't need Amazon's help to make its way into existence. It's already here; just unevenly distributed.
Really, wtf? If my boss, who is a 10x coder, looks over my shoulder it's one thing because he's more or less always right with his criticism. I couldn't imagine anyone else micromanaging the dev process though
> What person would ever want this "feature"?
I've been waiting for years for a feature like this. Seriously. My wife let our son play with her phone, so when I call her on my way home, she never picks it up.
It got to a point that sometimes I have to log in into her account and activate "Lost my iPhone", so it rings at full volume. More recently I bought an Yi camera that has an intercom functionality by default, but it's clunky, app is not very friendly, I need to scream for people to hear me, etc.
Having a decent intercom functionality (and bonus points for having with video too) would be a dream come true in our household.
Just wondering on the interoperability with other regular Android and iOS devices...
I feel like there are multiple problems in your situation that need to be fixed. If you cannot contact your wife in an emergency there is a problem (setting off the alarm might not be viable in an emergency). Why not give your son either his own phone, a tablet, or an old phone of yours? Or why would your wife allow the volume to be off when your son is using her phone? If your wife is not at the location of the device when you "drop-in" this still won't fix your problem.
I'd be all for it as long as it doesn't start sending my audio and video until I give an OK. I'd love to be able to talk to my family around the country instantly.
I just don't wanna get caught watching porn.
Apple (and Google) really dropped the ball on the connected Home 'smartbox' that Amazon popularized with Alexa.
We received one as a gift this past Christmas, and I'm now a full believer in this tech after being a very big skeptic during the first couple years of Alexa's existence. Add to the fact, that we primarily use it as a smart connected radio, and the benefits are still beyond clear to me.
Essentially, you've now opened up the possibility of exposing a lot of the latest tech to a new demographic of people that probably were 'too old' to 'get it', or not tech savvy enough to use it. The combination of a voice interface (not perfect, but improving) with access to all the latest web services spanning music, telephony, email, todo lists, home automation, etc is huge. I can now actually envision my parents, or even grandparents using services like Spotify, Podcasts, Connected Calendars, VOIP, and any number of things that the tech savvy take for granted through their phones or other devices.
Circling back to my first statement about Apple; the quintessential consumer oriented tech company. The company that's supposed to make all things nasty and complicated into things that are simple and accessible. How did Apple who already had Apple TV (home box), Siri (voice interface), Itunes (music and app ecosystem), Icloud( ugh.. but still integrated personal mgmt) and FaceTime (VOIP) not come up with this sooner. Or at least, once they saw Alexa gaining popularity not just bundle up their services and release it. Apple typically is late to the party with a more refined product, but Amazon is executing at an impressive rate these days and it's getting harder to see how Apple can close the gap.
Apple spends years meticulously developing and then releasing the most successful (and profitable) consumer computing platform of all time. Nearly every man, woman and child in the US has an Apple device no more than five feet from them at all time that's completely capable of controlling every home device connected to the internet.
Amazon spends years and billions of dollars trying to compete in the hardware space with Apple, unsuccessfully releasing a phone and several very average tablet devices, none of which really gain much traction.
Then they release a device that can respond only to voice "pretty well" which can now handle VOIP calls only with other Amazon devices and we are ceding this battle to Amazon?
I think Amazon has to greatly improve the user experience before the Echo moves past a cool novelty item for me. I own one, and I can honestly say I feel no desire to purchase any more.
My Nest cam on the other hand I use all day to monitor my dog (using my iPhone) and often consider switching to Google Home and buying more Nest products because I feel invested in that ecosystem.
To me, the tablet/smart phone experience is just more efficient and easier than dealing with voice. That's just my own experience though, and time may prove me very wrong.
You're almost speaking to my point, Apple did create one of the best and widely adopted computing platforms out there with the Smart Phone. And yet... even you describe it as a 'computing device'.
Echo/Alexa is the first step to that ubiquitous IoT future, where computing is sort of removed from the terminology and services are just available on demand in the most natural of human interfaces -- voice.
Similar to that first moment of watching a 5 year old ( or 60 year old ) accessing YouTube on an Ipad ( simplified touch interface ) when the first i-devices came out. The voice interface will be just as transformative, if not more so.
The moment for me was when my 2 year old niece screamed, "Alexa, play the gummy bear song"... and it started playing, and she started dancing. That was a game changing moment for me, to realize that this device opens the doors for the young, the old, the impaired, and even the tech averse to access all kinds of cool tech that we take for granted. Hell even for me, "Alexa, play the latest 'how I built this' podcast"
Don't get me wrong, typing and touch is infinitely more efficient and powerful, but voice will be infinitely more accessible. Touch devices, as simple as they are, still require a mental model of which icons provide which services, clicking through and typing out requests and looking at results, versus what my 2 year old niece was able to do with Alexa.
My point is that the iPhone/iPad/Android-enabled tablet is a ubiquitous IoT control panel.
I disagree that the most natural of human interfaces is voice. It's like saying that listening to an audiobook will always be a better way to consume media than watching a video. Audio only is great for some use cases, but not most. Humans developed the ability to see, touch, hear, and speak for a reason. After all, radios predated television by a long shot. Then when televisions were released, they pretty much cannibalized the sale of the home radio, because it added the ability to see in real time what you were listening to.
Speech is most certainly an important part of communication for humans, but it's just one, and only best for certain things. Simple queries like "what's the weather today?" or "play some music" is better said than typed, I would agree. But for lots of other tasks its just not efficient. I'd rather pull out my phone and search for restaurant recommendations than try and fumble around communicating by voice. When I pull up the Yelp app, I can instantly view a list of many of restaurants and because I'm used to the interface and visual cues, like the number of stars, location, and reviews, I can discern what I think I'd like very quickly. Now imagine a human trying to describe what they saw on that app to me. It'd be impossible to do. It's just very difficult to convey subtleties with voice only.
As an aside, if Apple wanted to get into the IoT business and pose a threat to Amazon, I think if they released some sort of "Always On" listening mode and began giving developers the ability to build apps which responded to it, they'd already be caught up. If I could say "play some music" or "Face Time Dave" and it solved the simple query problem, I don't know that I'd ever use my Echo again (I maybe use it once or twice a week now).
In terms of voice/speech, we maybe talking on different points. I'm considering voice as an input mechanism, but the output mechanism certainly has to be dynamic and use the most sensible mechanism in the given context. Ex:
1. Alexa play song --> output on in-built speaker
2. "Alexa turn on Warriors game", "Alexa play latest episode of Game of Thrones" --> output onto nearest TV
3. Alexa get direction to San Francisco --> sends to my phone screen
4. Alexa show me top Sushi restaurants nearby --> send to nearest display ( TV or phone )
... and so on.
So yes, I definitely agree with you, voice as an output quickly becomes untenable. But again, that's what I mean by ubiquitous, you're no longer tied to a device for input/output. Your environment/context will define what your input/output mechanisms are. Outputs can be any displays, speakers, TVs, thermostats, lights, etc. And in most cases, voice is the simplest, most intuitive input mechanism for simple queries that a majority of our daily interactions with our surroundings will require.
Just as touch devices required UI developers to simplify their interface design to accommodate 'touch access' by removing layers of menus, pages, etc. Voice will also precipitate this type of simplification of the interface to where the core elements are accessible with simple queries, with strong, complex NLP and search behind it.
And again, it's more about accessibility than it is about expressiveness through voice input.
> Nearly every man, woman and child in the US has an Apple device no more than five feet from them at all time
How did you come up with this claim? It's certainly not true for myself, my household, most of my relatives and most of my friends and coworkers.
Well, Apple sells about 200 million iPhones a year, so when you add in iPad sales to that, unless you are outside the US, you should consider yourself in a very select minority.
200 million worldwide.
The iPhone currently has around 15% of the smartphone market:
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/27/iphone-15-percent-marke...
Last time I checked, 85% was most definitely not a minority.
Hold up. Is it your belief that Apple's smartphone market share in 1Q16 is equal to the number of people who have iPhones or Apple products?
If you have a different figure, you should share it
This is your source to defend. 85% of smartphones purchased in 1Q16 were non-Apple. You used this figure to claim that 85% of all people don't own iPhones.
You're most likely right, but I don't know what kind of honest conversation can be had with someone who is so willing to pull one over on the rest of us to force his point. You derived your own figure from an unrelated figure and implied a connection.
If you had answered "Oh haha yup, my bad" that'd be excusable. But it looks like you're running with it and / or throwing the burden on me for some reason.
You've used a lot of words to say close to nothing at all.
> You're most likely right
What exactly are you complaining about then?
You don't think being intentionally misleading should be an issue to people who might otherwise agree with your base claim? There's something seriously wrong with your compass here.
> You've used a lot of words to say close to nothing at all.
Alright man, that says a lot about how willing you are to change.
> intentionally misleading
I think what's wrong with this conversation is that you think you can correctly attribute malice to the opinions of complete strangers simply because you don't agree with them.
This will get you into trouble more often than not.
Did you notice how I didn't accuse you of intentionally adding nothing to the conversation or intentionally being obtuse?
That's because I don't know you at all and therefore I don't claim to know anything about your intentions. As a matter of fact, even after this very ridiculous conversation, and although I haven't the slightest clue of what your actual intentions are, I still give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your intentions are noble, (albeit clearly based on incorrect assumptions).
That's the difference between you and I.
What will get you into trouble is insisting we don't know you at all. On the contrary, you've told us enough.
You're right, I stand corrected. Nobody uses Apple products. Let's move on.
Are those the only two possible scenarios? Either everyone has an Apple device within 5ft of them at all times or nobody uses Apple products?
You're looking for an honest conversation now? That's bold.
I'm not sure how Google dropedp the ball? I see your argument that Apple was also well situated to create this, but other than starting a bit late, what has Google done wrong?
They are catching up very quickly, since like Apple, they are in a much better position to create this technology as they have most of the ingredients already. Google Home has managed to mostly catch up in 6 months to a product that's been out for over 2 years. 3rd party support is growing very fast, the new SDK opens many doors, the IFTTT/Actions support allows tinkerers to hack up cool new features, and when it comes to conversational AI, most agree that Google is far ahead.
That being said, the competition is still fierce and I'm loving the innovations each side brings.
The Nexus Q was Google dropping the ball: https://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-google-nexus-...
I have a couple of friends who still have one in a drawer somewhere and it was just poor execution all around. They could have been way ahead of the curve but now they're playing catchup. They're definitely still very well positioned and catching up fast though. Google's AI capability and straightfoward integration with exclusive market-leading products (Google Now, Google Maps, etc.) will likely make them a leader eventually unless they drop the ball again.
I suppose for both Google and Apple 'dropping the ball' not only relates to starting late, but also
a) having the ingredients way before Amazon
b) knowing the market for such a product was viable(people were ready) and desirable($$ could be huge)
c) and having made failed attempts at it
Apple and Google both tried to attack it through the SmartTV effort, which came and went and didn't amount to much. People didn't want to spend upwards of $1K for such a thing, whoops. Then Google purchased Nest, thinking that would be a nice backdoor into the Home automated system -- I have a Nest also, good product, but again, not the right entry way for this product category.
Than along comes Amazon and creates essentially a wireless smart speaker, that you can talk to, at a $100 price tag. Boom.
Don't get me wrong, Google Home is catching up fast and I had a heavy debate/research session when we got Alexa on whether I should exchange it for Home. But in the end, it just didn't matter, Alexa did things well enough at this point. Google may have the better, more widely adopted ecosystem (Gmail, Calendar, etc), the Voice assistant is likely better from what I've read, and I have no doubt Google can do the SDK/app ecosystem in a great way. But really, I feel like Alexa is doing things just well enough to keep the competition at bay, and with their head start, they're owning the consumer mindshare. And the combination of those 2 things might be enough to fend off any newcomers now.... though let the competition and innovation continue -- on that I agree!
I don't have alexa, just "OK, Google", and the interaction model is very similar to the commandline - which isn't too positive when it comes to regular people.
And it fits with :
>> we primarily use it as a smart connected radio,
Does anybody see a solution to that problem ?
This might be the thing that stirs apple to action.
I'm under the impression that Alexa works much better at understanding than Siri? Is that true?
What would be great is if all these things could work together. Amazons smartphones are not compelling and they don't have laptops/desktops. It sounds like they do IoT well, while Apple does the later.
My gosh, yes. Alexa's ability to understand me far outclasses Siri in almost every manner.
2011 re MobileMe http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2...
The tech matters in that it must work, but what they've really been lacking is a cohesive story around how all of this stuff works together and what it enables people to do. Right now, my biggest interaction with iCloud is constantly being reminded that I'm out of storage on it, randomly, sometimes via CarPlay while driving.
Apple is a hardware company. Their software forays have been mixed. They do some awesome stuff and some terrible stuff. Many great iOS features were lifted from some combination of the jailbreak community + android. The App Store on Mac has some dumb limitations which have driven away some big and many small publishers. It's still hard to explain what iCloud does exactly and why storage on it costs $10/month for 1TB in 2017. The Photos app, which forcibly replaced the sometimes-liked iPhoto, regularly crashes / hangs for me when trying to import more than a couple hundred photos. It's awful and slow on a brand new top of the line maxed out rMBP when opening my library with ~20k photos. I don't really believe that I'm an outlier in how many photos I take, but the experience is awful, I can't enable any type of debug status / anything to tell me what it's actually doing, can't go back to iPhoto, Aperture is discontinued, and the storage format for the Photos library is not just flat files of the original sources, so it's basically impossible to switch to any other management software for this task (plus the iPhone won't sync with many other pieces of software). iTunes is and has been garbage for a decade and a half at this point, and again it's forced upon you if you use an iPhone. Have a problem with your phone? Forget fixing the configuration despite it all being there (I used to be into jailbreak and you can basically fix anything if you want to badly enough), it's time for a hard reset. Enjoy spending the whole day resetting your 2FA tokens. Look also at what they've done with Final Cut Pro. Combine this with how it's impossible to upgrade the GPU in the current Mac Pro to anything resembling current best-in-class pro performance levels, and it's easy to make the argument that Apple doesn't care about pro users as of about 5 years ago. Ooh yeah, and about Apple Maps, HomeKit, discontinuing wifi routers, the Apple TV, watchOS...
Above all, to me, this represents an internal issue with their leadership. Very few people there seem to know how to manage a software product. Granted it's a difficult thing to do well, but honestly, to me, their losses far outweigh their wins in this space in the past decade. They've had some big missed opportunities and while I don't have insight into their leadership, I don't see that changing any time soon.
Despite all of this, they continue to print money and move tons of product, so I guess from a purely capitalistic standpoint, who cares...but I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts.
"I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts". Pretty much what's wrong with all monopolistic power holders. Technology disrupts so many things but not factors leading to monopolistic industries.
Apple still has a huge advantage with their iOS app ecosystem. They can introduce a hardware and add an SDK to iOS that allows their developers to create apps that seamlessly work on that hardware. But they need to come up with the hardware fast because Amazon will race far ahead otherwise.
Let's not forget their huge cash on hand. Apple could purchase its way into any market and technology at this point.
I really like apple stuff, but your sentence could have easily applied to Microsoft at the dawn of smartphones. Capital is not a guaranteed path to success.
Microsoft hasn't gone away. Both companies are huge successes. They've just got failures like everybody else. Unlike most, they're still owners of markets.
This seems like the biggest feature these devices have been missing. Some use cases off the top of my head:
* Alexa, call my phone (because I can't find it)
* Alexa, call for Chinese food (okay everyone call out what you want)
* Alexa, send a message to my son -- "I've fallen and I can't get up"
You can enable "Alexa, find my phone" by installing the skill and android/ios app called "Trackr"
Once it is set up, you can say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to find my phone", which will tell you the address your phone was last seen. You can also say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to ring my phone", which will make your phone ding even if it is on silent.
The "Help! I've fallen and can't get up!" functionality can be had by installing the "Ask My Buddy" skill, which will let you designate emergency contacts which you can notify by voice.
It's not chinese food, but both Dominos and Pizza Hut now have Alexa skills available which will let you order by voice, as well.
I strongly suspect that the Chinese food problem is going to be solved by Amazon restaurants once it gains more areas and traction. Since they have the menus already they can handle the entire ordering process.
> It's not chinese food, but both Dominos and Pizza Hut now have Alexa skills available which will let you order by voice, as well.
In the UK, Just Eat has an Alexa skill - they're one of two major "takeaway aggregators" here.
Or as an intercom:
* Alexa, call the living room: hey everybody, dinner's getting cold!
You can use the drop in feature for this, right?
Allow drop in between your devices in your home, and you can call one from another. Maybe they'll allow call groups and you can call to every room at once.
More like "tell everybody the dinner's getting cold" and Alexa will figure out what room they're in ;)
More like send them a text message to the device they're currently on.
#1 solution that I've been using, is setup an ifttt skill, then "alexa, trigger call my phone"
I use the trackr skill. Advantage being that even if your phone is on silent, it will ring it.
I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of applications ("skills") out there already that do the first one in your list.
Third idea is really interesting though, maybe calling the emergency services could be good in that situation too
#3 turns out to be complicated to do in practice, because the API Alexa exposes to allow third-party "skills" to handle voice commands requires them to be phrased in a pretty specific format that includes the name of the skill (see https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-sk...). Which is a big ask for a user in a high-stress emergency situation, especially if the skill is one they aren't going to have been routinely interacting with before then. (And a 911 type application is sort of the definition of an app the user will not be routinely interacting with.)
I tinkered a little bit with this idea when the Echo Dot came out, but these limitations more or less killed my interest in exploring the concept further.
This effectively makes the Echo Show a circa-1995 video phone for remote grandparenting.
I was only 8 in 1995, can you link me to a such a device? I'd like to compare.
Sure, I was thinking of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULX-omgUzIc
But in general the product has been around in some (generally expensive) form since the '70s.
I wonder who's providing their telephony backend. There was some speculation that Twilio was powering Amazon Connect. Twilio's Jeff Lawson was an original AWS product manager...
Does this actually make real telephone calls? I got the impression that this only connected the Echo products and app.
According to the article, it's not real telephone calls, yet.
I'm guessing its some component of their AWS Chime product https://chime.aws/
I wish we could just get some standardization and federation across VoIP providers. I would love to be able to use whatever device I want to call someone else, who can use whatever device they want to answer. Mac, PC, iOS, Android, Alexa - it should all just work together.
Apple is very hostile about this, especially when it comes to iMessage.
This is "free" as in Amazon is free to record your calls and messages and use them either as training data for AI or targeting data for advertising.
Do you have a different level of expected privacy with Amazon's services than you do with Apple, Google, or Microsoft?
Alexa Calling will compete with FaceTime, Google Duo, and Skype (amongst others). Do you feel the same way about those other services or is your concern specifically related to the Echo platform?
My gut feeling is that FaceTime is encrypted client-to-client (or at least primarily p2p direct connections) but I don't have time right now to look into this in detail.
Google / Skype are both assumed to be MitM'd; Microsoft in fact purposely re-did things to centralize Skype. If I recall correctly, Google Voice was pretty clearly used for training data.
>gut feeling
Why are you using gut feeling to make decisions when you clearly have an internet connection right now and can confirm or deny your hypothesis instantly?
> Why are you using gut feeling to make decisions
I'm not using gut feeling to make decisions; I am sharing information with an appropriate "grain of salt" disclaimer attached.
>> I don't have time right now to look into this in detail
Repeated in case you missed it.
But since you took the time to call me out (thanks?), I will Google it for you:
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/law-enforcement-guidelin... (September 29, 2015)
FaceTime communications are end-to-end encrypted and Apple has no way to decrypt FaceTime data when it is in transit between devices. Apple cannot intercept FaceTime communications. Apple has FaceTime call invitation logs when a FaceTime call invitation is initiated. These logs do not indicate that any communication between users actually took place. Apple has no information as to whether the FaceTime call was successfully established or duration of a FaceTime call. FaceTime call invitation logs are retained up to 30 days. FaceTime call invitation logs can be obtained with an order under 18 U.S.C. §2703(d) or court order meeting the equivalent legal standard or search warrant.
Then how come only Amazon gets shit on when they announce new products, while no one blinks an eye at new Google or Microsoft communication-related releases?
Are you kidding? You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy for product launches than that which is HackerNews. It doesn't much matter who is launching. The bigger they are, the more piss and vinegar you'll find in the comments. Apple and M$oft are certainly not immune to this.
If it makes you feel any better, I take care to shit on all of the spy-vertisers whenever possible, and think this kind of massive data collection should be illegal.
Assuming that it's true that they're always criticized for new products, it may be because they also sell a staggering breadth of other consumer products. We often see our Amazon search results on Web page ads for days after browsing on amazon.com. It's more obvious when you're being tracked and targeted by Amazon than by other consumer electronics manufacturers. (I wouldn't say I like it, but I'm OK with this contract so far.)
I have no idea why Google doesn't get more flak, but there is a higher level of privacy standard with Apple as they neither profit from user metadata (advertising) and are the most publicly visible torch-bearer for privacy among the big corps.
I don't trust anyone (even Apple) to have an always-on listening device in my house. Too many shades of 1984. If need be, I'll push a button on my phone/bt headset and query.
To be fair. We (at least I haven't) looked through everything he's said online. He might have given them equal shit as well in the past.
> Do you have a different level of expected privacy with Amazon's services than you do with Apple, Google, or Microsoft?
I was thinking about this today, and figured this is the epitome of a dystopian society. We've readily given up our freedoms and privacy in lieu of technology that is able to gather data on us and shared with entities we probably don't approve of, blinded by the "cool" things this technology can do.
Every time I see something like this I get nauseated because people are willing to hand over all their personal data for some shiny new technology that really doesn't do anything really amazing at all. I must be getting old, because it felt like not too long ago, technology was developed to help humans, not to gather data on them and subvert their privacy and treat them like dollar signs.
> Every time I see something like this I get nauseated because people are willing to hand over all their personal data for some shiny new technology that really doesn't do anything really amazing at all.
It isn't clear to me if you are directing that towards my comment, or if you meant it as a general criticism. My question was intended to understand more about the concerns that the previous comment raised and if they were only critical of Amazon's implementation or if they were more broadly concerned with privacy wrt all communication tools of this type. It was not to advocate for a "who cares, it's not important" position by any means.
> Do you have a different level of expected privacy with Amazon's services than you do with Apple, Google, or Microsoft?
No. The same Faustian bargain applies to these other services as well. I just think it's worth pointing out that this is not free. You're paying with your data.
I should also point out that the situation has evolved. Back when Skype was new, it was clear they were providing a service in exchange for ad revenue, but not so clear how much conversation data they were retaining if any. As the ad economy evolved perpetual [meta]data retention has become the norm - effectively increasing the cost of using these services.
Huh? Skype is free. Google Hangouts is free. Google voice is free.
Do you have a facebook account? LinkedIn? Gmail? All of your points apply there as well.
How is this controversial?
Over here(UK) you can get a sim card from any operator for free, and call people on the same network for free - yet I don't expect my telephone conversations to be recorded and analysed by my mobile network. Why is it different here?
Where does it say this?
Dug into this a little. In the Alexa ToS[1]:
Alexa Calling and Messaging Schedule
... the ability to send and receive messages and calls with other users (collectively, "Alexa Calling and Messaging") ...
1.1 General. Your messages, communications requests (e.g., "Alexa, call Mom"), and related interactions are "Alexa Interactions," ... Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions and related information in the cloud in order to ... improve our services.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Section 1.3 of the Alexa Terms of Use: "...to provide and improve our services...".
1.3 Alexa Interactions. You control Alexa with your voice. Alexa streams audio to the cloud when you interact with Alexa. Alexa processes and retains your Alexa Interactions, such as your voice inputs, music playlists and your Alexa to-do and shopping lists, in the cloud to provide and improve our services. Learn more about these voice services including how to delete voice recordings associated with your account.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
I personally take "improve" in this context to mean: iteratively analyze and change our services to maximize profits
Section 1.1 of the Alexa Calling and Messaging Schedule (at the bottom of those terms) seems to imply that the actual content of your calls isn't what they call "Alexa Interactions", although if you call out to Alexa during the call ("Alexa, hang up"), that is an Alexa Interaction.
It's not very clear, though, and I feel like they could have made this clear very easily.
(I do expect Amazon to store the voiceprints of "Alexa, do foo" to improve their speech-to-text, as well as analyze the actual requests, yes, but I would hope that Amazon is not analyzing or storing the contents of calls.)
Yes, but those are Alexa interactions. I would not necessarily read that as including audio or voice messages to another human where Amazon is not expected to interpret or understand what you're saying, but rather to pass along the voice/video as a carrier.
Then again, you could read it that way. And Amazon might. This needs clarification.
When you use Alexa you can actually see all your interactions in the Alexa app and mark off whether or not Alexa got the interaction right or wrong.
Yeah sounds like a bad idea.
Yet another missed opportunity for Google who purchased Grandcentral all those years ago. They already have call metrics for android devices. They could have had it for all the folks who would have dropped their PSTN lines for a Google Voice appliance as well as call history for anyone they called. Thought they wanted that kind of information but apparently not that much. Must be low value relative to web searches?
Would love to see a hack for Google home / Amazon echo that just turns them into dumb SIP devices. :-)
Plenty of 3rd party devices support Google voice though.. I have been using a ooba (not sure about the name) for 4 years now as my home phone.
Oh yeah there are plenty of hacks to make it work, but Google worked to remove native SIP support from their service, which was originally there in GC. It's too bad, because it was handy as hell.
*Ooma likely, e.g. Ooma Telo.
Didn't know GV integrated w/ it though, cool.
> You can call or message any contact who also has the free Alexa App, an Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show and has enabled Alexa calling and messaging.
Just to be clear for others that can't/didn't read the full article, you can't make full calls to anyone, they have to have at minimum the amazon alexa app.
Can you make phone calls with a Google Home yet? If not, it seems like an oversight. (Google has lots of VOIP infrastructure, right? They have Google Voice, which seems to have risen from the dead over the past 6ish months...)
If I call a friend, what number shows up on their end? Does it have its own phone number or can it use your cell number?
Title is probably misleading many people. This new feature does not do standard calls to phones. From what I can tell, it's more of an "in-amazon-network" voice chat, between amazon apps/devices.
Is it just me - or does anyone sympathize with every woman/girl with the name Alexa or Alexandra?
...except state monarchies with telecom monopolies banning Whatsapp, Skype, Facetime...
Call/message anyone with the alexa call app? Won't get out of the gate
I think Android users would be more open to adopting a new call/message app. Apple users however are pretty well anchored to the iMessage/FaceTime combo.
Besides the hordes of Apple users that seem to use WhatsApp/FBM/Signal etc without any problems?
If anything Android might be worse off, if it's like Prime Video the app won't be available on the Google Play Store and you'll have to install Amazon Underground or w/e they call their app store now manually then download Amazon Prime Video for your device.
Besides the hordes of Apple users that seem to use WhatsApp/FBM/Signal etc without any problems?
All three of the examples you laid out have specific use cases that propelled their popularity
WhatsApp: free SMS which was a bigger deal, especially internationally when it hit the scene. The Echo Show is US only for now.
FB Messenger: access to the walled garden of people that live in FB
Signal: secure private communications.
I'm not saying that Apple users won't use other message mediums if there is a compelling reason but I am saying for Apple users that are in predominately Apple-centric family/social circles the Echo messaging/video chat app doesn't offer meaningful differentiation from iMessage/FaceTime.
Care to expand?
Announcing an unreleased major feature the week before Google I/O? What a surprise.
"If they're not selling something to you, they're selling you" -Anonymous
Amazon is literally an online store. A vast majority of their sales comes from selling things to you. Including the damn Echo this service runs on.
Well they are selling you the device...
Services cost money, that's why all phones don't offer free calling. The 'free' calls will eat away at the margins. I don't understand why this quote is controversial. It's quite obvious that they want the free data to at least train their machine learning algorithms, if not to also 'provide targeted ads'.
> Meanwhile, users of that newest Echo, the Echo Show, which has the screen and video feature, will get added services, it seems. The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first.
I wonder if this is opt-in or opt-out. Honestly if it's opt-out I think Amazon could have a huge backlash on its hands. Not from privacy-minded folks, but from ordinary people who suddenly have people listening to them/viewing them when they don't expect (unless Amazon really makes an effort to make that the expectation).
The very next paragraph:
Alas, this is not being positioned as something mildly intrusive, nor as a creepy big brother-style service (which is the worst case scenario and one that Amazon has been taking pains to avoid in all of its Echo and Alexa products). Rather, Amazon emphasizes that it is opt-in, and a way to communicate with only the very closest members of your family.
Until the first zero day is discovered.
Until your boss requires it for sick days.
Clearly opt-in, as the next paragraph states