Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?
theguardian.comI 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, check prices and delivery dates and reviews then plump for one. Thinking of doing the same by voice drains me.
"Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow". Could that work? Would I trust that it had worked, if Alexa just said "ok" without me running off to a computer to check the order details and defeating the whole object? More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.
(I actually tried that sentence just now. Alexa remained in a stunned silence.)
> I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal
Entering into a subscription with no knowledge of that, let alone any up-front information about price or other terms, is very scummy behavior. The after-the-fact email attempts to claw back a moral high ground, but it's not difficult to see it for what it is. This combines the convenience of a smart speaker with the rapacity of a cold caller who already has your credit card number. It's thinly disguised fraud, and pernicious.
I doubt anyone would be happy with "Alexa, what's the weather?" entering them into an unannounced dollar-a-day contract with The Weather Company, or if asking about soccer scores got them automatically hooked up with a $7.99 Sportsball Channel add-on to their cable bill.
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 gotten marginally better over the years. But I really wouldn't miss them much if they all went away tomorrow. The vision was/is that they could match at least a marginally competent personal assistant over the phone. And they're nowhere even near the ballpark.
> 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 CODE GL16 / spl47" an album/EP by the same Autechre, "Hygh 2k12" by SCNTST.
It's a technology on that uncanny valley of working and simplifying some use-cases, and frustrating enough for some edge cases that you end up not trusting it, in my case making me avoid it.
Even for some basic alarms/timers it can be frustrating when it misinterprets your accent and sets timers for 50 minutes instead of 15. The pain of having to fix the failure and then re-add a timer/alarm is enough to push me away.
I use Alexa's announce capability to tell my wife to answer the phone--but what I actually tell her to say is in her native language, not in English. The announcement works fine but my phone tries to render it as English text. Never the same thing twice.
And she definitely does the 50/15 thing to me, although generally the other way around. Everything from 30/13 to 90/19 is vulnerable to being misunderstood. My wife has a lot more trouble with it--she learned her first word of English at 43 and so she still has a fair accent.
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.
> But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like driving--not so much.
I’ve tried Alexa, Google, and Siri multiple times over the years while driving and it’s just embarrassing how over hyped all of them are and yet simple questions which a human could potentially easily answer in seconds doing a search (if not driving of course), but none of them even get close.
- How far away is that storm?
- How many miles to the state line?
- What timezone is Omaha in?
- Where’s the closest gas station that has diesel?
- What’s the top rated BBQ place in town?
You can easily search how far away is that storm?
The others really ought to be voice searchable, but the diesel one would need to be timely in my area, where a couple of places have not had diesel available for several days.
>You can easily search how far away is that storm?
Pull up radar on Weather Underground (and/or look at the hourly forecast) and you should have a pretty good idea.
Whether or not that's the best example, the point is that there are a bunch of things I might want to know/do while driving that I can't look up without pulling off the road someplace. And even if I could theoretically look them up by voice, it would probably be an exercise in frustration to try to do so.
It's an interesting example because the question is very easy for a person to understand but giving an actual answer would take some time, but you can invert those for an AI.
But at least a human would give a reasonable answer, like "looks like at least thirty miles" or even just "I don't know". Your phone will instead say, oops, I didn't quite get that, try again later ( goodbye chime ). Which is terrible.
> You can easily search how far away is that storm?
Yes, I have two apps I use for that depending on what form of “how far away” I’m looking for, Dark Sky (time) and RadarScope (distance).
I tried using Google Assistant a few years ago and it was so frustrating in some dumb ways.
A notable example was when I tried using it to make a call. I told it to call my wife, by name, and it couldn't understand her name at all. So I said "call my wife" and it asked who my wife is. I couldn't answer with voice, because it still didn't understand her name. But it did give me a popup to select her from my address book. So I did and the popup went away... No call. So I tell it "call my wife" and it replies "who is your wife?".
I had the same problem funny enough! My wife has an Irish name that Google cannot pronounce (Alexa is much better in this one area) so I can't message her unless I try to match the mispronunciation (which I balk at out of self-respect) but it allows you to set nicknames for people. So I gave my wife, the nickname 'my wife'. I had to use the UI to do that, and even then, do I really trust Google to message the right person?
Is she confused because you're a polygamist? :)
> Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing.
That's because you interact with it as though it is a person, so your expectation levels are corresponding to the mode of communication used.
>That's because you interact with it as though it is a person
Well, that was sort of the pitch and it's certainly implied by "virtual/voice assistant." Certainly Amazon wasn't pitching Alexa as a voice-operated kitchen timer. To be honest, I'm probably better with them now because I know they mostly don't work but can be used for some simple tasks for which I know an incantation that mostly gives me the result I want.
Fair enough, but anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch. All I saw was an always on microphone with a line to Apple, Google or Amazon and for me that was reason enough to bar that stuff from crossing the threshold at the front door here.
>anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch.
That probably was--or should have been the case. But it's one of those things that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. After all, if a fairly young child can do something, it seems like a computer wired up to the Internet could. And in fact, voice recognition has gotten quite good--at least for English speakers without a strong accent. But actually carrying on a conversation in natural language is a really hard problem, even if children can do so from a fairly young age.
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”
> order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow
That's 2 continuous axes and one discrete option. What if the cheapest one is the worst reviewed? What if the most expensive one is the best reviewed? What if the middle price is only slightly above the worst review? What if there's a clearly cheapest, best option that is only available in 2 days?
How do you "trust" an answer to this? What does a single choice answer even mean?
I'm not sure I'd trust a shopkeeper to make this decision for me, as they could easily rationalise not telling me about the cheap and great option if it's not in stock, or falling more on the quality than the price because they make more margin. And Amazon is in this position on this one.
I can see a market for "Alexa, order me cheap dogfood for tomorrow", but pretty much anything more complex than that I just don't think people would give the decision to a biased third party to make for them, let alone a non-human one.
I think it's almost achievable if you say 'cheapest with 4 or more stars and delivery tomorrow'. Problem remains that cheapest could be the smallest pack size or cheapest per pound, and Amazon is not good at the latter anyway.
It is, but it means engineering your formulations carefully before giving them to the computer. Computers taking things literally isn't new, but there's normally less on the line when we do it.
Also I would imagine that as often as not there would be an opportunity for human judgement. Maybe there's a _much_ cheaper one at 3.98 stars, or the 4+ star and next day delivery options are 3x more expensive than the next available option. In both of these cases a human with the right intentions would likely stop and do something different.
> “Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation.“
The elderly woman stated she didn’t own a computer, or know how to use one.
Yes, it’s an edge case.
It's a pretty big edge case. In my family we also got an Alexa for my aging grandmother who was already shaky on computer literacy and developed serious motor/vision problems preventing her from using a computer. She learned just enough about Siri and Alexa to make phone calls, play music, and change the channel. There are definitely more old/disabled people out there for whom voice-activated assistants are not just a fun luxury gadget but are essential to performing everyday tasks like calling family members. We had to monitor her account to make sure she wasn't signing up for things without her understanding.
It’s disgusting that these types of devices have potentially an obvious use as a accessibility device, and yet, that’s completely being ignored in lieu of mass-market sales gimmicks.
We need an ADA that has teeth in the digital age. This is like a brick and mortar store building a ramp into their store for the convenience of people who can walk, and making it an inch too narrow for a wheelchair.
Real corporate social responsibility would be to tackle some of this low hanging fruit in their own area of expertise. But instead, everyone just promises to buy some carbon credits by 2030.
You can turn off voice purchasing entirely.
I’m not saying that Amazon should simply avoid harming people with disabilities. I’m going one step further and saying that they should actively help them.
Voice assistants are an obvious solution for people who can’t use other input devices because disability. Yet, Amazon has designed the device as a solution for people who choose not to use other input devices out of mild inconvenience, without any thought to accommodating the former.
They could improve people’s lives with very little marginal effort, yet, they choose not to. This is illegal when you’re building accommodations in the physical world, but sadly, mostly legal in the digital world.
I don't see the conspiracy to create voice assistants that don't work very well which is what you seem to be complaining about and which, as far as I can see, pretty much everyone on the thread agrees with. Voice assistants just aren't very good so they're mostly mildly useful for people who don't need them for anything important. I'm not sure what you would necessarily do differently to make it more useful for people with disabilities other than making it better, in which case maybe I could actually use it for something useful in my car.
The above example was a purchase confirmation sent via email. Why couldn’t the device just read it out loud? That’s literally the one thing it’s good at, and I’m sure a blind person would appreciate it.
The reason they don’t is not a conspiracy. It’s because they never considered the needs of the disabled, as many do.
I actually agree with that example. If I make a purchase etc. on a voice device, I expect an ACK by voice as well.
> an edge case
Not really: that person could have easily assumed that she "did not need to own a computer, nor know how to use one", as she may have easily assumed that no random "rambling" uttered into a computerized microphone could ever trigger expenses. It's a justifiable expectation.
How was the account setup in first place? Did she go to store, pick up device. Go home and read it her information and credit card number to create an account?
Update.. I tried just "order dog food" and it picked a decent choice based off my order history and then I could have said "buy this". So to be fair (with a device with a screen) it performed quite well.
Good that you tried it.
There are plenty of ways to make the interface very usable and reliable. Fixating on the voice UI is absolutely the wrong way to see it. The real problem is that your "assistant" doesn't actually work for you.
> More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.
It's a recommendation engine at that point, so what I assume it will do is buy you the products that Amazon is pushing or that have paid to be recommended. Does Alexa handle the website's small print to the effect of "there may be other vendors selling this product for a lower price than the vendor we're recommending."
If you have FireTV, then I'd be happy to use voice to do searches to show on it (the same way you can tell Alex to "show me comedy movies" or "search for X on Youtube" and have it show up on a FireTV device), but yeah, I can't imagine I'll ever use it to order something. Reordering something I've ordered before maybe, as long as I can be sure it will actually re-order the exact same thing.
> "Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow"
This is Amazon we’re talking about. The cheapest best reviewed dog food probably has 4K excellent reviews saying it’s the best cheap coat hangar anyone has ever seen.
Short version: Alexa supports third parties extending it with "Skills" apps which may be commercial. Paid functionality may be enabled via verbal confirmation via an in-app purchase[1]. Paid functionality may be one-time or recurring.
Her sister caught the corresponding email just before the paid subscription would have started. The documentation says developers must mark skills targeted at kids and those aren't eligible to have this flow enabled.
[1] https://developer.amazon.com/es-MX/docs/alexa/paid-skills/ov...
edit to add -- that was all presented without comment. But having a device that can start up a recurring subscription if anyone says "yes" to one prompt exist at all, and having the toggle for the feature on by default and in options is in the "no thanks" column for me.
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.
Always bet on religion.
Some of the most profitable early apps on the apps stores were Bible apps. People love their religions and will happily spend money on following them.
People like what they like. Religion, games, tv shows-- people will spend huge amounts on all these things if they find value in it. That value isn't always apparent to others. Also I really wonder how many of those users don't know they're paying for a subscription
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.
And things like DarkSky actually involve continuing to provide an appreciable service, a subscription model is quite reasonable. I have no problem with subscriptions for things with substantial back ends.
Was that before or after the "I am rich" app? It cost something like 10000 USD I recall.
Yeah, Amazon is terrible about this. It claims that it must have had the user confirm the purchase, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t. I order from Amazon about once a year, and the last time I did, they ran the, “Would you also like to sign up for Prime while making this order?” scam on me. I hit the button and immediately realized what I had done. I hit the back button before the next page loaded, but it was too late. I already had an email saying I had signed up without confirming anything or agreeing to any terms of service. Luckily I only had to go through about 3-5 pages of “Are you really sure you want to cancel?” And “how about we just suspend the service but don’t cancel it,” before I was allowed to cancel it. This company is disgusting.
Be smarter than a smart speaker by never purchasing one. Why put an always on snitch in your home? Such convivence is a trap.
Because the QOL from one is insane for me. While I’m cooking, I can set timers and look up conversions (one big country that produces a lot of internet content, including recipes, uses the most insane units). Everything else is a nice bonus, but those parts are major.
That said, I want to replace Alexa with something fully local, but the supply chain issues are currently a hindrance.
> Because the QOL from one is insane for me.
You have an “insane” QOL then if having a manual kitchen timer or a simple conversion chart on the wall would be a major difference.
At least with the manual kitchen timer, you can always know how much time is left just by looking. Set a ten minute timer on an Alexa, you have to threaten it with violence to keep the timer visible for more than 30 seconds of it, and that doesn’t always work either. I went so far as to literally turn off every single thing I could from the display and yet it’ll prefer showing a content less main screen over just keeping the timer displayed.
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 changes how much X of that unit means.
> 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!
And you're desperately coming up with nonsensical solutions that aren't as practical in any meaningful way.
You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems or not using US based recipes is trivial compared to asking for the conversion out loud and getting it immediately? Yeesh!
EDIT: even going back to your timer comment (to which you completely ignored the response), your 'trivial' solutions effectively boil down to 'get more kitchen space'. Totally trivial.
> 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 you completely ignored the response
I’m under no obligation to rebut every thing someone says, whether I find it correct or not. I said why I hate using Alexa for timers, I didn’t feel the need to go any further there.
This whole conversation is pretty pointless and "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" demonstrates exactly why.
Having an Alexa and asking it how many grams are in 1 1/4 cups of white wine vinegar is easier than having 2 sets of measuring cups. It's easier than having 1 set of measuring cups.
0 measuring cups takes up 0 space and I have no use for them. I use a bowl and a scale. That's easier for me than messing with measuring cups and having more crap to clean.
> This whole conversation is pretty pointless
Couldn’t agree more. Knew I should have backed away after my first post in this tree, the only one I stand 100% behind out of context of the rest of the replies around it.
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.
No one said it was the only way, you seem personally offended no one is keen on your weird alternatives though
> no one is keen on your weird alternatives though
The karma on the posts says otherwise, but thank you for your opinion!
Not a single person arguing against you has ever said it's the only way.
You just can't comprehend the fact some people think it's more convenient to use a voice triggered device when cooking than have numerous conversion charts or multiple measuring devices (especially in kitchens where space is at a premium. Let alone messy hands).
> 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.
> 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!?
Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better. That way your measurements will be consistent from day to day, so you can learn and make adjustments--"This recipe calls for 300g flour, but the dough was a bit loose last time--I'll try 315g instead." (In practice I'd probably first adjust the liquid content rather than the flour amount, but you get the idea).
If you're measuring 2.5 cups of flour one day you might get 317g and another day you might get 362g, so you can't even make the same consistency dough twice.
If you're simply trying to follow volumetric recipes, then volume-to-mass conversions are useless because you'd be trying to follow the recipe with more precision than the person who wrote the recipe in the first place. It's like converting "1 meter" to "1000 millimeters"; it's false precision from not being careful with significant figures. The recipe says "1 cup of flour" and the bot says that means 120 grams of flour. But that's false precision, specifically because volumetric measurement of flour is inherently imprecise. There is no way of knowing the recipe author actually used 120 grams of flour.
However, you mention that you iterate and refine these recipes, effectively writing your own recipes using volumetric recipes only as a starting point. In this case, the conversions have real utility. But if you're doing it right, these are conversions you only need to apply once per recipe, after which you'll never use that original volumetric recipe again. Such once-and-done tasks don't really seem worth automating to me, but for each their own I guess.
I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I've never tried, requiring thousands of conversions. Even if each conversion is only done once it's absolutely worth automating.
You're not cooking hundreds of recipes at once; I'd just convert them when I need them.
Which is what I do, with the help of automation.
whatever floats your boat, but it sounds a bit overkill to me.
As a european, I notice how imperial units are sometimes creeping back in. Even hating the crappy illogical mess, you learn to get some feeling just by exposure. Feet divided by 3 is about a meter, and 4 inch is 10cm. A mile is 1.5km.
For some reason I can remember pounds as 1/2 kg, but can never figure out lb without looking it up and finding it is also pounds.
A while ago, a local computer store mixed up feet and inch, and announced things like 14 feet laptop screens. I was the first to tell them, the mistake had been there for a month. It turns out non-USians know what a screen of size 14 is supposed to look like, and the word 'inch' behind it is treated like meaningless gibberish.
Anything that you use often enough can be memorized. A cup of flour is 120g, for example. But I use something like molasses maybe 5 times a year, so I'm not going to remember how much a cup of molasses weighs.
(I use molasses as an example because, due to how sticky it is, I much prefer to measure it directly into my mixing bowl by weight rather than using a liquid measuring cup).
> Yes, converting a cup of flour to 120g of flour is absolutely better.
Yes, but you do that once and done and then continue using the recipe in the future with the new quality measurement (adjusting as needed on future cooks). OP was advocating for using their Alexa to convert every time they cooked, specifically when their hands were full of raw sausage for example.
Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often. I have hundreds of recipes in my file that I haven't gotten around to trying yet, I could easily make a new recipe every day for a year.
I use a recipe app that has built-in conversions I can configure, but if I'm making a recipe out of a paper book I sometimes use Alexa to do conversions for me. Ideally I'd do all the conversions before I got my hands dirty, but that doesn't always happen.
> Maybe they make new recipes on a regular basis, so they're doing it once per recipe but still fairly often.
Then memorize the conversions. It’s not that hard. Or you know, plan ahead and convert before cooking. Or simply just own up to the fact that the only reason an Alexa is a “insane QOL improvement” for this use case is SOLELY because you’ve rationalized it as such. This horse is now more than sufficiently beaten, so I’m backing away.
I could memorize dozens of conversions, or I can outsource that mental load to a computer. The latter is a nice quality of life improvement.
Most baking recipes that use volumetric units actually use standardize mass units converted in a conventional way (based on material and form) to volumetric units, because the recipes are done by pros for the kind of newbs that disproportionately consume recipes. They aren't imprecise measures they are measures for people who are more comfortable with imprecise tools.
If you prefer to work in mass, you reverse the conversion.
One of my greatest cookbook-purchase disappointments was an English translation of a popular Italian cookbook, which converted all the mass measurements for ingredients like flour in the original to absurd volume measurements--"2 cups plus 5 tablespoons plus 3/4 teaspoon". The conversion can be reversed as you mention, of course, but it pains me just to read the recipes.
>Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit
For baking, I'll generally weigh and, for flour, pretty much always. However, I use measuring cups all the time for other cooking where recipes may not even give a weight equivalent to a volume of something.
That's fair. In many recipes volumes can be taken as vague suggestions.
"Alexa, time remaining".
The fact you call this mini feature of setting a timer (which is equally available on your phone via voice) "QOL" is fascinating to me
Setting a time, setting alarms, playing music, turning lights on and off, controlling media, (eg Netflix), checking the weather, etc. I'm just focusing on the universal use cases, and excluding varying degrees of niche usesnlike interactively displaying recipes and saying the rosary.
Especially in rooms where you don't already have a sound system, it's really a no-brainer. And I question that you've ever interacted with a smartphone if you think either the responsiveness or the convenience (not everybody is glued to their phone, and sometimes it's in the other room).
This need people have to think everything is either super-tubular-amazing or completely-useless-dross is _exhausting_. For anybody interested in understanding instead of posturing online to fill some emotional void, it's plainly obvious how smart speakers could be a modest improvement to QoL for many people.
I'm definitely in the middle ground somewhere. I do think they're mostly disappointing. That said, they understand properly phrased commands well enough and are somewhat useful, if hardly essential, for a variety of simple tasks.
>Especially in rooms where you don't already have a sound system, it's really a no-brainer.
I'm going to want some sort of speaker in my bedroom--used to have a CD player--and a smart speaker is as useful a candidate as anything, and it can function as an alarm clock as well.
Yea, it really is a no-brainer for a modest QoL improvement, unless you have objections to the privacy implications. I'm really just losing tolerance for this tendency to only express dumb, low-dimensional opinions that are so heavily detached from reality, like the GP comment's claim that they can't comprehend it having nonzero value to someone's workflows.
I wonder if it's the same dynamic that's contributing tk the polarization of political discourse: the structure of information flow in the social media era rewards being punchy, simplistic, and hysterical. The incentives feel inescapable for the masses of people out there that are too hollow to hold beliefs or engage with reality in any meaningful way.
Doing it on my phone involves taking my phone out of my pocket or figuring out where I left it. Doing it on my alexa devices means mindlessly speaking out loud anywhere in my house, also when my hands are full or messy.
It affects QOL when you get used to it along with a wide range of other features which are similarly tiny by themselves (turning the TV on/off; changing volume; searching for something on my FireTV instead of using the virtual keyboard; turning lights on/off; using it as an alarm clock; telling my son in his room upstairs that dinner is ready without yelling; having a single command to turn of the lights and turn on a playlist to fall asleep to) but that combined adds up to a whole lot reduced friction.
Yeah. Those are the sort of occasionally handy things that Alexa is somewhat useful for. But QoL? (I don't even generally use it as a timer in the kitchen as opposed to spending 5 seconds to set a timer by hand that shows me a countdown.)
The phone is even more of a snitch than is an Echo or what have you.
Well, using your phone as a voice assistant is using a voice assistant…
It's very very useful when you're cooking, they explained that pretty clearly imo.
My main usecase for Alexa is also multiple timers while cooking. It's very useful - prior, I would juggle multiple independent timers on microwaves/stoves/fridge.
I find nowadays most of the US produced content I use also lists weights in grams so no need for conversion.
I think it's definitely become more common, especially for baking. Digital scales are small and cheap and, if I'm going to work in weight anyway, I'd rather do it in grams than ounces (which would probably be mixed in with some volumetric units for small quantities).
> I can set timers and look up conversions
What you seem to be needing takes an old tablet and a slice of an evening of coding...
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.
> 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.
> is probably lower than you seem to suggest (if you are already proficient in Java)
So in other words it's probably not lower than suggested.
And certainly higher than the skills required to order and plug in a home assistant that offers a superior interface (doesn't require clean and free hands)
True it is that the technologist engineers, in a way, to celebrate laziness. But on the other hand, it does not take a hacker to «order and plug in».
Now, the context is more on drawbacks, and it was the very poster to note an intention to «replace [it] with something fully local».
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.
Boggles my mind that anyone buys these things.
At the risk of sounding like a drug dealer, have you tried one?
The main reason why I'll probably never buy an Alexa is because it sucks at the specific things I need it to do, but I concede that there's something liberating about just yelling at the computer and getting a reply. If I'm about to leave and I don't know which jacket to pick, being able to yell "Alexa, what's the weather like?" keeps me from switching contexts and losing my train of thought. It may not sound like much, but once you combine a bunch of small tasks it adds up.
I just don't see those tradeoffs adding up for me. My days in the Bay Area taught me to dress in layers and always have extra layers when going out anyway, although I know it was just one example you were giving.
I don't even like to speak around them because I assume they are archiving every voice sample forever.
That's the thing, you won't really know how much they add up until you start using one. Even then it took a long time before I used it as much as I do now. My son uses it even more, e.g. preferring to ask it to do maths rather than opening up a calculator app.
But frankly "hands free" timers/reminders/alarms alone is enough of a killer feature for me alone.
It's incredibly useful for people with disabilities
I can see that. But I hope it never becomes standard.
I find them aggravating because of my disability.
An acquaintance has made every light in their home integrated into Google's services. I have a mild speech impediment and Google seems incapable of recognising my speech as speech. "Hey Google. HEY GOOGLE. Hey Gooooogle! Turn off the lights." I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. "Hey Goooooooogle! Turn. Off. The. Lights.". I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.
And of course, when I gave in and used the switch, my host immediately came upstairs and chastised me for causing device errors to pop up in the network. Use voice!
Not terribly impressed, to say the least. And don't get me started on the bank's voice recognition system on the phone.
You're an edge case, like the old, the young, the computer-illiterate, the very computer-literate, people who speak English but deal with a lot of things that aren't in English, and so on...
I'm struggling to understand their stance :(. The point of "smart" is that it makes things easier. If it doesn't make things easier, what's the point? And as a guest, it had better make it easier for you.
For what it's worth, which obviously isn't much, all my public rooms have smart switches as well as being able to be controlled by voice. And if someone needs to use the physical switch (they're all still uncovered and accessible) then that's a failure of my system not of whoever needed to bypass it.
The main benefit to me of smart is that I can automate transitions, so it's that much less likely that anyone will need to manually adjust the lighting.
This is a problem because your acquaintance have used smart bulbs instead of replacing their switches with smart switches. Lightwave rf switches and similar can be controlled with Google/Alexa or their own app, but still have buttons to push as well. I absolutely understand your frustration with that.
In terms of understanding, it'll improve. I have a broad Scandinavian accent. My Alexa handles that just fine for the most part. It's not more than a few years ago most speech recognition struggled with that (I remember a phone booking line that insisted on recognising me saying "London" as "Birmingham")
What about smartphones, not just yours, but also those around you with Hey Siri or Hey Google turned on? I don’t see a huge difference.
I turn them off, and disable their ability to function completely. Unless I am in control and the processing is local, no ambient computing.
> set up by my sister... and is attached to her... account
> can inadvertently enter into premium subscriptions simply by saying yes
So this individual (sister to a journalist at the Guardian, which facilitates information spreading and highlights the possibility of under the radar cases) gives somebody else a voice controlled machine linked to a credit card. What could possibly.
Reminds me of having accounts for kids with the payment details...
Seems like the email should be the confirmation, and without the confirmation the trial stops. Opting in with a yes alone, when my four year olds can now ask Alexa for stuff, seems like a terrible design choice by itself.
Never mind prayers. The new frontier for AI is confessions. And Alexa should sell indulgences.
Seriously though, how long before we see AI-powered therapists? Or do they exist already?
How good do they have to be? Even ELIZA apparently has (minor) demonstrable therapeutic value.
https://sites.google.com/view/elizagen-org/the-original-eliza
Anything I don’t expect to use to make purchases I try to enable whatever “child lock” features it might have.
Does God answer prayers from robots?
We made robots in our image, which makes us gods to the robots. And what is a crash log or a compiler error or a core dump, if not a prayer from the machine begging for salvation? Every Jira ticket you've ever closed has been a prayer answered successfully, and every WONTFIX is surely interpreted by the machine as "the sysadmin works in mysterious ways".
Machines can pray on our behalf according to Tibetan Buddhism.
https://github.com/PixelsCommander/PrayerWheel
http://pixelscommander.com/interactive-revolution/can-comput...
god runs on a freemium service
Oh this dystopian future.
> Thank goodness she didn’t ask Alexa to say the Rosary
The highlight of the article there.