Hacker News Reader

Comment by WesleyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

Same as was most everyone else has listed: kitchen timer, play music, occasionally ask her the time. A new skill was recently released that lets you control your alarm.com system and I have Vivint (ugh) which is backed by Alarm.com so it works. I've played with that a bit, but not as much I'd like. Oh and shopping list from time to time, but the mobile app is terrible so it's not much fun to use once you're actually in the store and trying to shop.

View on HN

Her. Beautiful. :)

Hm yes, a female that is utterly servile and obedient. Perfect.

Her, as in a machine to which I have developed an emotional connection which happens to have a female name as it's own. The tie is between the name Alexa and the user. Had amazon named it AZ5000, this person would probably have called it it. But her shows a bond. One which is uncommon between humans and machines.

My comment is on the beauty of the bond between the user and the machine. Do not read anymore into it or give it negative connotations.

Fair enough. My reply was sarcastic BTW, but highlighting that Amazon chose to give a female name and persona to a device that does what it is told without question. Is it possible to reassign its gender and call it "Alex" and give it a male voice?

I do think that emotional bonds between humans and machines are fundamently unhealthy, but that's got a long history so it's nothing new (e.g. sailors calling their ships "her").

I apologize for not understanding your response as sarcastic.

> I do think that emotional bonds between humans and machines are fundamently unhealthy

Is this an emotional bond because the OP said "her", or do you sense that for some other reason? Do you say this only in the context of high technology, the 21st century, or does a person talking about their car "She purrs like a kitten"[0] elicit the same response in you?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X919tRgip3k

I think perhaps I would be more comfortable with a Star Wars droid style name like 'AZ', tbh

A2-Z2? :)

This comment squicks me out so, so much. Not so much that the Echo as a product has been humanized, but because that seems like it was its purpose. You have this little thing sitting in your house that you bought, nominally to make your life easier. But all that other "make your life easier" stuff is icing on the real cake here, which is Amazon having, quite literally, a voice in your house that will sell you stuff at the slightest opportunity. Was that Amazon's goal? Maybe not intentionally, but it seems to be the end effect.

I don't know why that comment made me think that, but it casts the Echo in a much less wholesome light for some reason. I suppose it's because once people start to humanize it, they will start to bond with it, which means they are less likely to get rid of it. That comes off as just a little ethically dubious to me.

They certainly did that on purpose. Humanizing the machine is how they can sell it as an always available "assitant".

I don't care about the amazon Alexa. I found the bond beautiful. Thats it. :)

Sell you stuff? It isn't speaking to you on its own. You're asking it to do this for you and then it does.

>Amazon having, quite literally, a voice in your house that will sell you stuff at the slightest opportunity

I don't see how the second half of this statement follows the first. There's a big difference between "can" and "will". The Echo doesn't do this. You could make this statement about anything. With a forced OTA update, your phone could become nothing but an advertisement tomorrow morning. That new intern your company hired? They could secretly just be a shill for Microsoft who will try to sell you upgraded office software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com