Amazon Sells Out of Echo Speakers in Midst of Holiday Rush
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There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are?
I am currently typing this from a 2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router. Last week, iOS decided to randomly delete all of my saved locations in the Maps app. I've never had stable, fast internet anywhere I've lived in the US in the past 8 years - every few days or so, shit just doesn't work for a bit. I've owned things like a Nest or Philips Hue in the past, and they randomly reset to factory mode or desync'd from my phone . Half the time I try to play my PS4, some stupid patch fails to download, or PSN is down, etc.
The more things like the Amazon Echo I would have in my house, the more irritating my daily life would be - because I don't want to deal with the 5% of the time where I have to repeat my request 5 times for it to tell me the weather, or the connection to the Amazon server is lost and I can't play any music. This 5% of the time across dozens of devices results in being annoyed 100% of the time.
All of this is why I mainly use a record player to listen to music at home (no DRM, no problem with servers being down or albums removed remotely), really like my GameCube for video games (put a disk in and play, no patches to download), still exclusively buy paper books, am fine with dumb light switches, and so on.
If you think this entire thing is ridiculous, I fully agree - I make my living contributing to this industry! But either people are living through these same annoyances as I am and they're fine with it (in which case please teach me your secrets), or somehow I'm getting a worse experience with technology than 99.9% of the population (I guess statistically such a person must exist, and it is me).
1. You have sucky Internet. Bad Internet is going to cause numerous issues. From what I've heard it's hard to get a really good Internet connection in the US. But in many places in the world, great Internet connections are available at low cost.
Bad Internet means devices are going to have issues with firmware updates. Things will be more flaky in general, data will be lost part way through transfer and you'll hit issues with devices not robust to this more often.
2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works.
I'm not shocked if somebody drops $3,000+ on a MBP, and can't reliably connect to an AP from the same vendor, let alone any other vendor.
(Don't even ask about the quality of any of their "1.0" products - full of bugs every time, newest example is the touch bar.)
For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. They all have their own quirks. D-Link tends to experience intermittent packet loss, Netgear has sudden intermittent loss of radio signal, ASUS routers just simply stop routing packets every few weeks or so. For off-the-shelf, we tend to see the fewest complaints from Linksys wireless devices, but their wired devices are pretty unreliable.
Engenius, which you'll see in a lot of commercial deployments, are over-priced and the radios in them just give up and go home after about a year or so.
This is one of my favorite soapboxes, so I gotta be careful not to get carried away, but I really sympathize with the GP upthread. Mail software, iOS, MacOS, Windows of course, networking, printers, phone systems, camera systems, databases, the whole kit & kaboodle is full of infuriating behavior and it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.
I'm currently in the process of selling my break-fix business, because it's an infinite suck-hole that's stupidly difficult to make money on, and moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.
I personally cannot believe how terrible consumer-grade WiFi has stayed. You'd think that some of these manufacturers would be upping their QC at some point: I've experienced all the random undiagnosable problems you've described where nothing short of rebooting the router fixes things, and only until things break again later. I currently own one of those fancy Netgear Nighthawk routers and after months of going through PCI-Express cards on my desktop machine where random packet loss made gaming impossible (but not on any other devices even in the same room), I finally gave up and bought a 100ft cable off of Monoprice and ran it over some doorframes with tape.
I see a lot of buzz around all this "pro-sumer" mesh network gear[1], but I haven't had the kind of sprawling living situation that justifies it yet. (Though I did just recommend that article to a coworker on a very large property, and he's hoping it fixes his many, many problems.)
> it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.
Hear hear. To OP's original point, I can't believe how much stuff simply doesn't work like it's supposed to. I always thought it was my high-tech demands for plugging together services/software that weren't necessarily built for each other (e.g. Google Music on a Roku, or Snapchat on an Android phone), but after going home last Thanksgiving, it's unbelievable to me how many mainline iOS scenarios are completely broken. Every conversation I had with relatives was "oh yeah, that's easy to fix...lemme see...wait, what?...that doesn't make any sense...google-fu...huh, I guess there's some random problems with this...let's try deleting/re-adding your account...okay, that didn't do anything...wtf..." Throw in some "you got your iCloud password wrong twice and now we're locked out, time to go through insane account recovery", and I was ready to move to the woods and give up technology forever.
> moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.
Hahaha, grass is greener, man. Be prepared to be not fixing A LOT more bugs. ;)
[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-wi-fi-mesh-networking-...
I personally think someone has put an apple-curse on him, he blames it on cheap batteries.
I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc).
I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had.
Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had.
I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most.
I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath.
[0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.
Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi.
Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel?
But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.
I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?
I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.
The RT-AC68U or RT-AC88U are better choices (because they use Broadcom?). My RT-N66U has been a flawless AP for years.
Thank you for the tip!
Well, I work from home, and my wi-fi network (different routers across several homes, mostly Mac clients) has always worked.
The only thing that had issues was the DSL connection crapping out (usually once per 2 weeks or so) and having to restart the router to re-sync.
But no wi-fi issues, or machines disconnecting etc.
That said I always lived in single floor apartments (but with concrete walls). So I never had to try to e.g. bring wifi to the basement or so.
Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.
It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc.
Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.
My setup at home is:
Motorola Surfboard SB6183
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X
Uniquiti Unifi AP
I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP.
If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try:
- partner with Ubiquiti to white label their gear
- build an app to make the APs easy to setup
- work hard to become the Wirecutter's top pick
- sell them on Amazon
Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?
I think the OP question touched on problems existing, but small enough for many to "accept them" as status quo, and him/her questioning if he/she was the only one bothered by them. I am one of those people too. Thus my question of whether or not you actually have no problems, or simply "no problems requiring intervention, other than waiting/reconnecting".
Correct. It just works. The base station I have is also really old at this point. It is the larger flat one without simultaneous 5g bought ~2008. I bought it after I went through some of the other cheaper options that would cause my VPN to drop randomly throughout the day.
I want to upgrade to something with the newer standards and more speed, but I'm worried about going back to an unstable connection. I've been thinking about either the Netgear R6400 or the Google wifi 3 pack.
Our internet has gone down (Uverse fiber), but that's outside of our home and there's little we can do about it.
My phone - a Nexus 5X - is probably the flakiest bit of tech that I have. I reboot it every 10 days or so. The next worst is the AT&T DVRs. They are terribly designed, painful to use, and have bugs.
Most of the tech in my house (Canon printer, QNAP raid box, Hikvision cameras, PS4, Roku, Wii-U, Onkyo receiver, Samsung and Toshiba televisions, iPads, iPhones, Samsung Tablet, Thinkpad, MacBook, gaming PC, Kindles, etc...) have basically no recurring problems. We've had brown outs where the power goes down but not off that made me have to go reboot everything, but other than that, no real problems. Our VitaMix blender does blow one breaker, but that's not really a tech issue.
a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.
testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.
Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.
I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.
0: https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ac/ 1: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wifi-signal/id525912054?mt=1...
> Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses.
... I think fits with the question the OP asked, and my follow up to. Since it's not a binary, and people have different levels of acceptance, and different levels of work put in to getting that number closer to 1 than 0, that is my issue. A stable router and wired devices "just works" for at least the last couple of decades.
I can likely get a better WLAN than the one I have, but I have already put in more time than I'd like to. At this point if I can't throw money at it, I'll rather just throw money at installing cat6a, which I did for the stuff I cared about (desktop, htpc, server).
> I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time.
Contradicting as it is to your first statement, do you really mean this though? Or is it simply "works well enough, within reasonable efforts, means and expectations"?
There was a cool blog recently on HN about switching to Ubiquiti HW: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...
I hate solving problems like this at home. Part of the challenge is that I don't have the same resources, though.
> Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise?
I hate this X-factor of WiFi with a passion. It's something that legitimately can vary in the time domain, either periodic or aperiodic. I have no good way to rule it out.
I have started using home powerline adapters and found them to be effective and reliable high throughput, low-latency connections to the smart TV/set top devices in my home.
Also, I hate using voice assistants. By the time I say "weather" I could have typed it into the browser (and 1/10 times it doesn't hear me properly and gives me some jibberish I'm not interested in).
This discussion also reminds me of this thread, see also my list of links there:
It's not just about markets being small. Many times it's about designers pushing form over function, and people not realising what they're losing.
Take induction hobs, for instance. I had to go out of my way to get one with mechanical knobs, as opposed to touch controls, and it's such a huge UX improvement that I now feel handicapped in other people's kitchens. Yet I've had several friends and colleagues express genuine surprise that this is even possible; they've only ever seen induction hobs with touch, and thus assumed it's necessary to have touch on induction.
They're easier to clean. They look better. They're possibly cheaper.
If you want to cook, you'll have to take portable appliances onto the deck or into the basement because kitchens are solely about looking good now.
There are snarky analogies to web design in the above, BTW.
You add supposedly safer as well. Since no heat is generated unless the pan is on the stove, it's safer for kids. Apparently the jury is still out on the technology since it uses electromagnetic currents:
Another Dangerous Cooking Appliance – Induction Stovetops - http://breastcancerconqueror.com/another-dangerous-cooking-a...
Health Issues with Induction Cooktops - http://www.livestrong.com/article/312052-health-issues-with-...
Is Induction Cooking Safe? - http://www.magdahavas.com/is-induction-cooking-safe/
I just like to think I have a keen sense of where technology doesn't make things better, just more complex.
I still mostly use paper books, paper to take notes, have a physical journal, whiteboard, and calendar, and generally not a lot of home automation. It's not even that the technologies don't work so much as they don't offer anything I need -- eg, why manage the overhead of a digital online calendar between multiple accounts when some paper and a thumbtack works fine to share plans for meals with roommates?
I just don't think complexity is the same as progress, which makes a lot of modern technology sort of unappealing -- it's complex (and hence error prone) solutions to simple problems, usually with a side helping of exploitative psychology and selling your personal information.
Pass.
On the other hand: I pay $10 a month for unlimited music, $8 for tons of movies and tv shows, I get most of the stuff I buy in the mail in two days, Google Maps can navigate me anywhere, and I do all of my trading instantly online with low fees.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
1. Some people customize more, so their setup tends to operate in ways that weren't as heavily tested, or anticipated by the makers.
2. Some people are more technologically fluent, and instinctively avoid common failure modes, and/or tend to get everything humming along with minimal effort.
3. Some people push their tech harder, or more thoughtlessly, like people who open ninety browser tabs, or are oblivious to the fact that their laptop fan runs constantly.
4. Some people like to have the bleeding edge latest tech, which has had less time for the kinks to work out.
5. Some people are more bothered by little glitches.
This is me. I get irrationally furious when, oh, KDE decides one day to consume all available system memory and then hang and I have to ssh into my own laptop to reboot it. (It's an otherwise reliable, not heavily customized system, so not so much an example of #4.)
Meanwhile I see people walking around all the time with totally busted smartphone screens like it's no big deal. They just don't seem to mind very much if email stops working for a while or they have to reboot a computer or whatever.
As an analogy from another totally separate yet strangely parallel hobby, back when social networking meant ham radio morse code radios, I can personally assure you that every ham radio operator who can not solder a PL-259 RF connector, can not crimp an Anderson Powerpole DC connector, or can not solder surface mount components makes certain via social networking (over radios, back then) that everyone knows they can not, and that makes everyone think no one can perform those tasks because negative reports is all they hear endlessly repeated. However the reality is all those tasks are pretty easy and problems are rare and usually its possible to learn how to do it correctly with little time investment.
None the less, its a common "design pattern" of social media / networking that once the numerical problem count exceeds, say, the tribal count number around 100, the entire population no matter how many billions will all "know" that problem is universal for everyone, while perhaps they're the only person out of billions not experiencing the reported problem. Meanwhile the reality of the problem is there are (billions minus one hundred) experiencing total success.
I'm just saying its a social networking or social media problem, not a wifi problem.
I think every time I work on a type of software for work, I can never trust it again. I have javascript disabled by default, images disabled by default, cookies disabled by default. Smartphones are too inconvenient to carry around, so I use a Nokia and keep a smartphone plugged in at home for tinder.
Even on my workstation, I got fed up with desktop environments so I don't use them.
Echo, at least, does not need to be charged.
Man, my life is good. The secret? Get good Internet. Wire what you can. Get a damned good wifi router for the rest. Know your tools.
I buy paper books because they're much cheaper but take my Kindle when traveling.
But I'm also in the same boat with using older "dumb" tech. People can't believe I buy cd's still, but hey, you can get nearly anything used on amazon for a few bucks and it's DRM free!
I just get annoyed if something that would work instantly otherwise doesn't work at all. Say I want to put on music while cooking - putting on a record or CD would take 5 seconds, and work 100% of the time. But if Spotify is down, or asks me to update my password, or has removed the album I've played every week for the past year from their library, or I have to re-sync my bluetooth speaker, etc., then now I'm dealing with this instead of getting on with my cooking.
Whether this expectation is unreasonable or not is clearly a personal matter, but for me it seems like a pretty basic thing to demand from the objects I own.
That's not my experience at all; the damn scratches in CDs made me switch to an MP3 player as soon as I could afford one, back in the early 2000s.
Streaming audio is still shitty, that's true, but MPD reading off of a local disk actually works reliably.
I love those people who choose to purchase the bottom-tier internet, and then bitterly complain about how terrible the customer service is. "So open your wallet and get an ISP with good customer service" -> cue look of hate from them.
I had a hunch that it must somehow be "me" and not my ISP, so I replace ALL of my network gear with Ubiquiti stuff. I got a UniFi USG (handles actual routing), UniFi Switch (US-8-150W), UniFi AP AC Pro (Wireless AP), CloudKey (runs the software that powers all this, but it's not strictly needed, you can run it on your PC/Mac as well just to setup things and it doesn't need to be running 100% of the time).
Since I've done this I've had ZERO disconnects. Not a single one. No WiFi problems either. I'm not sure if it would fix what you're experiencing, but I thought I'd share my experience.
I've been much happier with my home worker after I traded in my all in one AP + Router/Firewall with a discrete firewall (pfSense) and Ubiquiti AP that's only an AP, nothing else.
To try to counter potential selection bias I'll give my boring answer: I would be really pissed if those things kept happening to me, so you're not particularly intolerant, but they don't. I get hard to fix wifi problems maybe once a year.
The only things I have that aren't wired are iDevices, my laptop, a petnet feeder, a harmony hub and the echo. I hope amazon comes out out with an ethernet adapter like chromecast has. I don't have much hope for the other two.
I am cranky when I know someone could have fixed a bug or UI defect and since I know what the problem is, have some good clues as to their thinking on the issue it makes me more cranky.
Also I'm getting older.
Regarding the Macbook, you might have a hardware defect. I changed the Wifi/Bluetooth adapter (Macstore) and it now works flawlessly. It used to drop weirdly on some Wifi networks.
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
As software has taken over everything, we can safely extend this to all technologies.
I use Ruckus Wireless WiFi paired with PFSense and HP Layer 2 & Layer 3 switching at home. I chose a building with 1Gbit fiber to my unit.
Things work great for me. The cost is crazy high for the typical consumer though. If I didn't run my own business from home I couldn't afford it.
The reason why many people love it (me and my family included) is that they don't think of it as technology but as a product.
In my family we are two grown ups, a 7 year old and a 3 year old. Google Home understand us all first time in most cases. The ones where it doesn't are so rare it's note even 5% of the time.
I look for technology which:
1) removes the layers of abstraction when it comes to interacting with it.
2) Helps with banale tasks such as weather (can't be underestimated, when you have kids), starting some random music (Play smooth jazz, play Pat Metheny, Play dance music), play latest episode of "Startups for the rest of us", play the news, timer when you cook, add things we need to buy, ask something we are unsure about.
3) Gives us back some of the tangibility of the physical products.
All these things can be done via your phone, but once you have a voice interface you realize how much faster and less intrusive it is.
These voice interfaces are not yet good enough for really detailed needs but for our mostly simple needs.
1) Q4 2015 MBP, top of the line - kernel thread crash on suspend, causing it to wake back up. Semi-random, kinda interesting except when it woke up in my bag and seemed to almost catch on fire ... repeatedly. People told me to take it to the Genius Bar .. I seriously doubted they could figure the issue out. It would've been a back to the factory situation (I sold it -- after verifying the hardware was still good of course).
2) Sometime in 2014-ish? I change the wireless bandwidth on a ubiquiti router at the office -- all the Macs go offline, Linux machines do not. Suggesting a bug in WiFi. This is not unusual for WiFi on any device (not just macs) in my experience. I disagree with the idea that it Just Works generally.
3) Macbook Pro 2013 - enabling IPv6 stack causes kernel crash when trying to disable.
4) and to make it clear I'm not just picking on Apple: Sony PS4 with a dual band 802.11a/b/g/n wireless router -- constantly drops connection. Figured out it was because of the 5GHz band. Had to set up a separate wireless network just for PS4 with an older router. Sony should put up some time and money to help fix these driver issues instead of leaving it entirely on BSD volunteers (assuming they're not using a custom driver, in which case they should, you know, fix it).
5) Making PSN a requirement was a terrible decision for the PS4: lizard squad DDoS the day after I got it. Updates kicking me out of PSN. Unable to log back in, etc. I will never buy another console gaming system with this requirement, if I can avoid it. If I can't I will do serious research first.
This is why I'm back to homebrewing/hacking hardware and putting Linux/BSD on all my stuff ... at least I then have a clue of how to debug this kind of weird shit, even if it is a PITA, and at least if things don't work, I can blame myself, rather than having to say I paid for it. Certainly no sense paying for premium consumer stuff either, even if you have the money. Spend it on something else.
No it's not just you.
Seems to be a question of disposition, in my circles at least. There was a bonus anecdote about how Alexa has ignored his girlfriend for a year though.
>2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router
I have had two different Macs that did this. I did a ton of research (those 5-10(!) year-old bookmarks in Pinboard are unsurprisingly dead) and found certain wifi chipsets had problems (which is why other people with the same model as you will say they've never had a problem). That said, when we moved into our new house a year ago I had to buy a new router and add an access point because of the step up in square footage and I haven't had a problem since.
Of course, that new router was one of the Netgear ones with the giant security hole that was revealed a couple of weeks ago . . .
There's a blog post that was on HN a few days back about it: https://www.troyhunt.com/ubiquiti-all-the-things-how-i-final...
For example, three dual band triple chain 802.11n/ac APs (https://routerboard.com/RBwAPG-5HacT2HnD) and a router (https://routerboard.com/RB750Gr3) have an MRSP of $330, including POE for the APs.
Roaming is very tough to get right unfortunately. Only the client devices can make a decision to roam, so without ugly hacks such as using a single channel / MAC / SSID to create a giant interfering WLAN, your options are limited. What you can do with Mikrotik is set up access rules to kick a client off an AP if the signal strength falls below a threshold, but as this is not client-initiated, there is a longer re-association time which could interrupt VoIP etc.
There are options such as 3rd party roaming clients for (eg https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.heleron.wi... for Android) which I'd consider. For laptops, most drivers have a "roaming aggressiveness" setting which can be tweaked. In general almost all devices should handle transient connectivity glitches fairly well, so kicking low signal clients off an AP shouldn't interrupt too much.
We used to use my Xbox One to watch DVDs and such. Oh, but since I don't play it that often when we settle down to watch the movie: 30 minute download and update. Movie night ruined.
I finally bought an old, dumb DVD player that first came out in 2005. We're much happier with that.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/5jh1em/103_patch_blac...
While waiting for the update, I wanted to comment on HackerNews, so I clicked on the 1Password icon in Google Chrome, and attempted to login. It crashed, and a bug report was sent to their team. I think I've come to expect that most software is poorly written. What further compounds that fact is a lot of it is not open-source. Tons of bugs are out there, with only a handful of people to actually fix them (when they have the time of course).
Also, I try to avoid consumer grade equipment when possible. I'll be switching to the Ubiquiti products soon enough, as I've heard nothing but positive remarks. The same issues exist in other fields as well. For example, a friend of mine does painting for a living. Consumer grade equipment like rollers and hand brushes can't even come close to expensive machinery such as a spray machine. Or a mechanic using a hydraulic lift on a vehicle versus common jack stands.
I like to believe that there is an AI out there that managed to avoid CAPTCHA and is messing with us at the worst moments.
Outside of that, big fan of it. Despite only using a few features.
I'm less bothered by flaws in implementation, and instead bothered by failing to live up to potential due to artificial limits.
For example, the original Xbox had Ethernet and a harddrive, but it's capabilities were completely hamstrung by the OS. It wasn't until the device was hacked did it really come into it's own (spawning XMBP=>XBMC=>(Kodi|Boxee|Plex|...).
I got the Echo when Amazon was offering it to select Prime members for $99, so I didn't have much expectations for it. I was happy that I could change the wake work (Because Alexa is the name of an ex-gf), and the kitchen timer, and news feature were more than enough for me.
Once they added Spotify integration, it was well worth the cost to me.
I could be partly to blame for that though because I don't like that fact that every thing they say into the echo is recorded and saved into the cloud so I limited what they could do with it. Don't want all my kids silly activities saved and tracked like that.
The Echo gets things wrong a lot more than 5%. I agree, that takes the fun out of it and becomes increasingly annoying. Sometimes, its quicker and easier to simply type in the search in Google.
I love my paper books!!
I still truly do not understand the full appeal of the IoT. I play with this stuff as a hobby, but I am always asking myself "would, I really use this in real life?" and 95% of the time the answer is no.
I think there's an entire world of record albums that never saw the light. Sites like discog makes me want to start a collection.
But I very much agree with what you wrote. I'm not sold on voice interfaces, that one time where it asks you "Sorry, can you repeat it again?" is the last time I'm using Google Now.
But more importantly I just feel like I look stupid talking to the air alone. Also feel like I have to strain my voice and focus when I'm talking to a machine which adds some friction.
I do miss the days when we didn't have such bloat. Games would load instantly and ready to play without signing into facebook or being awarded without doing anything.
I've been using macbooks for 5+ years. Have never had a wifi issue with Airport Extreme. Not even once.
it's possible that i'm not the target demographic, that i'm the only person who doesnt have literally everything in their home futuristically connected (locks, lights, windows, curtains, vacuums, etc) -- and that this is actually solving a huge problem for a lot of people. but that seems unlikely -- i live in a relatively tech-infested city (SF) and almost nobody i know has those things.
maybe i'm too old (27) to "get it"? get off my lawn??
I think older people love the idea of interacting with a computer with voice - it's way easier for someone to get a quick answer with voice if they're otherwise unfamiliar with navigating a smart phone or laptop (plus the added Star Trek "Computer, locate Commander Riker" aspect - with that added feeling of nostalgia, maybe).
EDIT: changed words for clarity
I do find it funny that the tech from a fictional post-scarcity society is being pioneered in the real world by a merchandise company (Amazon) and an advertising company (Google). Meanwhile, Microsoft is lagging behind despite Cortana (in my experience) having the best voice recognition of all the services, Siri included.
I have truly no idea why people buy these. I'm a tech nerd, I usually am an early adopter of newfangled technology. But this? I literally couldn't justify spending $5 on it.
I resisted for a long time, then bought an Echo, and I loved that so much that I bought a dot, then another, then a 3 pack for my kids for Christmas. It's great for timers, alarms, playing music, news, browsing Amazon, and so much more.
Being portable helps, especially with speakers that work so much better than phone speakers do.
FWIW, I'm a 38 year-old father of 3. I think that if you bought one, you would find yourself delighted (and surprised) by how fun it can be.
"Alexa, order a _____."
"I found 7 items matching ___..." and proceeds to go through the list.
It's crazy how quickly you get used to having it there. When I'm at a hotel or a friends house I almost get annoyed that it's not standing by for simple stuff like just reminding me to decouple from a task in a half hour - "Alexa set a timer for 30 minutes"
Lastly its super convenient if you are super engrossed in something but also want food. You can just yell "Alexa tell dominos to order my favorite". No going to the site or anything just one sentence and 20 minutes later you have pizza.
where does the music come from when you ok google it? I don't have a sonos or whatever set up in my house, so I use my Echo for this (the speaker is excellent) and playing spotify, playing tunein radio, playing pandora, setting kitchen timers when cooking and getting weather reports.
yeah you can get these in a million other ways, but it's just convenient to have in the kitchen.
The echo is always in the same exact spot, so there's no hunting for it, never a need for hands. It just works
Lights are still a gimmick.
The answer to this is: No.
The Echo and Google Smarthome don't require you to take it out of your pocket to interact with it. Walk in the door and it's listening. It sounds like a small difference but it is huge.
I think voice interfaces are very easily dismissed as for the lazy people, or a gimmick. Until you start using it on a daily basis. Then you start to realize how stupid it is to not be able to turn on your lights while both hands are overloaded with grocery bags (because two trips to the car is just never done!)
Stumbling in the dark waiting for Echo to process your command versus just having the lights turn on when you enter a room.
I suppose if the motion sensors had some extreme AI and could detect when I would want the lights on or off and make that decision before I verbalized it. But I'd probably want the voice interface as an override when the AI gets the wrong answer.
I also like the idea of "authenticating" via being present in my home. If my in laws are watching my son while I step out for a few minutes - they can talk to Alexa as easily as I can.
Most of those devices just don't have speakers/microphones cable of working reliably at room scale in real world conditions. They've certainly gotten better over the years but I doubt they will ever match the reliability of physically larger devices purpose built for the task.
> how many people have 50$ wifi connected bulbs? and isn't the most convenient way to turn on a light switch still just physically flipping the switch?
I don't think this is the killer app for the Echo but home automation is becoming pretty mainstream these days. Enough so that stores like Lowes, Home Depot, Target, etc stock bulbs, switchable outlets, starter kits, etc.
> isn't the most convenient way to turn on a light switch still just physically flipping the switch?
Not if you have your hands full or the switch happens to be on the other side of a dark room. Home automation is a novelty at first but once that wears off it becomes just another tool not very different from a light switch
Given I gave the Echo I had away, I'm hoping the next iteration of the Echo or Google Home device has the $2 of components required to implement this functionality so that it just works out of the box.
Most of the 'skills' (an appstore with absolutely zero quality control) are useless or extremely limited shovelware hidden behind archaic verbal rituals. I say verbal rituals because what you might consider a normal request, such as "Alexa, how much is Tesla stock selling for?", turns into the complex "Alexa, ask Cool ACME Stock Master what the current buying price of Tesla stock is".
It very much appears that instead of being able to infer what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely specific strings to extremely specific corresponding processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely frustrating as a user.
Using Alexa becomes natural. Re-phrasing the same thing thirty times until you get the intended result with the required phrasing moreso.
Really the only reason to buy it is so that you can control your Lifx lights and listen to streaming music on demand. The latter is quite good as long as you don't mind mediocre speakers or sound quality.
All of that said...there is, however, something to be said about the novelty factor of being able to ask for very basic dictionary / wikipedia lookups.
It very much appears that instead of being able to infer
what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely
specific strings to extremely specific corresponding
processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely
frustrating as a user.
If someone says "Alexa, we need more bread" how do you figure out which skill to delegate that to when the 'amazon', 'ebay', 'ocado', and 'asda' skills all report they can order products matching that query, the 'music' and 'video' skills report they can stream content matching that query, and the 'grocery list' skill reports it can add that to a grocery list?
If I say that, what I really mean is "Look at Ocado and Asda, if I have a delivery coming in the near future add my most-ordered full size loaf of bread to the order if it's not already present, otherwise add it to my grocery list and remind me when I'm leaving work tomorrow"
And that behaviour is bread-specific. If I'm ordering beer I want different behaviour - and if I'm ordering something personal, maybe I don't want my search broadcast to every retailer just to check if they can help with it.
> Alexa, we need more bread
< Should I order it through Ocado, Asda, Ebay or Amazon?
> Always use Asda for bread ("unless I tell you otherwise" is implied)
So I don't think we can really generalize Alexa's failings to the entire space.
Only if you have your phone on you, and at least I don't carry mine around at home.
Other than that, I don't know. I tried to get it to play a podcast today, but it wouldn't.
Powered on 100% of the time is the difference. The listening takes too much power for most devices still whereas echo's are always wired and listening. There are probably differences in the software as well but thats a big one. I guess the speaker is larger as well. Kinda like a beats pill audio quality (limited by size) with n always on mic.
But I think you are right, it's the small improvement over the phone, you always know where it is, and the microphones are designed for large area reception over phone microphones which are generally optimizes for closer sound sources. These small differences are valuable, even though you can get 90% of the functionality by just keeping your phone in the open.
Off the top of my head from last night while cooking dinner:
* "hey google, add olive oil to the grocery list"
* "hey google, set a timer for 15 minutes for rice"
* "hey google, play some Christmas music"
* "hey google, how much time is left on the rice"
I could have fumbled with pulling out my iphone for all of these, but I would have had to stop prepping dinner, wash my hands, and then mess with the phone. Instead, it just fits in the flow of what I am doing.
Also, your phone may be deep in a pocket, in a coat, or in your purse in the other room. Echo/Home is right there in the kitchen waiting for you.
Lastly, you have no battery worries. Want 12+ hours of music in the kitchen? No problem.
"play some Christmas music" doesn't work so well if you want to use Spotify -- it has to become "play some Christmas music from Spotify", which feels awkward.
"order X" defaults to Amazon, where I might want to voice-order groceries using Instacart or order a pizza using GrubHub/Uber Eats/whatever.
In Canada this just doers a google search, whereas "play Bruno Mars" fires up Spotify as expected.
I think these type of products may end up being better for the less tech obsessed. I'm thinking of getting one in the next year or so because I don't have my phone on me at all times when I'm at home and and I think that's true for a lot of people who aren't hyper-connected and attached to their phones all the time. It's nice to have access to all that stuff just in the house but without feeling like you're attached to a device at all times.
Also binary thinking, people in the ankle bracelet tribe literally cannot comprehend people who don't carry their phone with them everywhere 24x7 and vice versa, and echo is incredibly useful to members of the non-ankle bracelet tribe.
(ankle bracelet as in giant house arrest GPS tracker thingie, not shiny gold high fashion)
I have another interesting problem in that I have a newer phone that uses huge amounts of power to do the simplest things, and aftermarket wireless Qi charger, and Qi only provides USB1.0 slow charging rates of power, so even with my phone laying on the charger (s, I have multiple chargers) the battery slowly dies if I play music or podcasts or anything, whereas the echo is ac powered and I don't feel like I threw out $1 into the battery replacement fund every time I charge it because the echo is always plugged in. It feels cheaper to use the echo, less hassle. I can afford to replace my phone battery but its a huge inconvenient PITA.
I have Echoes in the bedroom and kitchen/living room and a Tap that floats.
NB: I work for AWS but am just an general Alexa fanboy (and I am definitely a lot older than 27).
Last night's tasks:
- Got into a dark house with my hands full of bags, "Hey Alexa turn on the living room lights. Play blues music."
- Taking my shoes off, "Hey Alexa what's the news"
- Cooking, "Hey Alexa what's 12 fluid ounces in cups. Add garlic to my shopping list."
- On the way out the door, "Hey Alexa ask NYC Transit what's the status of the 4 train"
- Going to sleep, "Hey Alexa turn off the bedroom light. Play white noise. Loop."
- Wake up in the middle of the night "Hey Alexa what time is it? What time is my first meeting tomorrow? Cancel my alarm for 7:30AM. Set an alarm for 8AM.". All without shining a screen in my face, which can disrupt sleep cycles.
There's a few glitches (sometimes the speech clips, had to reboot it once or twice) but speech recognition is decent (I have a soft-spoken English accent which challenges some systems). Also it's great when alone but kind of awkward talking to the machine when you have company.
I can see a lot of mundane tasks switching over to ambient, speech-based interfaces in the future. I'll be adding Alexa Skills development to my skillset over Christmas.
I've seen a bunch of people mention use cases in their bedrooms, which is great, but they seem to fall apart when you're not single since you don't want the speaker waking your partner up, which is sad since I would like to know what time it is without shining a light in my eyes.
I like to ask Alexa what time it is without turning on the tv or looking for my phone. Whem I'm going to the bathroom, I'll tell Alexa to play the news. I add things to the shopping list, check the weather, set alarms for certain times...
For $40 (the dot) it's worth it. I'm hoping to save some money with a smart thermostat. And I'm hoping Google will put out something like the dot because I hear it's much more conversation (I just don't want to plunk down $140 or whatever it is for the Google Home right now).
I was most excited to hook the Echo up to home automation, but I haven't yet because the special bulbs and plug adapters are too expensive.
Instead, my wife and I use it heavily for:
* Music: Playing music immediately to get kids jumping around, when hosting people over for dinner, whatever. We have a portable Bose speaker, but it's not nearly as convenient.
* Timers: We set these a lot to multitask. Filling the bath, cooking, whatever.
* Weather: While getting ourselves and the kids ready in the morning, we usually ask about the weather for today to figure out which sweater/coat combinations need to happen.
* Shopping: We are constantly running out of things. We can quickly say "Add ___ to the shopping list." Even if we don't actually order from Amazon, later I can pull up the list on my phone. Plus, using IFTTT, the items get copied to my iOS Reminders list, which is shared with my wife.
So with the echo you sometimes have to do a quick Google search to get the name of the song so you can tell the Echo.
The Google Home does not require the extra step. With the Google Home I am starting to use a condensed English. So I will say "play sting Gwen bottle"
The Google home will launch Sting and Gwen Stefani playing message in the bottle. But the Google Home will also turn on the TV, set the correct input and then start playing.
The Echo is older but for my family use cases the Google Home is far more useful.
This was before the new capibilities just added to the Google Home
She's not very technically oriented (iPad is about as complicated as she wants to get), but absolutely LOVES the Dot. I bought her first one for her birthday back in October, and she called me on my birthday three weeks after that and had it sing "Happy Birthday" to me over the phone. She'd had it for all of a week before she told me "I need another one of these for the other end of the house.."
I went online to buy a few things this weekend and almost every item I looked up was marked "Back in stock on Dec XX" where XX was somewhere in the range of 24th to 30th.
So I'm not surprised that this extends to Amazon's own products. It's a shame, as one of the main reasons to shop on Amazon is to know you can get almost anything with no notice.
Current numbers, especially in the US, look very promising. Growth isn't where it has been in the past, but employment is very strong and so is spending. Wage growth will have a large effect on spending for gifts, especially for earners with low wages.
Maybe that's why Amazon was so surprised this year. They anticipated their growth number to what they sold last year and didn't account for the extra boost.
Of course that's just speculation, but it would fit well. And would explain why I don't see this effect on Amazon UK at all.
Don't take my comment the wrong way -- I'm not begrudging anyone on their spending habits or how they use their disposable income, but I genuinely have several items or activities that I'd rather spend that $140 current sale price on.
Or, to rephrase, the idea of voice controlling music in my house appeals to me, but not at this price point? For what it's worth, the sibling products are also awkwardly priced for me: the cheapest Tap (edit/correction: Dot) has a terrible speaker while the mid-range Tap isn't hands-free.
I'd be truly curious how people actually use the Echo: how much of it is music playing, how much of it is checking the weather, or witty banter, or re-ordering a household item. Is it more of a utility device? Is it more of an entertainment device? Is it some clever hybrid thereof?
It's only trivial to detect if everyone is watching all the time.
Why don't we freak out that Chrome could be listening to all our audio? I guess you could make an argument that far-field mics make it different, but I have a lot of conversations near my laptop and phone.
As tekromancr mentioned; it would be pretty obvious if these changes were made, especially on a wide-ranging basis, so that only really leaves this potential capability being used in a targeted manner, at which point Mossad is after you specifically and you're gonna get Mosadded. (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
Having said that, I would be interested in a 3rd party maintained registry of updates for all software so that it would at the very least be noticeable if updates were being abused for this purpose, similar to the way certificate transparency works for SSL/TLS certs.
Absolutely. That's why I don't really let stuff auto-update, use as much FOSS stuff as I can, etc. Just because someone can push a malicious update to $product_a doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that they can do it to $product_b. I fail to see the logic here.
> Why don't we freak out that Chrome could be listening to all our audio?
I do. And that's why I don't use Chrome. Just because you don't seem to be worried doesn't mean other people don't worry about it.
> ...it would be pretty obvious if these changes were made, especially on a wide-ranging basis...
Maybe, but I'm not worried just about wide-ranging basis, but a narrow-ranging basis as well.
Most people are not concerned about Chrome, iOS or Android auto-updating; I'm sure you can see that you're an outlier here.
FOSS software might not have automatic updates, but if you do any sort of update where you don't verify the blob you got is the same one as everyone else you have exactly the same problem.
I largely expect that unless you get super paranoid about this (and hey, we're on HN, so that's a possibility), you're not really going to stop a sophisticated government adversary. And at the point where you're on a specifically targeted list, they will probably not limit themselves to the digital world.
I also think that expecting this level of privacy where the government cannot figure out what you're doing is a historical anomaly; most people who avoided telephones because the government could be listening are generally considered crazy people.
Does the government target people in a violation of their civil rights? Yes, but you probably know if you're doing something the government doesn't like, and it does not seem sensible to argue that people should become experts in technology and then give up a lot of benefits to avoid a risk that is not real for them.
Sure, but I don't see how that invalidates my point. Some people are concerned about privacy, some people aren't. That doesn't mean the original software couldn't be updated with malicious code.
> FOSS software might not have automatic updates, but if you do any sort of update where you don't verify the blob you got is the same one as everyone else you have exactly the same problem.
I'd disagree. Having the ability to verify it has kept a lot of people from pushing a lot of bad code because they know they could be caught.
> you're not really going to stop a sophisticated government adversary.
I'd agree, but just because I can't really stop someone from breaking into my house doesn't mean I'm OK with putting a key under my doormatt.
> I also think that expecting this level of privacy where the government cannot figure out what you're doing is a historical anomaly
There's a huge difference between being able to figure out, and recording everything for later use.
> most people who avoided telephones because the government could be listening are generally considered crazy people.
lolno. Movies have often had a trope about talking in person because "someone could be listening" for a long time. Audiences understand this quite well and go along with the story. And it doesn't have to be the government. When party-lines were common, people knew you had to be careful, or the town gossip could get all the juicy details. The Public has long known that someone could be listening. The difference now is that a lot of actors are trying to always be listening.
> it does not seem sensible to argue that people should become experts in technology and then give up a lot of benefits to avoid a risk that is not real for them.
I'm not really sure where I said that. If I did, I'd like you to point it out. I just think people should be able to educate themselves and decide for themselves if that trade-off is worth it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make the tradeoff, but pretending that "It's OK, the Echo could never be used maliciously because some guy on HN said he wrote the software and it doesn't do that" is naive at best.
I broke down and got one on sale for $129-ish because it seemed to be the cheapest it was ever going to get.
It's nice to play with but I don't think it was worth the money for us. It is certainly a powerful speaker and if you're in the market for a good Bluetooth speaker, many of which are $200+, it's probably worthwhile. If you're just using it as a voice assistant, I think the Android/iOS VAs are probably better and I don't think they're really much less accessible -- everyone's phone is near them all the time and you can program Androids at least to unlock and execute your query upon hearing "OK Google".
The microphones do not work as well as advertised. We often have to repeat the hotword several times after turning our heads toward the device to get it to activate. After activation, it has bad noise filtering, doesn't work well in noisy environments. I have a Dot in my office (much quieter than the main area where there are 5 little tykes running around screeching all the time) and even it will struggle if my oscillating fan is blowing in its direction. It will also misunderstand and start answering totally different questions or performing totally different tasks somewhat frequently.
We tried one or two times to use the voice ordering functionality, but it's just plain unwieldy and we've never executed an order from it. I don't know if anyone actually uses that or not. It's hard to buy something without the visual confirmation and Alexa reads out the whole title. You'll say "Buy Ziploc bags" and it will say "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag 24 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $5.19, do you want buy it?" and then you say no and it says "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag Plastic 12 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $3.19, do you want to buy it?". Who wants to shop/browse like that when they could reach into their phone and buy it on the Amazon app with quick visual review of the available options and easy price comparison (don't have to remember "Oh yeah, was the 12 count $5 or $3")?
The Alexa backend service is not very good at answering random questions, which diminishes the device's utility. If you're not asking one of its canned tasks, it usually says "I can't understand the question I heard" or "Hmm, I don't know the answer to that question". The "OK Google" on Android is much more versatile and I've never used Siri myself, but it appears to be much more versatile as well.
My 3 year old daughter loves to ask it "Alexa, where do jumping monkeys live?" and get back "Hmm, I can't understand the question I heard". She laughs for a long time at this response and sometimes says "You're dumb Alexa".
We mainly use it as a voice-controlled timer ("set a timer for x minutes"), checking the weather, checking the news ("play my flash briefing", which, ugh), and doing quick math ("what's 341 minus 114?"). We also play songs on it, my kids think it's hilarious to run up to it and say "Play Bananaphone!!". They then dance around to Bananaphone. All of these things work nearly-identically (usually slightly better) with my phone's voice assistant.
So yeah, Echos are fun, but in terms of unique value proposition, they are pretty soft. Your phone's built-in voice assistant does everything Alexa does and more. The Echo can sometimes be more convenient if you're in the right spot in the right room and it's hard to reach your phone at that particular moment, but otherwise I don't think it brings a lot to the table. Honestly it's biggest value is as a powerful and vibrant Bluetooth speaker.
It's totally a utility for me... turning on lights when I'm heading up the staircase, setting timers while in the middle of cooking, checking the weather/forecast, making sure there are no surprises on my commute. I use it to play music occasionally.
I would have never started down this path if the device was over $100, though, so I agree with you there. $40 was just a good enough entry point for me.
Of course they will be a big overlap (like how it is now), but smart companies tend to play to their strengths than to play by their enemy's rules.
In fact, their current ad campaign clearly shows the “buy stuff” use case. From ordering pizzas to buying roses to requesting an Uber. But it also features users asking Alexa for their calendar itinerary, or the caloric content of hot wings.
Amazon.com has already become a site where if you aren't a prime member then you may have well not use it. Since almost all sales are prime exclusive, shipping is now crazy expensive without prime, and almost all new features are prime too.
I suspect in the coming year or two the "cost of entry" will be both a prime membership AND an Alexa enabled device. Without both you'll miss out on a lot of the site's benefit and prices.
It's pretty easy to get the factories in Shenzhen to crank out a couple extra to meet demand (it USED to be a lot harder).
I call BS.
It seems to me that the Echo is what amazon pushes most at the moment. They want to be in every house. I don't think they make much by selling it, it's mostly to bind people to amazon (prime and buying through the device). It doesn't make sense to constraint supply in that case. Constraining supply is used for expensive items to suggest that they're sought after. Don't think Echo fits in that category.
That said, I just don't see too many people buying Echo. Another distracting device that tries to get you to buy more stuff on Amazon is just not something I think people want, and the speech recognition works flaky at best, even in a quiet room (my Amazon engineer buddy has one). It's just like Siri.
I had to go brick-and-mortar to get a flash drive in under an hour the other weekend. At Silicon Valley's Best Buy in SF, the in-store Echo demo had a few passersby press the Demo button, and then as soon as it started talking, they looked confused and walked away. Not a good sign.
It does make a lot of sense: When something actually isn't selling so well, running a marketing campaign saying "we've sold out" is a great psychological hack to temporarily drive up demand.
Google Home also seems to be completely gone at every store I've visited in the last few days. That includes places like Target, who usually have their shit together when it comes to inventory.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/31/hanjin-shipping-vessel-unable...
Maybe not for Amazon per se, but someone must have lost out on Christmas because of this.
Echo: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01GAGVC9K/
Echo Dot: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01DFKBG5Y/
Delivery to UK addresses only, but if you befriend a UK HN-er who's willing to be a patsy, I'm sure that won't be too much of a hurdle.
I'm not terribly interested in any home automation/assistant system that requires an always on connection to some external server.
Unfortunately all of the FOSS voice-recognition stuff I've tried has been hacky at best.
While on Echo, you are just a part of the Quality System and Eris knows what they'll do with all that information in the future. Algorithms and AI is there to sort it out.
I find it creepy but what creeps me even more out is people who don't find it creepy.
I'm not saying your making the wrong decision, it's a trade-off that everyone needs to make individually. If your happy with your Echo, great! But just because someone has one attack-vector on you doesn't mean you should dismiss new attack vectors.
The Echo is an unlikely device to be compromised and recording everything you say, because it's pretty locked down and definitely not a general purpose computer.
> it's pretty locked down
source? AFAIK you can't verify what it's doing, so it doesn't matter how well it's locked down.
The device sends sound to their servers to process what you are saying. They probably aren't sending all the sound, but if they aren't, I can't be bothered to keep up to date on if they change that policy.
Is it unreasonable to assume that the NSA is logging (or will eventually be logging) everything sent over the Internet with this device around?
It seriously is no worse than OK Google or Siri and you should seriously be more worried about your cell phone.
0. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
It should be clear to the HN crowd. One day, ambient voice technology is going to be everywhere. In your car. In the supermarket. Everywhere. The Amazon Echo is an early example of it. That it's connected to the largest goods distribution network has the potential to enhance modern living in an obvious way.
It's so typical with new technology to see a bunch of naysayers and ho-hum attitudes until one day it hits mainstream and everyone is like, "oh yeah, I knew it all along"
I bought 2 dots last night, one to plug into my Sonos and one to use as an alarm clock. Let's see if I use them at all beyond that.
edit: I canceled the dots and bought a Google Home and a dot to compare. Mostly because I use Google Music.
Critically lacking in both ecosystems, is the ability to handle multiple user profiles so that it can recognise who is asking the question and tailor the answer to that users schedule, travel etc.
TBH, GH is just a large speaker for your smartphone.
I agree that a conversational interface will cut down on summoning the app.
With blacjack, and hookers...
This allows me to build the Alexa that I want to build which is really awesome IMO.
I'm working on setting one up now, but find the docs confusing at best. I'm hoping once I get it set up it will work well, but I'm having trouble getting to that part.
I'm happy to use it from an app rather than with voice
If there's anyone who knows how to stock up for the holidays, it's Amazon. It's kind of amazing that they sold out on the Echo, all things considered.
"If they sold out, the product must be great!"
2) I bet that the average cart size at checkout is less than half of the cost of an Echo.
The benefits don't outweigh the costs of a marketing stunt of claiming that they are sold out.
Birthday is different though, but will not be the case for most decisions.
Long term gains > Short term gains on a product like this.
Assuming this isn't artificial scarcity (to imply their product is more popular than it is); it just likely means that Amazon discounted harder and further than they projected and thus ran out.
Plus the Google Home had a weak day 1 offering in my opinion and the opinion of many reviewers. So that may have driven sales too.
The main reason I haven't bought an Echo (and am looking into self-hosted solutions instead) is the privacy concern.
I'm also pretty sure that people would've noticed if it always sends by default, guess some people will have monitored traffic from/to the device.