Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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"I'm in two minds about Google home, alexa etc. On one hand, the novelty / utility of these devices makes me half inclined to get one but the fundamental idea of having a device in my house, connected to the internet that is sat there listening to me 24/7 leaves me feeling slightly uneasy at best."

I am totally opposed to these devices in my home and am, frankly, aghast at the notion that they would see wide deployment or that "voice is the future ... blah blah".

However, I do have the ability to consider other viewpoints and when I do, I am completely underwhelmed by the proposed use-cases of these devices. According to Amazon themselves, the things I could do with Alexa include:

"What's on sale today ?"

"Find me a Chinese restaurant"

"What's the weather"

These are use-cases that suggest a user who either has no particular preferences or is satisfied with extremely simple, non-nuanced information (or both). These use-cases are the literal manifestation of dumbing yourself down far enough for the computer to pass your (very easy) turing test.

Other use-cases like "play my party playlist" are a wash in terms of simplicity or speed vs. just (pressing whatever play button you have in the system you use).

Are there any examples that I would find interesting or nuanced or definitive improvements over existing tools ?

I too have observed no use-cases that make these devices appealing even if data exfiltration was not their principal feature.

But what irks me most is the flimsy excuse that sending their recordings (or even a post-processed textual rendering) to the cloud is necessary to perform these trivial operations. We've had desktop voice recognition of the quality necessary to perform these operations for a long time now.

> "What's on sale today ?"

This could access an Amazon (store) API directly.

> "Find me a Chinese restaurant"

This could use a Yelp API directly, as if it were a web browser.

> "What's the weather"

This could use a Weather Underground (or whatever) API. Ideally the device could be configured to source data for these inquiries from various options.

> "play my party playlist"

This shouldn't generate any off-network traffic at all.

>> "play my party playlist" >This shouldn't generate any off-network traffic at all.

at least it should check for drm and weather you paid parking tickets or resell the song otherwise

The only killer use case I've encountered so far is being able to yell "hey Cortana! Next track!" across the room while playing with a toddler, since either walking over to push a button or pulling my smartphone out to advance it remotely would totally disrupt the current interaction with my child.

Or I could just curate my playlists more carefully.

Everything else is either too low information density (this is why I get the weather from an app, not The Weather Channel) or more efficiently handled manually (music control, search queries) in most situations

I had an an interesting moment recently where I watched my 88 year old grandfather seemlessly set up music from his Alexa, and order something on Amazon.

We might just not be the target market.

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