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Comment by beauzero | Hacker News Reader

"If you’re in a room where a child has just fallen asleep, and someone else walks in..." considering the other person as Alexa bothers me. I appreciate the tech but the fact that Alexa/Amazon corporate is participating, even passively, in interactions with my children and myself causes me pause.

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If having an always-on microphone in your home didn't already give you pause, I fail to see how this development changes things significantly.

I think the sleeping child is the "other person" here.

I'm not sure the takeaway here is that anybody's conferring personhood on Alexa. I think they're just pointing out that there's meaning conveyed in speech beyond just the content of the words spoken. Regardless of what words someone says, saying it in a whisper implies something about the volume that other parties should respond with. I had a coworker with laryngitis last winter, and I found myself unconsciously lowering my volume to be closer to his raspy voice. Tone and volume of speech can communicate a lot; why not allow a spoken word interface to leverage that extra information?

Then why buy it, dude? Do you think Alexa isn’t listening to you when you scold your kids in the kitchen? Seriously.

I haven't purchased one. Good research should be encouraged. Ethical implications of implementations should be discussed openly.

His isn’t ethical implications discussion. This is you using every one of these feature release pages as your product review page. If nothing has changed about your position why even tell us? It’s like all those people who comment on software built with Go. “I don’t understand why Terraform uses Golang. It has no generics”

That’s not “programming language feature discussion”. It’s obsessively off-topic behaviour.

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