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Comment by mr__y | Hacker News Reader

My guess: first of all, "for security reasons" your DIY device will need to be certified, any existing SBCs will need to be replaced/extended to support new type of network and due to bloated protocol specs with a myriad of abstraction levels will render it almost impossible to implement it on your own and the open source library that can do that will implement the standard as specified whereas all proprietary solutions will have some quirks and little differences from official standard making it very hard to connect to anything from your open source lib. Also the sophistication of the new standard will exceed the capabilities of any arduino forcing you to replace any boards you have with new ones that have AVR uc with Connected Home hardware support.

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Believe me, they will it will never find adoption. How to say, they are free to make whatever standards, but they will not matter much if nobody will use them.

Their entire ecosystem together have less devices shipped than even some OEM nonames, not to say of Xiaomi or Huawei or Tuya who tower over them.

All kinds of "smart assistants" like Alexa end up in drawers very quickly after initial novelty passes, and it creeping up you in the middle of a conversation gets annoying. From data I have, sales of those smart speakers is already starting to taper off.

In Russia, there is an idiom "to divide the cake before it's baked." And those guys are doing exactly that: people don't even know what those "connected home" devices are and which ones sell well, yet they are already eager make up standards for them.

Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming.

I genuinely think the Amazon team (at least in that particular regard) want to do some good. But until they can teach their machines how to understand context, I just don't want my unfiltered conversations going around potentially to medical institutions or law enforcement.

Has anyone found Alexa way too easy to trigger? As someone who frequently talks about people with a similar name, I'm amazed at how often Alexa chimes in. I think 'OK Google' is at a sweet spot (although my parents for ages were convinced 'hi google' would work if they tried enough :)

Pretty sure you can change the name she responds to.

It's a limited set of options though, like 'Computer', which is hardly an uncommon word.

For clarity, Alexa responded to my comments without being triggered. It's always listening (which makes sense, by virtue of listening for the trigger) but in this case, it reacted without the "Alexa" key word.

Id say yes. I just switched from google and feel like google was too buggy and slightly too hard to trigger. Alexa is too easy to trigger and has too many notifications.

Don't have an Alexa so can't comment on how easy it is to trigger, although I don't know any Alexes so it'd unlikely be a problem for me.

What I can say about the google equivelent is that I find saying 'Hey Google' everytime I want it to do something is a bit of a mouthful especially if you want to do several things is shortish succession.

And my other problem is that I apprently say 'OK Cool' too often when I'm on the desk phone at work as my google account is full of recordings of bits of my work phone convo's where I've triggered it unwittingly.

Sometimes mine starts responding to... nothing. As in, in the midst of silence in the middle of the night, like a dog barking at ghosts, it'll answer a question literally nothing asked.

Relevant

https://youtu.be/J9gUIhkzNDk

Also relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQD4UdGY-A

"Hey Google" is a valid trigger for some versions of the assistant, so they weren't that far off and may have seen that in action before.

> Can confirm. My alexa went in the drawer after she was offering to call the crisis line for me during a spirited session of gaming.

Wait, what? Please explain more.

It feels like you're saying Alexa heard you being ... passionate, and got concerned. But my understanding was that Alexa listens only after the trigger word. I'm really confused by what you've said and wish to know more context.

If you've ever owned a device like Alexa or Google Home what he said isn't confusing at all. They trigger accidentally all the time. His Alexa simply triggered when it wasn't supposed to and then reacted to what he was saying. Given he was gaming it was likely something about killing himself or someone else.

Huh, interesting. I have an amazon echo. My problem with it is not that it activates when I don't say trigger word, it's that I have to try very many times to get it triggered (usually by speaking louder).

It's impossible for me to say with certainty if it didn't just interpret something I said as it's trigger. Nevertheless, I was playing Halo online and yelling about a match going badly, saying something to the effect of "we might as well kill ourselves, this match is just not going our way" while laughing, and Alexa interpreted it as me contemplating suicide, and offered to connect me to a crisis line.

Great, now we need another device recording all sounds so we can play then back to reverse engineer smart speaker behavior :(

I am surprised this is how we have ended up. We have already had a pretty good looking model for this sort of voice activated computer interaction thanks to Star Trek: TNG.

It would be far more palatable for the devices to wait for a command cue ("Computer--") to respond with an activation bleep. After the bleep, the commands begin to be interpereted.

Instead we have a listener always awaiting commands. What could be a helpful and invisible servant is instead some kind of jerk who interjects with the most literal interpretations of normal conversations.

If I wake up in the morning feeling grumpy (every day) and say some crazy crap (totally possible) on my way to the can, will an apple contractor employee be able to figure out what the hell I really wanted by reviewing the seconds of audio?

I have made death threats to wall hanging photographs in those 30 minutes before my medication kicks in. There is no checkbox for this in the privacy settings. I know with some of these smart things you can change the prompt, but this feels like not the best we can come up with.

> command cue ("Computer--") to respond with an activation bleep

This can be turned on in the Home app → Accessibility → "Play start sound" (as well as "Play end sound").

My experience is the opposite, basically every home I go to has an Alexa or a google home. It’s not doing too much typically managing lights/smart switches, and playing music.

I thought the russian idiom was something about splitting the hide before youve shot the bear.

Don't know much about russian idioms, but "splitting the <rewards x> before <accomplishing risky thing y>" sounds a lot like that stock thing the dutch east india company created

Apparently at least Apple is turning over a new leaf; they just open sourced HomeKit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21831259

Andreas Gal? What a surprise.

That's the guy who flopped with Silk Labs labs.

> any existing SBCs will need to be replaced/extended to support new type of network and due to bloated protocol specs with a myriad of abstraction levels will render it almost impossible to implement it on your own and the open source library that can do that will implement the standard as specified whereas all proprietary solutions will have some quirks and little differences from official standard making it very hard to connect to anything from your open source lib.

Whoa, is it really necessary to call BlueTooth out like that?

BT v1 to v3 maybe, but BTLE/v4 solved a lot of the problems afaik.

You're probably right. It's been a while since I had the misfortune of working with BT.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958300

For anyone not following the the link, cptskippy has given a user perspective that summarises things nicely in my view:

“It's easier to tell when you're not using BLE. :) The Tesla Model 3 uses traditional Bluetooth for phone calls and streaming but the Phone as a Key functionality is BLE. When you walk up to the car and try to open it and the car says FU then BLE isn't working. When your Xiaomi Mi Band smartwatch hasn't buzzed all day but you pull your smartphone out of your pocket and have 8 missed calls, 100 messages, and 500 emails then BLE isn't working. When you're at a Tech Conference and the Conference App uses BLE Beacons to help navigate you indoors and it can't determine your location then BLE isn't working.”

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