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Comment by kome | Hacker News Reader

personal curiosity: is there someone that uses those devices in real life?

I see you're already being downvoted, but I feel the same - I don't understand why does anyone have any of these devices at home. It's nuts. Yet apparently Alexa sold 50 million smart speakers or something like that.

I read alot about them, but I have never come across one in the wild despite living in a fairly wealthy, gadget friendly environment. I agree that the whole idea of voluntarily installing something like this seems mind-blowingly nuts. Are real people actually using Alexa? If so- what for? Are there killer reasons for using Alexa like there are for, say, a Tesla or an iPhone?

It would be very interesting to see how many bought them as a novelty, and then got tired of them and unplugged them.

I have three friends that own an Alexa. I think they bought it as a novelty and now it only replaces the Bluetooth speaker and looking at the weather.

Still haven't seen a single reason to own one.

One glance and swipe down in Dark Sky shows me more weather info than Alexa could tell me in two minutes, I don’t get the weather part.

Owned three, threw all of them out. The AI was underwhelming in understanding, even finding music. We ended up using it to tell the time when sitting at the table without a computer. Now I own a wrist watch.

Some buy it to play music in their living spaces. My dad came back with a free Echo after moving his phone plan to Verizon. Thankfully I got him to be skeptical of it just because they are giving them away for free. Sibling got a google one for novelty. Over time they also stopped using, it got annoying having to plug it back in every time (since I dont let it stay plugged in). cus fuck google, amazon, fb, apple, microsoft, am I missing anyone? Samsung seems to stay lowkey but eff em too.

IMO the GP is being downvoted because irrespective of one's personal feelings regarding 'smart home' devices, it's difficult to see how someone could genuinely have never encountered any users of those devices (assuming you're living in the US). I can understand how someone extremely tech-savvy and cognizant of the privacy and other downsides of those devices may have friends who similarly would not use or purchase the same; but to have genuinely never seen one, whether it be in the home of a relative, an acquaintance, in popular television or movies - and having never read any reporting about their popularity - seems beyond the realm of possibility. Given that, the GP's question seems conceited. I can see how they might have intended to direct the question towards HN users in the assumption that most HN users would be wary of the aforementioned devices, in which case it'd be interesting to read the perspectives of those individuals who use them despite their downsides. But that isn't immediately evident.

Well the GP might not live in the US. I don't, and I have never seen anybody use one of those and I don't know anybody who does either, and I haven't seen them in series or movies either (except sci-fi AI movies). For all I know, an Alexa is just a device to order toilet paper from Amazon when it's out or maybe use it to turn on and off the light in the room if you're too lazy to do it yourself.

Is the demographic that uses these preferentially si-valley people or is it widely spread in the US?

BTW I'm not particularly against home AI assistants myself. But I'm fairly against streaming my audio to a third party that can transcribe and give everything to any snooping fourth party though :) I did read about Google doing this with their assistant's audio, it ended up at contractors doing manual transcribing.

I don't live in the US either. But this website is primarily US-focused, and most people on it readily assume the context for everything is the US, so I conform to the same habit.

My anecdotal examples would be mostly middle-class families and college students in the US, not particularly valley-related. In my country these type of devices are on the market but not popular (only seen a couple), but they're priced out of the range of the majority of the population anyway.

My use case is small children and music. It's incredibly convenient to say "alexa, play songs by pink fong" or whatever they're in the mood for, while cleaning or cooking or what have you, compared to getting a phone or tablet out and browsing to the music app and trying to find the same song or playlist.

Additionally, my oldest child can put music on for herself with her voice, but can't read or spell enough to do it otherwise.

Same, only seen one alexa at a friends with a child.

They use it to play music. Alexa play christmas songs. Alexa pause. Alexa resume.

That's all.

You could have this without the potential online security nightmare. I had an offline voice control WinAmp plugin ~15 years ago.

It has access to everything on amazon music, a much larger playlist than anything I own. I can also say "play show tunes" or "play 80s" and it will do that.

I know about homebrew options. I've tried some of them. The problem is convincing others. They want something that works every time all the time, not something I have to fiddle with every so often.

As for the security, it was my concern from day one, but when laypeople see the convenience and not some hidden boogeyman, you can't convince them otherwise. I lost that argument to my wife and it wasn't a hill I chose to die on. I'm just careful what I say openly, as you should anywhere. Plus we all carry phones around already.

Whether you understand why people own them, you didn’t claim to not know that people actually buy them.

They seem a bit silly until you get one and then the idea of going without it feels frustrating. I have a couple (kitchen/living room and bedroom). I use it daily for setting timers when cooking, turning on/off the lights and adjusting them (e.g. turning to a specific setting if I'm watching a movie) and when I finish reading in bed at night I can just tell it to turn off all the lights to save me getting out of bed and getting back in the dark.

Obviously none of this is necessary and could be done in other ways but it's useful and relatively cheap (I got both echo dots in sales and 3 out of 4 bulbs in sales too).

Edit: I presume you're talking about Alexa in general and not this specific landlord product.

All those uses sound like they could be accomplished without connecting the Echos to the internet. If the connection is interrupted, can they still perform those tasks?

The speakers don't have the hardware needed to run speech recognition and (realistic) text to speech, so no. This is the reason why I'm interested in Mycroft—with just a bit more hardware it actually can do a pretty okay job offline, though the TTS is very robotic.

As someone living not in the US, I feel the same. I see all sorts of giveaways and deals (ie, free echo dot if you buy a newspaper subscription), but I've never met anyone who uses one. Never seen one in a friends house. Here it seems like they're desperately trying to get people to use them (to the point of giving them away), and failing. I figured it was probably a cultural split between US / everywhere else.

Another thing is I think we don't like voice activated control in general. An American colleague used to use voice activated calling all the time on his phone. I've literally never seen anyone else use that, unless they're driving.

Spidertron voice control when? ;p (Counts as driving..?)

This guy is an internet detective :D Could be done as a mod via the lua api, if you really wanted (would need an external relay program to communicate with the voice thing, like eg clusterio does).

I live in an EU country and travel quite a lot. I see them and google homes very frequently. This article is from Australia. Maybe it is just your circles?

Just to add - per-capita as % of internet users market saturation is in the same ballpark between US/EU countries.

It was higher than I would have expected even in 2018 (17.2% of Germans with internet access reported having used one regularly)

https://contentstorage-nax1.emarketer.com/519874bbcaa13e06b8...

Imagine paying money to install an always on mic/camera in your own home. These people both scare and confuse me.

That IPhone and Samsung with a non replaceable battery is...a mic and camera that is always on. Potentially even when the device is off.

Microphone jamming apps (like PilferShush Jammer) and electrical tape exist, at least.

Most of the devices have a switch for the microphone that is supposedly implemented in hardware rather than software. And the vast majority of smart home devices do not have cameras.

Granted, the ease of use of their functionality is largely dependent on the microphone being on at all times.

People used to say the same thing about phones.

I know of people (in real life) who use Alexa devices and are quite enthusiastic about them. In some respects, they are quite sensible and look at how the device contributes to their lives. In other respects ...

... well, let's just say that I'm in the category of people who find the technology creepy. My tendency to avoid prying into other people's lives and desire to lead a quiet life leaves me with uneasy feelings with the massive amounts of data collection happening these days.

The thing is, not everyone is like that. If someone is okay with the noise of world intruding into their lives and are curious about the lives of other people, I can think of very few reasons why they would find these voice assistants creepy. That list includes the realists concerns about security and plain old paranoia.

I have a couple of Google Home Minis but I never paid for them, one was gifted by Spotify and one by Google when they were getting rid of their stock of the old model. I usually use them to control the lights and Spotify/Netflix when I am too lazy to get off the couch in the middle of an episode. They are also getting less and less useful because the voice recognition is getting steadily worse (false negative and false positive recognition of wake-up sentence has easily doubled since I got them). I could easily live without them but I still think the technology is cool. When they stop working I will probably look for a full-blown local alternative that doesn't rely on the Internet.

In 2018 (I’m sure it is a lot higher now) 17.2% of Germans with internet access reported having regularly used a smart speaker. 26% in us, 18% in Canada.

https://contentstorage-nax1.emarketer.com/519874bbcaa13e06b8...

The only place I've seen one was in a hotel room. I unplugged it.

I would say between 10-20 of my friends have some variety of smart home device? Most are Alexa, with a few Google Homes. They span the spectrum from tech-savvy to the opposite.

Are you blind?

That wasn't rhetorical, the only person I know who owns and uses one regularly is a 80 year old blind lady.

Never seen one in the wild in the uk

Must be your circles.

In 2018 (must be higher now) 22% of uk residents with internet access reported having regularly used a smart speaker.

https://contentstorage-nax1.emarketer.com/519874bbcaa13e06b8...

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