Agreed. And I have a small child. I _really_ don't want them to be forming "relationships" with brands by asking robot assistants named after corporations to do stuff.
It sounded dumb enough for two adults to say it all day, but the convenience was worth it. Having my little one start using the phrase to talk to things is definitely where I draw the line.
Besides, now that it tries to make suggestions after every other command all you really hear in my house in regards to them is "hey google shut the fuck up and do what you're told". Unfortunately the stupid puck doesn't allow you to interrupt the unsolicited FAQ any longer.
Come to think of it, I think I'm getting rid of most of these things this weekend.
Of course Amazon isn't likely to ever do such a thing, because god forbid we don't have the ability to suddenly order something from Amazon on every device at all times.
Comically, that's actually one of the things its the worst at. I tried to do it exactly once and swore I would never do it again. In the time it takes to read the first search result, I could have found and ordered what I want from my phone. If that's what they were going for, I can't believe they didn't scrap the project.
Supposedly they're fairly good at re-ordering, but given how often Alexa mis-hears me, I'm not a fan of doing anything involving money on it.
Also, I've mapped all of the functions we use to "recipes" that include the word "please" so that they don't work unless you use the word "please." i.e. the upstairs lights are named as for example "the Chicago lights" and there is a recipe that says "turn on the Chicago lights" when someone utters "Computer, please turn on the upstairs lights." So if you say "Computer, turn on the upstairs lights" it says "I don't know what upstairs lights are."
The disadvantage of this approach is that you need to get the string exactly as stored.
"#Karma.. Police.. Arrest this man, he talks in maths...#"
There are, unfortunately, millions of ways we form relationships with brands. A brand's reason for existing is to live somewhere in our psyche either subconsciously or consciously. We say "Q-tip" instead of cotton swab, "band-aid" instead of bandage, "Advil" when we need ibuprofen, or "Tylenol" when we want acetaminophen. When we see white polar bears around Christmas time, we think of Coca-Cola, and so on and so forth.
All that to say, kudos for you for taking a principled approach, but I am not sure it's going to achieve much.
I've been meaning to have a play with https://mycroft.ai/ but only out of interest, I don't see myself leaving it running.
Now you can mispronounce it, that’s the only leeway we get.
Not a bad option. I would much prefer asking 19th century Russian author, Nikolai Gogol, to turn on the lights.
"I am not a number I am a free man!"