Alexa owners not using it after only two weeks
mashable.com
mashable.com
My daughter put a pizza into the Amazon Alexa Enabled oven/microwave. You can probably guess where this is going. She’s done this many many times, put it on the metal rack, and let me know it was good to go.
I opened the Alexa app on my phone and said, very precisely (I saved the log) “Alexa, bake at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty minutes on first oven”. Alexa interpreted this as “Alexa, fig at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for thirty minutes on first oven”. A Alexa interpreted “fig” as “microwave”, and proceeded to set the microwave/oven full of metal cookware to microwave for 30 minutes.
For some reason I thought being extremely precise and including degrees and things that would only make sense if you wanted to bake, or the fact that I have never microwaved something for that length of time, would inform Alexa and keep this from happening.
Around 21 minutes later my wife smelled something, as we were upstairs, and we had to open all the windows and leave a few hours early for our relatives house. Thank goodness we weren’t hosting.
Anyway that’s the last time I’ll use smart appliances like microwaves.
I get the Internet of Things dreams (I understand, not agree), but who would want this? You still need to be there to load and consume the food. It’s not like the HVAC that can be of use to me while I’m not there yet.
Maybe I'm just a Luddite.
What next, Internet connected pacemakers?
i would be scared to use such a device to control appliances or make orders without doble checking that it is actually going to do what i want. even for something seemingly harmless as playing a movie if a misunderstanding could play something inappropriate for the kids.
I was told by the person manning the desk they could not help me, only the representative on the phone could and no, they did not have a direct line.
After 30min on hold person on the phone said they could not tell me what hertz/budget would have a car for my reservation though they were the reservation desk. They transferred me to customer service where I waited for 90 min to no avail.
Even worse, I was in a total loop at booking.com. Enter reservation number pls: easy. Enter pin: there isn't one. Immediate disconnect. No representative, no series of numbers, no alternate phone number available.
Usually, the robot will give you something like "i didn't understand you, can you please repeat that?" and blow 2 or 3 more times into the mic...
Afterwards, i'm usually transferred pretty quickly to a human being - presumably this is due to some accessibility requirements....
I personally don't want to talk to machines all that much either, but in for your reason. It's because the utility of such an interface sucks. The things can't actually do much other than bring something up on a screen. And they make mistakes half the time.
I don’t need an internet connected spying device for this though. So ended up switching to a HomePod mini.
It sets timers without internet, and plays music from my phone which is somewhere around the house. It can ask my phone for weather info as well.
These voice assistants are sparkling novelties and nothing more. Since cell phones and ramping up with smartphones, people have this weird hype based relationship with technology. It permeates everything. Screens everywhere, capacitive touch everything, wireless where it isn't necessary, it's all novelties that don't actually improve anyone's life. And the voice assistant is probably the biggest example.
And that's what these products are supposed to be, pretty on a shelf, playful in the commercial, a spunky young woman smiling while making breakfast for the kids or going on a jog, all to get you to buy them, not to get you to use them. As long as they're plugged in in your house tracking everything you do they're generating revenue. When you step back from the hype, what you really are doing is inviting a spy into your home in exchange for an overpriced and overengineered egg timer.
No one knows how much it really helps, but I have the “raise to talk” and “Hey Siri” features disabled to keep the “always on” buffer as short as possible.
"The assertion that Alexa growth is slowing is not accurate,” Pearsall wrote to Bloomberg. “The fact is that Alexa continues to grow—we see increases in customer usage, and Alexa is used in more households around the world than ever before.”
End-quote.
So that sure sounds like some board-member speak there.
That said, I personally use Siri. I typically use it to check the weather or play music. Nothing else.
I also have a HomePod mini. It’s fine for what it is.
I just don’t think that voice controlled software is going to go beyond general information that you Can access quickly by asking a simple question, especially if you are doing something else at the same time.
Notes? Faster to check it manually since most people can read and find information faster than a voice telling you your notes one by one.
Searching for info? Right now it’s easier to do it yourself. Even Siri will say “here’s what I found on the web for #thing”, forcing you to look at your phone.
I don’t know, maybe there is potential there. But people will always do what’s easier and faster. A voice just isn’t faster than reading and doing tasks yourself in many situations.
I have a Google Home assistant and I only use it to play music since it has fairly decent sound quality. My Amazon echo and show devices will stay unplugged.
i really am very happy to find fault, to elaborate misuse. but the reaction to amazon using a very little bit of bandwidth (usually under 50MB i expect) feels entirely emotional, entirely reactionary. in any technical sense we can measure it is for all intensive purposes going to be irrelevant.
this feels like a social dilemna. we want to activate ourselves against amazon. want to tear down the big, the seeming man. but this feels petty & small. that we so readily make a stand here says that we arent really discerning or tasteful or making sensible assessments & rationalizations & choices. we're acting in aggressively zero sum hostile premises, & causing a stir over that which is nothing.
generally i think you're larger point about mistrust is dead on. these systems are black boxes, running in far off data centers. this is anti-personal computing, unobservable by the primary stakeholder, & it's a fucking abominable form of computing that i think more & more people realize has no respect for them, that treats them like end users, not masters of their home & it's systems.
It has nothing to do with the "big guy". If some no-name startup sold me software or a device and told me they're going to use my bandwidth for whatever reasons, I'd be just as concerned. I use plenty of Amazon on a day to day basis, no need to "tear down the man". But these Echo and Show devices will stay turned off.
claiming that this is like giving access to your car to a stranger is ridiculous. i cant see the fauntest shred of truth to this FUD.
Sometimes they ask Alexa to play a song, but everything seems to require the music plan on top of Prime these days, so it will play a different ‘related’ station instead.
It’s beyond strange when kids asks for a random kids song, but it is not available, so it starts playing obscure rap songs dropping F- and N- bombs (so obscure it bypasses explicit filters?).
It’s so hilariously broken in these cases (has happened two or three times over the past couple years), but I would love to know the breakdown in logic that these kids are finding…
I have several blind friends, they use voice assistants, but don't particularly like them. In all honesty, a lot of voice-based stuff isn't that advanced versus what were using 15-20 years ago with Wildfire. For productivity for disabled users, they're quite mediocre in many ways. Not saying they're terrible, but I am saying there's a very long road ahead, and being a minority means it is low priority and low understanding for most corps. Their focus is on gimmicks over substance.
I’d much rather have a uniform interface for controlling house devices via their APIs as wall mounted touchscreens (connected to mics, speakers, etc. as desired)
An iPad is close hardware wise but a uniform and customizable UI would be ideal.
Just seems like a lot has been built via voice because a voice OS didn't exist, as opposed to voice actually being the best way to receive commands and output information.
For light control it's very useful and pretty cheap so if I only used it for that I would be happy.
they use it to play songs, our 6 year old uses it to spell words when she is writing cards, they use it to hear animal sounds, tell stories, talk between rooms when friends are over,etc.
Adults just use it for weather and timers…
people around me are using alexa way more than usua
and by around me, it's globally, on various networks (discord, irc etc), i see people mention/talk about alexa way more than google, even more than siri..
All of these assistants have limitations because they don’t have any real context to the requests. People think that they are failures because they are not really intelligent but they do have small uses on a daily basis as long as you understand the limitations.
An alarm clock that doesn't stand a pretty good chance of randomly broadcasting your bedroom audio to the internet on a regular basis. You can even get ones that work when the power's out!
If you replace "assistant" with "internet connected room mic" when pondering them, I find it helps make the decisions far clearer. The best place for them is never having been shipped in the first place. The second best place is the trash. Down the list from there is "unplugged and forgotten." And somewhere at the bottom is "Powered on, connected, and waiting for a plausible excuse to broadcast fairly clear room audio out to the internet."
I've abandoned smartphones for the time being (but have a PinePhone to hack on for sport and challenge - it in no way resembles a functional device at this point in time) and have gone back to a flip phone device with a removable battery that generally lives on the kitchen counter, and has a pretty poor room mic. It gets rebooted (full power cycle with battery removal) often enough, and I frequently don't bother bringing it with me places, or at least bringing it with powered on. I've found since I'm looking at it far less, it falls out of mind, so I will quite literally head into town and not realize I don't have it until I get nearly back home. It's fine, I did that for years before cell phones existed, I see no reason why I can't go back to that.
"No phones in the bedroom" is just a standing good policy for a range of reasons anyway.
However, I generally trust phones a bit more than I trust the "room mic" class of "assistant" devices. First, they're on battery, and widespread abuse will mean rapid battery drain and a warm phone. A phone, warm in the pocket, is cause for either turning your phone screen off, or alarm if it's already screen off and you don't know why it's warm.
But they also have a less effective microphone. Most of the ones I've experimented with over the years won't pick up a normal conversational tone across the room with any accuracy - but you can walk into a room, query for an Alexa/Google/etc device, and the one across the room will generally respond to you. They have far better microphones than a typical phone does for room audio.
I'm aware that the various devices are not supposed to be a live stream of room audio to the internet and generally don't seem to be doing that unless triggered, but the reports of people who have done a deep dive into their triggered captures have been that it captures a lot of nonsensical chunks of audio for no discernible reason beyond, presumably, "When in doubt, capture and send" - ease of use, of course, meaning that false negatives in detection are far more serious than false positives.
But neither do I trust the companies involved to not be doing a range of audio analysis locally and sending the information up in random updates. I don't know that they do this sort of thing, but I don't trust them not to. You could do things like unique voice count in the room detection to identify how many people typically live in a place, or if people are having a party. You could do vocal stressor analysis to determine if people are frequently angry, upset, etc. And I'm sure there are many papers written on what else one can use this sort of stuff for. I object to the capability being present, even if not used. Hence my general trend of not keeping smartphones around me regularly - but even there, at least Apple devices do tend to indicate if something is abusing mic privileges, and I can remove audio privileges from apps. I can't do that with the... skills? whatever the audio helper additional functionality code is called.
I grew up watching Star Trek (TNG), and even many years later, talking to computers just feels somewhere between "wrong" and "the Primary Processor Cortex is infected with Clamanthian Neurovirans!" - it's gotten dumb and they've got until the end of the episode to somehow fix it. It probably involves tachyons and the main deflector dish.
The more they try to sound like actual humans (and voice synthesis has been improving vastly over the past 20 years, I still recall thinking Dr. Sbaitso was impressive), the more jarring it is when they... don't respond remotely like an actual human would. Someone else in this thread shared a story of Alexa doing the same thing it had done many other times, wrong, and setting a microwave going with a metal oven rack in it. If I've told someone how to bake a pizza 30 times, it's fairly unlikely that they'll screw it up the 31st. That's not true talking to a computer, it seems to have the same low probability of screwing it up every time you do it.
That's all before you get into the fact that they're an absolute privacy and security nightmare, that plugging your whole house of "smart" devices in pretty much guarantees that you're broadcasting your every action to data aggregators (I consider actions taken in my home to be my and my family's business, not the property of whoever has the strongest clause in their EULA), that the devices will fail to function long before a simple mechanical device would have (resulting in huge piles of ewaste), and are just generally human-toxic trash.
I work in the low weeds of tech, and a comparison I saw some years back is entirely apt (paraphrased, sorry, I don't know the original source):
- Technophile: Has all the smart devices connected to his phone, can control his shower from across the planet, argues online over which hue of RGB light goes best for each programmed situation, and nothing in his house ever quite seems to work right.
- Firmware/CPU Engineer: The smartest thing in the house is his printer, and he keeps a loaded 12 gauge leaned up against it in case it makes an unexpected noise.
It's very true. Most of the people I know in the deep weeds have a deep, abiding mistrust for more and more of "consumer tech," and a deep hatred of "things" lately.