Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to put penny in plug socket | Hacker News Reader

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to put penny in plug socket

bbc.com

38 pointstotaldude8713 comments

Dupe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709369 (442 points 373 comments)

Are people still buying in these smart speakers? Everybody I knew turned them into paperweights, or send them to the drawer after a few months after the novelty wore off.

Still using ours.

They make good voice activated light switches (when connected to Alexa-enabled switches and light bulbs) but that's about it imho...

Routines in the Alexa app are also quite useful together with Alexa switches if you want to put plant lights on a cheap and convenient timer.

Tried the wifi light bulbs once and every time the power went out the light would turn on at its highest level and lose the connection to the controller. Turned out to be a frustrating experience to replace a simple toggle switch.

I use mine to settle arguments and shut down "know it all"s

"Alexa tell me why my friend is full of..."

"Did this answer your question?"

"Yes, thankyou Alexa!"

When I was a kid my Mom would have us grab the "Big" dictionary and look things up, most likely it gave her a few moments of peace and quiet while we eagrly ran to her bedroom to carry "Grampa Dict" or "Great Grampa Dict"(The really big one!) back to the living room and look up whatever we were arguing about.

I mostly use mine as great sounding speakers and an overpriced kitchen timer

The one thing Alexa is really useful for is setting timers while cooking. Hands free, nameable timers make it worthwhile for me.

I want an offline voice recognition speaker that can do timers and stream audio from my phone, although that's optional to be honest. I wonder how hard making such a thing is.

How does it stream audio while offline?

Handover to Bluetooth potentially? Or stream data directly peer to peer.

Godsent for people w/ disabilities

This is obvious tabloid-esque content from a non-tech source. I do not think this is good enough content to belong on hackernews

Reply on news.ycombinator.com