It would be superduper if AMZN would work with customers to ensure Alexa solves problems that actually exist in ways that are genuinely satisfying, instead of trying to be clever or whatever it is they're doing.
The "By the way" intrusion, for example, has nearly evicted the whole concept.
It's an open source voice assistant, which runs on hardware you physically own and keep in your house.
If Amazon is going to kill Alexa, they should be forced to unlock their (Linux?) firmware to avoid millions of devices going into landfills. The open-source community will come up with a replacement that can use their stellar hardware.
You missed the "Pricing Available Until November 30th, 2022" and the corresponding grayed and struck price of $499.00
For me, the price to replace these all would be be a few thousand dollars.
For me, if Amazon was to discontinue Alexa (not a prediction), putting home pods in the rooms that lack them (yes, I have Alexa and Siri sitting next to each other) would be less than the cost of a single Mycroft.
For those of us that don’t use Alexa, what’s this?
Siri has started telling me the company that provides it’s weather data every ~10th time I ask for the weather and I feel like even that crosses a line. I do hope Apple have a metric for how many customers swear at HomePods and have someone trying to minimise that.
Echo: "Okay. By the way, did you know I can do some other random thing wholly unrelated to the task you gave me, the description of which interrupts something that matters and now you've lost it because you are screaming at me to shut up, please god shut up, please never ever make suggestions?"
Having the voice assistant actually talk back and say anything at all more than the absolutely minimum possible response is unwelcome. Getting a 'by the way' response makes me want to chuck the hardware into the pool. That whole ecosystem is on my list of things to evict and replace with a self-hosted solution, but I've had too-limited time lately to go down that rabbit hole.