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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this is a general trend or just me, but Alexa hardly gets my music commands right anymore. I tell it to play music and almost always it insists on playing something similar sounding from the younger generation’s zeitgeist… like it thinks my tastes are too old and and thinks I should be listening to more popular songs. It’s a really bizarre experience recently. Alexa used to just work and play the music I expected. Now I have to specify things almost exactly, and even then sometimes it doesn't find the music I’m looking for. Is this what it feels like to get old?

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This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears.

I've waited my whole life for AI assistants. I remember being really excited about the promise in the 90s. But it's this is it? Voluntary advertisement consumption?

Very disappointing.

Hanlon's Razor -- maybe Alexa matches to the most probable match and not many people are expecting what OP expects Alexa to play?

Which is the core problem with Alexa: why is a personal assistant getting worse at helping me specifically (even if it's better for the majority of users)?

Alexa arriving with a default profile for generic recognition makes sense -- but after that, it should have learned me, my voice, my commands.

Instead, it was one more not so subtle demand from Silicon Valley to become synonymous with their Product Persona -- or be ignored.

That, while possibly true, is a different problem than "This is because you are the product, not the customer. The customer is the record company paying to get their artists music into your ears."

It's not just you. I was an avid Alexa user with 1 Google Home just for comparison. Sometime in 2019 or 2020, Alexa got really bad, catching maybe 50% of requests, so they all got replaced with Google devices

That's very similar to YouTube recommendations, they seem to think your tastes are too peculiar and you should be dragged down to a more popular cluster.

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