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Comment by xuaihua | Hacker News Reader

An older article, and specifically about their Super Bowl ads, but a fascinating answer to a question I had directly from the source at Amazon.

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For anyone who's curious, it's typical for Alexa to respond to pre-recorded mentions of her name. Last night, ours woke to "Alex" while watching The Traitors.

(Speaking of being intrusive, lately Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities to the point that my kids asked me to fire her. It's looking like Siri + Homebridge will allow me to do that.)

> Alexa has also been very aggressive about promoting other Alexa capabilities

I was wondering it that was just me, it seems a lot of responses are now ending with "...by the way, did you know i can...". I sometimes listen to NPR ( please don't judge ) and i get the "...we still don't have your zip code..." a lot but i think that is an NPR thing and not an Alexa thing.

It's definitely not just you. I use the "Good Morning" skill nearly daily (which responds with a joke or a little fact about the date), and about 1/3 of the time, before the actual response, she'll interrupt to ask that I setup voice recognition so she knows my name.

While I heartily recommend you to explore other options, there's a solution to that infuriating behaviour: https://fosstodon.org/@scubbo/109412458604860895

Thanks! I found it a few messages down: "Alexa, stop 'By The Way'"

Alexa will then reply, "I will snooze my suggestions…for now." (The foreboding pause was implied.)

And the suggestions will restart in a few days. What we did is add "stop by the way" as a custom command to our "goodnight" routine, so the thing is reminded every single night that these suggestions are unwelcome. The annoyance maximization team at amazon hasn't deployed countermeasures to this yet.

Haha, yeah, not a fan of that :( anecdotally, they haven't restarted for me yet (activated it ~6 months ago), but I really wish there was a permanent option.

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