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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I have basically stopped using Alexa in my house. It started as a vision for an intelligent personal assistant, and what we ended up with is a glorified kitchen timer that reads out Amazon ads all day.

“By the way, sign up for Amazon music.”

“Tip your Amazon driver.”

No thanks.

I wish they had actually done something with the tech rather than promptly handing it over to the marketing team once it got some users. I’m trying to think of a single major improvement to the experience since it first launched a decade ago, but am coming up empty.

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Ooh ooh! And the fact that EVERY ALEXA IN THE HOUSE will rotate a mysterious yellow light if you get a special Amazon notification. Took me a good while to figure out wtf it is.

This winds me up enormously. Especially when it's "please review this thing you bought 3 months ago". FFS.

Glorified kitchen timer reminds me a little of my use case(s).

When uncorrected I have severe vision impairment (-10 + astigmatism). Without exaggeration I have trouble finding my glasses unless the room is well lit, and even then I have some panic if they aren't exactly where I think they are. I have backup glasses in a known place because if my glasses slide off the nightstand or something else I'm essentially completely blind.

At night, in a dark (or even dim) room, it's much worse. So, for me, the Echo does it's job just because I can tell it to turn on the lights. I imagine for other people with more significant accessibility issues it can be very useful - even though it drives all of us crazy with "Oh, by the way, did you know I can...".

It's also nice for a few other bedtime/dark room related things like lying down to go to sleep and get that panic "OH WAIT! Is that 7am meeting tomorrow? Better check the calendar and set my alarm accordingly." Or when I wake up at some point in the dark and need to decide if I should start my day I can ask Echo what time it is without struggling to find my phone and be blinded (even more so) by the backlight as I hold it (literally) 1-2" from my eye.

It can be really annoying but for me these (admittedly minor) use cases keeps Echo in my house (bedroom).

Motion and sound activated lights have been a thing forever. The only new innovation is that your request has to hit 3 AWS data centers and a server in China and Google Analytics before your bedside lamp can turn on. And if Wi-Fi goes out for some reason then you’re sitting in the dark.

You don't like Amazon/Echo and that's fine. I'm not coming to your house and forcing you to install one. No one is.

Server in China? I use Home Assistant with total local control of all of my smart home devices. On a separate VLAN and SSID. With no internet access. Echo is on a different VLAN and uses the (excellent) Home Assistant integration. AWS data center of course, but see my other comments[0] about the near-total uselessness of any local devices and implementations for wake word detection, ASR, and NLP. Speaking of Home Assistant, see my other comment about the graphing and notification system I built for Echo/Alexa[1].

Yes, I remember commercials for "The Clapper". I've been in bathrooms with motion activated lights that turn off while you're on the toilet (you know, the move where everyone starts frantically waving their arms).

Not only are these solutions also imperfect, you conveniently ignored my other use cases about checking the time in the dark, checking my calendar, setting alarms, etc.

I like my Echo. I like my "smart home" configuration and I've minimized the security issues and blast radius. I understand your concern and it's not without merit but you have the choice of whether or not to use internet connected devices in your environment. So do I.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041435#35051644

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35041435#35051766

> Tip your Amazon driver

Ha ha, what? Is that a real thing?

Yeah you can google it, it's a real program that Alexa will notify you of sometimes (if you're in a participating region), just like the other ads, sorry, "reminders" it serves.

Mine just asks me to "thank" or compliment my driver. Initially they gave drivers money based on their thankfulness metrics but I think that program ended.

It only happened twice, for less than 48 hours

Glad I didn't buy one. If I had bought one and it did that to me I'd actually sabotage our AWS spend on purpose just to punish Bezos.

TBF it wasn´t like that at the beginning, when growing the ecosystem was their priority.

As pointed in the article, the move to monetization happened once the writing was on the wall that it wouldn´t become significantly different than what we have now.

Also they´ve always been priced so aggressively, I´m kinda glad I got the original puck at such a low price, to see first hand where the technology was and what to expect from it.

It makes sense they’d want to support the service with ads, but it feels especially jarring to have a simple interface for simple tasks unpredictably and inconsistently interrupted with ads. I think especially because it tends to be a device we use for multitasking while cooking, cleaning, cuddling, etc. but also just because of the inconsistency. It’s like if your toaster or C compiler occasionally asked if you knew it could cook bagels or give warnings for unused variables, when you’re just trying to make breakfast or get your code to compile before a meeting.

This is horrible, in NL we have the "international version" of Alexa and we don't get any of this crap, just a basic voice assistant that can play music and control smart home devices.

Do you by any chance know how to turn off the btw prompts?

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