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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

Alexa's value has been dropping for me a lot lately since they follow nearly every interaction with some sort of commercial. '10 minute timer set, while you wait I can....' This appears to be one more nail in the coffin for something that could be very promising.

I think that for this segment to really take off Amazon/Google/Apple all need to start releasing usable stuff to the open source world. A good open source home server voice based back-end that can control open-source devices will start creating apps and drive exploration the space. Eventually it will find the killer apps that will truly kick-start things. The houses lost to people setting up their own back-end is likely very small and the returns could be very big.

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I bought the one with the screen. It constantly shows advertisements so I can't have it in my line of sight while doing anything else in my home. If you buy any personal items be sure to take them out of your amazon "recently viewed" queue immediately.

It shows me triumphant notifications (!) that turn out to just be a request for me to review a product. Yes, that's why I _bought_ this device, so the company I bought it from can use it as a portal to ask me to do free work for them.

It has failed to add any value other than as a device I can use to ensure that our Alexa skills are in fact working or not when I take bug reports out of our queue.

For the amount of counter space this thing swallows I constantly wonder why they couldn't have put a few USB charging ports somewhere on the side of it.

Speaking of USB and/or Bluetooth, why aren't there any "peripherals" for this device? It's just a useless screen connected to a cloud of corporate garbage that no one would ask for and it has zero ability to step outside of this sphere. So, yea, jam it full of "generative" content, how could you possibly make it worse?

I beta tested many of these products and found them so dystopian and useless I refused to ever participate in a beta again.

I got one as a welcome gift for work and my wife ended up smashing it with a hammer because it gave our seven year old unrestricted access to YouTube. She pulled it out of the garbage twice and hid it from us.

Thing is durable, she couldn’t actually crack the casing but broke something inside so it stopped working.

(To be clear we do let our kid watch YouTube supervised after she’s finished lessons, although not very often)

Twist: hiding the Alexa in the trash was a sophisticated game to get the kid to develop puzzle solving skills and a rulebreaking ethos.

Hah, I’ll admit we didn’t punish her further because we thought “wow she’s very resourceful!”

I have an Echo Show 8 that I wanted to watch YouTube on, but it doesn't work. Which model can access YouTube?

I just wanted it to show a clock in a huge font so I could see when I needed to rush back into the "office" when taking a break or making coffee. Alexa Show became useless after a while because of all the non-disable content, and it barely even shows the time anymore.

I swapped it back to my old Echo Spot (the round screen one). It's great at being a clock.

The Echo Wall Clock is also fantastic at being a clock!

Although sadly now discontinued, when mine breaks there doesn't seem to be any comparable replacement from any brand at any price.

The Echo Wall Clock is great! (if a bit ugly) Setting kitchen timers a lot of what we use Alexa for, and the wall clock in the kitchen works well. Dissapointing that it is discontinued!

> why aren't there any "peripherals" for this device

They made a bunch of peripherals but they never caught on.

They made media remotes, game pads, a sticky note printer, scales, and other things.

I bought one with a 10" screen because I needed a new picture frame. I have mine only showing pictures that I loaded into an Amazon album. I didn't find it too hard to turn off all other stuff, although sometimes it turns back on some other feature which requires me to disable it again from the interface.

> Alexa's value has been dropping for me a lot lately since they follow nearly every interaction with some sort of commercial.

This is every Amazon hardware product unfortunately. Kindles are the least bad, but they're not great. They sell really cheap hardware (TVs, Alexas, tablets), but you pay in data and advertisements. It's probably a choice many consumers are happy with.

I bough a FireTV (the entire TV uses it for the US, not just the stick) because it was incredibly cheap. $150 for a 42" 4K television, shipped to my house in two days. That's absurd. It has ads that like to autoplay on the home screen and its OS (I hate TVs have OSs now) runs like trash. I got what I paid for.

I'd pay a serious premium for a product like an Alexa, but with in house processing of voice. Maybe I heard that the Apple version did this, but I heard enough negative things about it to no care enough to look into it.

What happens if you just disconnect the TV from the internet? Not requiring the TV to connect to the internet is the most important thing to me at this point when shopping, specifically because of ads.

> I hate TVs have OSs now

I've been able to avoid this by just hooking up a computer to a big screen TV with HDMI. That's it. I watch stuff via the computer. Slightly klunkier for some stuff but has worked well enough. Might not be the best interface for kids or folks not comfortable with a full keyboard/trackpad though.

They make android devices for the purpose of HDMI-ing to a TV.

So it's also adware... as if I didn't need another reason not to have an always-on Internet-connected microphone in my house.

Just wait until you see what neuralink turns out to be

The internet really will turn into that episode of futurama

Have you browsed the web without an adblocker? It's been like the Futurama episode since it aired

My April Fools Day blog post of in-brain advertisements https://deumbra.com/2022/04/introducing-thoughtlog-the-free-...

From Elon Musk’s other products, it doesn’t seem he is a fan of the advertising model.

Trapped in a 3 ton metal box for hours seems the perfect time to force feed ads, and yet… nothing

Nothing /yet/

Given Tesla has not done this for years, I think you have to give them credit for not being stupid. Not every organization wants to create an ad infested product.

I think their aggressive anti-repairability it's pretty stupid, so I don't think I will give them blanket credit. I would bet a sum of money that is fairly large to me that by 2034 they will be showing ads in some form of they are not defunct as a company.

I also think they absolutely will, once they get the actual full-self-driving figured out.

don't worry, the industry is getting there!!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1c1g...

That is not a tesla.

I had dots throughout the house back in 2017/2018. One day I had an issue and asked Alexa to put me in contact with customer support. She read off a definition of customer support from the dictionary. I asked a few more times until I realized customer support would not be available via Alexa. I unplugged them all and threw them in a bin...where they remain.

The best is a message notification in the bedroom at 2AM, or maybe it’s an update. I’m in the process of replacing it with HA voice with the atom boxes.

It probably won’t be as good, but it’s time to jump ship.

Interesting. I use HA as my hub but haven’t been following closely with what’s possible. I’m going to have to grab one of these Atom Voice boxes and try it out.

I’m increasingly infuriated with the Alex Echos. Specifically the “while you wait..” or “did you know…”. The only thing I trust the Echos to do is turn on/off devices, set timers, and set reminders (same as what I trust Siri for). I imagine with Atom you can probably hook up an LLM somewhere in the chain which would be awesome, especially if I can use a local model.

Another thing I want to banish from my life is “An item on your subscribe and save is not available”, that’s it, that’s the message. What item? Doesn’t matter. What about if you ask? Alexa has no clue what you are talking about and the app is useless for this specific purpose and in general. In fact the app is horrible to work with, it’s slow and buggy. I want to find the developers of both the app and this “feature” and just ask them why they hate users.

Alexa was neat for a while but I’ve replaced the music playing ability with Sonos which does a way better job and now I really wish Sonos had a HA Voice integration. I can stomach setting up these Atom boxes everywhere instead though.

By "atom boxes", are you referring to the ATOM Echo or something else?

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-echo-smart-speaker-de...

> I think that for this segment to really take off Amazon/Google/Apple all need to start releasing usable stuff to the open source world. A good open source home server voice based back-end that can control open-source devices will start creating apps and drive exploration the space.

That commoditizes the frontend, which is the part they would actually control. There's no lock-in if you can swap your Amazon Echos for Google Homes and everything still works.

It would drive interest in the space, but probably not money into their pocket.

I don't think there's any inherent advantage for Amazon/Google/Apple to make all the homes smart. It's only to their advantage if they're the ones selling the devices.

This was the same reason I got rid of my Alexas; those "by the way..." ads were infuriating. Instead, I just use Siri, and while Siri does get flack, it has yet to advertise to me inane things when I just want to set a timer; it is good enough.

Does this happen with ads turned off?

https://www.amazon.com/b?node=98592480011

It does because Amazon does this insidious thing there they keep adding new categories of what are, effectively, advertisements and sponsored content.

There used to be something like 3-4 checkboxes I turned off on my Alexa Show to disable stuff like that, but they gradually will break out stuff into it's own, separate category that is enabled by default and you have to turn off again. I went through my Show again last month and had to disable more than 20(!) new checkboxes to get it to stop showing me things like "New Prime Shows", "Popular Amazon Buys", "Trending Pop Culture News" and other crud like that.

Every few months, a new category enabled by default and a new checkbox to turn off.

Thanks for the details. Another dark pattern for FTC to monitor, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/09/...

> 10 minute timer set, while you wait I can....

Sounds like they enshitified where they eat.

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