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Comment by ghostly_s | Hacker News Reader

I laughed at this line: "Today Alexa has sold 500M+ devices, which is a mind-boggling user data moat." Yes, recordings of 500 million people saying "set a timer for ten minutes," and "order more paper towels" over and over again, truly a treasure-trove.

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My personal favorite is "Alexa! All Hue Lights ON" here - I only trust Siri with important cooking timers.

Mine usually goes:

"alexa lights" (works 50% of the time)

"ALEXA lights"

"ALEXA TURN LIGHTS ON"

I still love Alexa though, or more accurately, voice assistants in the home. It's just brutally out of date speech recognition and answering.

Always been a mystery why they didn't make it any better in the last 5yrs.

I've long wondered what the Alexa team does all day, but I've had friends who worked at Amazon as devs and I'm pretty sure it's "find as many ways to do nothing as possible".

What they did in the last 5 years was deprecate to death the Alexa web interface as well as totally ruin the Alexa mobile app such that there was really no great way to administrate my condo full of Echos.

What if I were to tell you that the Echo team spent all their time building not one, not two, but three entirely separate embedded tech stacks, for which all features had to be ported over, that all had to be supported because there's 25+ different devices because people got promoted for shipping 4 different ones every year?

I always wondered (being a developer myself) how a team at a well financed FAANG could fuck this up so badly. It seemed to me as if they were intentionally trying to ruin the product. Changes for no benefit month to month and this month doesn't work like it did last month, etc. Every night all 6 devices get reset to the same broken configuration I just changed yet again that day. What you describe here would do it easily and I'd absolutely believe you. I envisioned there had to be some reason but I'd have never guessed this was it.

The mobile app is utterly terrible.

just like Google they fired the entire speech flow teams

"Alexa, how much time left on my timer?"

"You have no active timers."

"Godd@mn you m..."

YUP - thats my experience as well - consistently too. The ONE thing we all use this kind of limited tech for and the Alexa team couldn't even do that well.

I don't even really use it for that. I have a kitchen timer on my microwave and another one on the oven. Both are easy to set. I can see if they're running and how much time is left.

I'd guess that half our Alexa utterances are for setting timers (the other half being split between listening to music and summoning the family to dinner/other announcements). Having dirty hands or not having to walk over to frob buttons makes the voice-activated timers pretty compelling to me.

Both my kitchen timers are sealed panels, one above the stove and one on the oven so I guess I just got in the habit of using them years before I had an Alexa.

I don't really even use the small one in the kitchen except to ask for a weather report now and then. But I see how the timers can be useful. They're very handy for my dentist etc. and would be for timing anything when you really don't have a free hand or want to touch anything.

Bedroom is light and alarm. Sometimes music but I don't really listen to music in bed. Downstairs I play off the AppleTV connected to my stereo system.

Set timer, play music, turn lights on/off, get weather report accounts for 100% of my Alexa usage. My wife uses the summoning function occasionally and my kids used to ask it random questions when they were younger, but yeah, that's about it.

For a while they were pretty much giving away the little Alexa dots. Buy some soap, get a free Alexa. I remember being unable to give them away and I think we ended up just trashing about half a dozen of them (vs the five active Alexa unites my ex-wife has. I personally have none in my home and plan to keep it that way).

> truly a treasure trove.

You forgot the part about it solving crimes.

https://broward.us/2023/07/18/amazons-alexa-is-surprise-witn...

Imagine how many millions of “shut up!” “F—- you alexa!” Etc.

At least a few 100 from me.

"Alexa play music"

(having setup Apple Music as default on every device and the Alexa app)

"Ok, playing My Soundtrack on Amazon Music"

"Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop, Alexa Stop"

"Alexa play music"

"Ok, playing Apple Music"

"What the f*$#, F^%@ you Alexa"

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