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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Being able to yell "Alexa, turn my lights off" has been handy.

Alexa recently interrupting me with notifications that are just "Hey, some garbage you don't want is on sale" has me thinking about throwing the thing out.

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I switched to HomePods for exactly this reason, Alexa was constantly upselling me on features and Amazon products. Threw it out.

The nice (ish) thing about Apple is that since they price everything stupidly high, I have some faith they're making a profit.

I don't think Alexa makes money. I'm pretty sure the hardware is sold at a loss, with the intention it gets you to buy shit through Amazon with it. Which - obviously - no. Nobody is shopping via voice, that was always a stupid idea.

Same here. I have one echo left and using as a fancy kitchen timer with clock.

I did exactly the same and haven't missed it one bit.

I tried the same but I have multiple people in my house so about 20% of the time when I say “turn off the lights” it responds with “who is talking” and goes through a voice calibration exercise.

It’s super infuriating because I guess they want to personalize to the speaker, even when it doesn’t matter. And I suppose I sound similarly to others in my household.

If you don't need personalization, I think you can turn that off in the Home app.

>has me thinking about throwing the thing out

Me, as well, but there's got to be someone whose job it is to calculate just how often it can interrupt people with ads without them throwing the device away because I've been saying this for years and I still have my glorified alarm clock/light switch around.

The only thing that keeps me on my FireTV is the ability to sideload random APK files. Smarttube is just about the only thing that makes my Smart TV feel smart anymore: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube

There is no reason why your needs require a datacenter backed device.

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