After a decade of free Alexa, Amazon now wants you to pay
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It does timers, tells the weather, and, uh, shouts at me from Ring when someone is at the door.
Handy when cooking and I don't want to touch something.
The voice recognition is iffy, the misunderstanding is constant, the vocal command line is painful. The plugins don't work seamlessly at all.
But it's a good timer.
But my iPhone does the same. And for $120 per year, that’s a good chunk of my iPhone cost every 4 years. E-waste, here we come!
I've also got an Echo Show in the same room with its microphone enabled. Then I can just ask Alexa to, for example, "on Dot, listen to classical KING FM, on Dot", and the Show will tell the Dot to start streaming that.
(I say "on Dot" at both the start and end because sometimes it wants it at the front and sometimes it wants it at the back, and I was never able to figure out what determined which it wanted at the moment).
Oh, and it is also a great way to get Spotify to play through my receiver. I can use the Spotify app on my phone or tablet or desktop to queue up things but tell the app to use Spotify Connect to tell the Dot to do the actual streaming of the music.
I really invested heavily into the Alexa system. It is super cool and futureistic! I have dots, the wallplug, echo show, studio, etc.
I just wish Amazon had invested in the usability of it more!
really aggravating.
and last I checked, there was supported web ui or cli to play music from my other devices outside of the (horribly slow) Alexa app.
IT COULD BE SO MUCH BETTER.
very common in our industry of software.
then the hypemeisters (vcs and marketers) pick up a likely candidate for hyping, and give it all the boost they can.
sometimes, by sheer luck, and of course by the old boys' network, it works.
I mean the profitability part, not the usefulness part.
llms are a case in point.
It's AliExpress with slightly faster shipping now.
Regardless, I use it as a timer frequently, and it's fantastic in the kitchen. I make a lot of bread and it's nice to be able to set a timer when I have flour / dough on my hands.
We are approaching 15 years of these things being mainstream and.. really that's it. Maybe that's fine.. it's just another mild lifestyle convenience!
But again, a reminder of the hype cycle and what actually ends up being useful technology when put in the hands of regular people.
When I need to take a piss and it's pitch black I don't fumble for the switch when I get out of bed. I just tell alexa to turn on the lights.
Because that's what they're asking.
I would pay a one time fee for it though. Like buying a product.
I use the Philips Hue system, and it works super reliably. But the Amazon integration is... getting iffier with that. No idea why. But yeah, voice controlled lights are nice.
Developing a great digital product? None has ever worked for them.
> you’ll still be able to use the current version of Alexa without a subscription fee.
It seems as if the current experience will remain free and this an available upgrade.
But I think the main problem was their entire vision for monetization was just nonsensical according to what I read. So I think they wasted many hours of effort on that front instead of trying to make devices people found enjoyable to use or that actually delivered value by working well.
People don't really want to buy blind via a device if they don't have to, and if they did it would likely come at the substitution of buying directly from the site. They nixed their web interface, and the mobile app performed poorly. They invested talent in coming up with buttons to reorder very specific stuff like laundry detergent, but something like their "Subscribe & Save" seems like a more sensible approach to that problem.
Plugins would have been great if plugin store didn't look like main Amazon store.
Like most people when I got my first one I played around with some other things but quickly stopped bothering. I'm perfectly happy with them as they are and don't know what else I would use them for. In browser and on phone AI have already filled the need for AI that I have at the moment.
They can charge as much or as little as they'd like for it. The idea of using such a service is repulsive, even for free. Amazon is the enemy, not your friend. Giving them more access to more of your life is a bad idea.
It's too bad we can't buy Alexa (/-like) devices that run auditable open-source code, and connect them to an open-source program running on our home servers. I'd be happy to have such a device/service, as long as it's under my control.
Considering I only ever use it as a timer, an impromptu alarm clock, and to ask what the time or temperature is when I'm about to head outside sometimes (can you believe there used to be a phone number you had to call to get that information if you didn't want to wait 7 minutes for the weather channel to do its forecast again?), I will just go without if they ever try to charge for that.
They've yanked at least one set of features, Alexa Guard. Its replacement, Alexa Emergency Assist, is the same thing but paid.
https://www.safewise.com/news/alexa-guard-no-longer-supporte...
Weather alerts: NOAA Storm prediction center convective outlooks and bookmark it.
They're the best thing the government does in the US.
Sure, if we live in the house, not at a desk, might be nice to have some "audio-based UI" but it's far from being a normal case. While I work or anyway I'm at the desk I can see anything quicker, when I'm not I'm typically do something else so I've no need to ask for current weather or something like that.
On contrary I do like MUCH home automation, but on MY terms. I do not like much Home Assistant but that's the least unusable of all I've tried, and I do like to have for instance:
- auto close/open certain roller blinds following the Sun position and the home+outside temperature
- run or not run water heater depending on water temp, available p.v., others running/scheduled charge, next day weather forecast
- auto-closing main home water valve when I go out for more than one day, also auto-close inlet, open purge in case of food sensors alarm
- ...
Long story short SIMPLE things, but beyond Alexa capabilities anyway. And things that could be far easier if a concept of OPEN, STANDARD appliance exists instead of the current sorry state of IoT...
Why not just listen to the news? You can listen to BBC on Alexa, along with almost any other news radio station you please. If you want short summaries, just look at the AP.
AI summaries might not be correct or might miss out on important context: in the news, the details are everything. And I doubt Amazon will be paying for the news services they scrape.
Are AI summaries of news really that much better than just listening to the news? Does the AI part mean it's going to try and figure out what news stories I listen to? Or will it just be the same for everyone, and then you might just say Alexa give me the news, and you can program it to give you news summaries from a huge list of available sources, which are not AI generated.
This seems like a stupid product idea, akin to subscription mouse. And I actually like and use my Alexa devices quite a bit (nest thermostat, smart water heater, smart lights, timer, weather, use as a speaker for my laptop), so I think I'd be their target market.
“Among features of the subscription Alexa, expected in October, are recipe suggestions based on your family’s dietary restrictions and AI summaries of the news. Caroline reported that you’ll still be able to use the current version of Alexa without a subscription fee.”
You went on that entire rant and called an entire product stupid based off of that?