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Comment by jdlyga | Hacker News Reader

Alexa is super buggy now anyway. I switched my Echo Dot to Alexa+, and it fails turning on and off my Samsung TV all the time now. You usually have to do it twice.

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This has been my impetus to do Home Assistant things and I already can tell you that I'm going to spend far more time setting it up and tweaking it than I actually save, but false economy is a tinkerer's best friend. It's pretty impressive what a local LLM setup can do though, and I'm learning that all my existing smart devices are trivially available if anyone gets physical access to my network I guess!

This is the kind of thing Claude Code (bypassing permissions) shines at. I‘m about to setup HA myself and intend to not write a single line of config myself.

Most of HA is configured in the gui these days, you won't need to write any config anyways.

Something I love about HA is that all thr gui can always be directly edited using yaml. So you can ask claude for a v1 then tweak it a bit then finish with the gui. And all of this directly from the gui.

Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.

I just use a "Alexa goodnight" to trigger turning off the tv and lights

I upgraded to the old Alexa. Alexa+ is a hot pile of crap.

i agree. the new LLM is better for dialog and Q&A, but they haven't properly tested intents and IOT integration at all.

How can this be? I had great luck with GPT3 way back when… and I didn’t have function calling or chat… had to parse the JSON myself, extraction “action” and “response-text” fields… How has this been so hard for AMZN? Is it a matter of token cost and trying to use small models?

that's a reasonable theory. they've likely delayed the launch this long due to the inference cost compared to the more basic Alexa engine.

I would also guess the testing is incomplete. Alexa+ is a slow roll out so they can improve precision/recall on the intents with actual customers. Alexa+ is less deterministic than the previous model was wrt intents

Someone posting on HN should know better than using Alexa and Samsung TVs. These devices are a unique combination of malware and spyware.

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