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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

> With the product sucking up server time

This is the part that hasn't made much sense to me. Maybe just.. have a better product?

As you quoted above, "most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about the weather." Why does any of this need to consume provider resources? Could a weather or music command not just be.. a direct API call from the device to a weather service / Spotify / whatever? Why does everything need to be shipped to Google/Amazon HQ?

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From what I can tell, only Apple even wants to try doing any of the processing on-device. Including parsing the speech. (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)

So there's no way for them to do anything without sending it off to the datacenter.

> (This may be out-of-date at this point, but I haven't heard of Amazon or Google doing on-device processing for Alexa or Assistant.)

It was out of date 6 years ago.

"This breakthrough enabled us to create a next generation Assistant that processes speech on-device at nearly zero latency, with transcription that happens in real-time, even when you have no network connection." - Google, 2019

https://blog.google/products/assistant/next-generation-googl...

Alexa actually had the option to process all requests locally (on at least some hardware) for the first ~10 years, from launch until earlier this year. The stated reason for removing the feature was generative AI.

It's an obvious cost optimization. Make the consumer directly cover the cost of inference and idle inference hardware.

I had a group of students make a service like this in 2021, completely local, could work offline, did pretty much everything Alexa can do, and they made it connect to their student accounts so they could ask it information about their class schedules. If they can do it, Amazon certainly can. That they don't says they think they can extract more value from monitoring each and every request than they could from selling a better product.

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