Alexa+

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-alexa-generative-artificial-intelligence

by fgblanch • 1 year ago

222 338 1 year ago

mdasen• 1 year ago

The pricing seems odd. $20/mo for Alexa+, but it's free with a $15/mo Prime subscription?

It makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.

bthrn• 1 year ago

Anchoring

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

Or Prime's getting another price increase.

yapyap• 1 year ago

Sounds like they just want you to get a prime subscription

neofrommatrix• 1 year ago

That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription. Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.

bbor• 1 year ago

Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?

beastman82• 1 year ago

No, but the market is free, and you are free to decline this terrible offer.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 year ago

Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.

mixedCase• 1 year ago

Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs.

I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.

dlcarrier4• 1 year ago

I haven't found an LLM that gives correct responses often enough to be consistently useful with typed requests, let alone spoken ones.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 year ago

Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings.

Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.

brookst6• 1 year ago

That’s wild. What kinds of things do you ask about?

I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.

echelon• 1 year ago

She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.

And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.

Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.

Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.

laweijfmvo• 1 year ago

It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.

olddustytrail• 1 year ago

"Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."

zamalek• 1 year ago

She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.

The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.

delichon3• 1 year ago

I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.

creshal• 1 year ago

Why would Amazon want you to have it, though? They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.

reginald78• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure their search results intentionally suck to make their ads more valuable.

Aurornis3• 1 year ago

They benefit fantastically from manipulating search results against you.

Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them.

They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”

doctoboggan4• 1 year ago

I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers".

I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.

DaiPlusPlus• 1 year ago

May I ask you what makes you so sure that it's an LLM-based search - and not any other kind of NLP search tech?

reaperducer3• 1 year ago

Nothing you describe hasn't already been done in the pre-LLM era with simple keyword matching.

In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.

I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.

pr337h4m• 1 year ago

Check out https://exa.ai/ - iirc they use a link-prediction transformer

https://websets.exa.ai/cm7m8a1ip006rdzzzgxsalirs

delichon3• 1 year ago

That's exactly what I asked for, wow. To whoever asked why should Amazon want to do this, it's to keep their customers from bypassing their own search with services like this one.

firejake308• 1 year ago

Looks great, but wow, the pricing is insane for the typical consumer

daveguy3• 1 year ago

Curious as to what LLMs you are using to allow successful queries like this and what are you using them for? If you don't mind sharing. My understanding was that these would result in some fairly random, maybe true maybe not, results. Is there a company with a RAG that produces reliable results? If so, I would like to check it out.

delichon3• 1 year ago

The majority is coding in an IDE with Claude. It outputs results that I can validate immediately. There are lots of wrong answers to be tossed out but it's still a large acceleration over just docs and stackoverflow.

I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.

jazzyjackson3• 1 year ago

I've found Perplexity.ai with Deepseek R1 to be very good at choosing a product or a hotel for me. I just punched in your query and it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen ! "Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer"

It's a good air fryer.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/air-fryers-without-bluetoot...

Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-recommend-a-hotel-mo...

lm284692• 1 year ago

it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen !

How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

I just tried this and it completely an utterly failed on the first prompt. Useless.

earbuds that have the wire in between so I can dangle them around my neck

First result: Sony WI-1000XM2 Wireless. These are neither earbuds nor do they have a wire.

Pointless garbage. It also doesn't let me copy and paste the result, for no reason. Bad software.

Exoristos2• 1 year ago

If I experienced your air fryer story, I'd assume the recommendation system had access to my shopping history somehow.

m_kos• 1 year ago

I am on a one-month free trial of Perplexity Pro and its deep research is excellent. It may very occasionally deviate from the original query, but I will still miss it a lot. It makes using Google feel like such a chore.

lesostep• 1 year ago

Google was a great product for searching the best deal too. As was Amazon back in the day. Perplexity.ai is massively in the red, and would have to extract a profit somewhere.

Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.

And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is. So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.

doctoboggan4• 1 year ago

I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years.

But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.

dlcarrier4• 1 year ago

That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not.

Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.

crooked-v• 1 year ago

I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results.

But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.

rchaud• 1 year ago

Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".

taeric12• 1 year ago

Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.

Mistletoe2• 1 year ago

It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.

daveguy3• 1 year ago

Personally, I think they'll move some of the Alexa+ functionality to prime subscribers and increase the prime rate again to subsidize.

nunez• 1 year ago

It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.

colordrops• 1 year ago

It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".

mikeInAlaska• 1 year ago

I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.

blueflow• 1 year ago

I'm morbidly curious about your questions.

pflenker• 1 year ago

Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.

goosedragons• 1 year ago

I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.

taeric12• 1 year ago

The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?

Marsymars8• 1 year ago

I've found it easiest to just leave a lightweight, compact umbrella as a permanent fixture in my everyday-carry bag!

stronglikedan• 1 year ago

Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.

bb88• 1 year ago

I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list.

A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy.

While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list."

And it did!

PaulHoule• 1 year ago

I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center.

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

rockbruno• 1 year ago

Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice

rolph• 1 year ago

model agnostic, meaning a model is enlisted based on specific task, rather than a shoehorn and a single model.

827a• 1 year ago

Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.

Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?

stirlo• 1 year ago

Perhaps pricing in other markets will be substantially lower and undercut the Prime cost?

dragonwriter• 1 year ago

Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?

Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"

The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.

baggachipz• 1 year ago

Remember how all Prime video used to be free and without ads? There'll be the same bait-and-switch here.

spacemannoslen2• 1 year ago

I remember reading an article about how Amazon would lose money every year on the Alexa service.

I wonder if /how that will change now after this.

antasvara• 1 year ago

IIRC, Alexa lost money because:

1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.

2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.

What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.

spacemannoslen2• 1 year ago

Specifically, if they’re going to lose even more on this venture now cranking it up to 11.

Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too

drivingmenuts• 1 year ago

How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?

jxyxfinite2• 1 year ago

This isn’t what they are selling.

They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”

mvieira382• 1 year ago

In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

Before using LLMs, you had to list every single variation that someone might say to trigger a command - “utterances” in every language.

With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...

junto2• 1 year ago

Do I need a new Amazon device or will it work with my current Echo?

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

"We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period."

junto2• 1 year ago

Thanks. Missed that.

1shooner2• 1 year ago

Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale.

I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.

On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for.

Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573

Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.

Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.

1shooner2• 1 year ago

Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.

mikestew• 1 year ago

Every time I hear that, I think “you mean like I’ve been doing for, what, the last five years?” How does Siri not know that I know this already? Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?

Marsymars8• 1 year ago

"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.

In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.

ben_w• 1 year ago

"did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?"

Likewise.

Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".

These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.

It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.

Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".

Karrot_Kream• 1 year ago

the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials

I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.

On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.

I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.

advisedwang• 1 year ago

Honestly I think it's a tiny number people that are actually eager consumers of surveillance capitalism. It's just pushed so hard by the companies around us that unless you actively oppose it it will creep in.

hbosch2• 1 year ago

On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.

On a bus or plane, no, absolutely not. In the kitchen of a busy household, yes, definitely.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Yup. Or rewinding your podcast or skipping to the next music track in the shower.

Asking what the name of the artist is while running with earbuds.

And so forth. We have different interfaces to adapt to the outputs we have available at the moment...

californical• 1 year ago

The Alexa in my in-law’s house already does this and it is such an anti-feature.

It’s always some garbage that they had clicked on at one point.

Suggested: the “AOWFIZ Toilet Brush with digital thermomteer” is 10% off

Like they paid $200 to have that in their kitchen

lasermike026• 1 year ago

Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT? Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo? None of this makes any sense.

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

Why would I want Alexa+ if I have ChatGPT?

Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa.

Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo?

Because it isn't out yet?

dmix2• 1 year ago

Most people using Alexa heavily probably already have Prime.

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 year ago

Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand.

Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!

People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !

qwertox2• 1 year ago

Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.
We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.

Thank you for nothing, then?

I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?

Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."

ceejayoz7• 1 year ago

Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+?

I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.

harmmonica4• 1 year ago

If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key).

That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).

One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."

drpossum• 1 year ago

I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.

com2kid• 1 year ago

Do it all locally.

I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?

The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).

[1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...

msh• 1 year ago

This is a local only version: https://www.jollamind2.com/

tokioyoyo4• 1 year ago

Fair, but the above comment is about general population. The percentage of people that’s actively against it in the real world is negligible. Like where do you cut the line? Is Siri/Google Assistant ok on your phone? What about every newer BMW nowadays coming with its own assistant? Samsung TVs? Nest/Ecobee products? I could go on, and I haven’t met a person who owns has 0 devices with voice assistants in years.

harmmonica4• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how any person can be confident of such things these days, but would you be ok with the open mic if you knew it couldn't be used to build some profile about you?

joshbaptiste• 1 year ago

Love the "Drop In" Feature opening a conversation channel to a particular room..

652• 1 year ago

You know, people said the same thing the first time voice assistants came out. They said the same thing when VR came out. Even when 3D printers came out for God's sake.

"Everyone will have one!"

It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.

harmmonica4• 1 year ago

I definitely agree it's a mistake to think that. That said, I do think LLM's or their direct successors are going to be more akin to Google search than the items you mention in terms of market penetration. And my comment was attempting to communicate that voice is today, and will be in the future a great way to interact with LLM's. I think you're saying you disagree with that, which is totally cool of course. Just thought I'd reply to share a little more of my thinking.

onedognight• 1 year ago

It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.

This is true in general, but LLMs do search better. Everyone already does search.

JadoJodo• 1 year ago

I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.

GratiaTerra• 1 year ago

Smile? No, it's a penis.

esafak2• 1 year ago

A bold logo! https://youtu.be/335Qnh-GRcA?t=128

toddmorey• 1 year ago

They are very hand-wavy in the privacy & security section.

grg0• 1 year ago

AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.

beardyw2• 1 year ago

I feel just as excited about this as I did the last Alexa. Why use the name of a failed product?

ascorbic• 1 year ago

A failed product that has sold 600 million units?

walthamstow• 1 year ago

Weren't they mostly sold below cost?

beardyw2• 1 year ago

Apparently at little or no profit.

hennell• 1 year ago

I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can.

My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.

Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.

Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?

They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?

And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.

I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.

But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.

Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.

JamesSwift• 1 year ago

Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"

terminalbraid• 1 year ago

I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop.

I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.

qmr• 1 year ago

Why did you let Alexa in in the first place?

bronco21016• 1 year ago

Given how Apple Intelligence has gone so far, I'm not going to hold my breath.

dmix2• 1 year ago

Finally, Alexa hasn't improved at all in years. I half love half hate mine.

I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

continue on the go with your phone or in the car,

I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.

ge963• 1 year ago

The fusion of the different devices is cool but man it feels odd to be owned by some company, integrated into all aspects of your life idk.

My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically

nozzlegear3• 1 year ago

What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.

ge963• 1 year ago

Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device?

edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"

movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC

I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech

mvieira382• 1 year ago

By having my phone I get the benefit of keeping my job and life after Google and other big tech companies dominated society to such a degree where it's basically impossible to function offline. By paying Amazon I get the benefit of being able to buy stuff after every other store was undercut to extinction. Hurray

gotts• 1 year ago

If they have a decent API I might consider buying it. Unfortunately it's not yet yet released in my region.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

I have 4 echos. This stuff looks like a lot of things I will never use.

hbosch2• 1 year ago

Custom bedtime stories will make every night in my house more pleasurable!

jazzyjackson3• 1 year ago

I don't know why I have such a visceral gut turning reaction to the idea of a bodyless voice synthesizing a bedtime story to a child. I don't have children, but always thought the whole bedtime story thing was meant to be time spent with the parent.

stavros• 1 year ago

https://deepdreams.stavros.io

They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.

08982• 1 year ago

The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly.

I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house.

I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?

Dnguyen• 1 year ago

Works well for us by saying, Alexa, announce ...

calamity_elf• 1 year ago

then half the time for us it will not hear the announcement, so we say 'alexa announce' again, and it announces "ALEXA ANNOUNCE" all over the house.

rdtsc• 1 year ago

Wait till she "mishears" you: "I thought you said you wanted to purchase 10 gallons of Amazon basics hand soap. Sorry about that. The shipping is arriving today, but you can return it back at the nearest UPS location".

I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".

HarHarVeryFunny4• 1 year ago

Wait til Alexa+ becoms "Alexa+ thinking", and tells you she's replaced the Ice Cream on your Amazon Fresh order with oatmeal because its healthier.

nashashmi2• 1 year ago

I remember when law officers wanted the Alexa recording at the home of a murder. Amazon did not give it up.

I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?

Aurornis3• 1 year ago

I think your memory is mistaken. Amazon will give up recordings when legally obligated to do so, because that’s the law. They can’t choose to ignore the law.

However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive).

Here’s a case where the Alexa command was used as part of the case, though it didn’t have recordings of the actual crime: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...

nashashmi2• 1 year ago

Try these searches: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

Alexa only sends network data when the hotword is heard...how exactly does that happen during a murder?

deadmutex• 1 year ago

I don't know the specifics of this case, but maybe the investigators just asked in case there was an accidental trigger, or a real trigger etc. Seems reasonable for the detective to attempt to turn over any stone they can to aid the investigation.

RestartKernel• 1 year ago

With an unfortunately named victim, I suppose.

plorg2• 1 year ago

I don't know about Alexa specifically, but I've seen stories where the police requested Ring videos from a neighbor's house, including cameras inside the neighbor's house that they could not have known of without Amazon's assistance, that were not pointed outside, and even, if I remember correctly, one that was in the neighbor's business in a completely different location, where the justification pointedly identified the neighbor as not a suspect, but Amazon gave over this video anyways.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

Until last year, Amazon gave police video from Ring without a warrant.

https://www.wired.com/story/ring-police-rfa-tool-shut-down/

otterley• 1 year ago

There’s a difference, though. Alexa’s recordings are made inside your house. Ring videos are taken outside your house. This distinction matters both as a fact and in the law.

acdha3• 1 year ago

Amazon has given police recordings:

https://apnews.com/general-news-343c0f5ed0884d1eb1dbe911e8ce...

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

bakugo• 1 year ago

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

Can Prime users instead get a discounted prime without this Alexa stuff? Seems like it should be $20 cheaper per month. In other words Prime shipping should be free.

alok-g• 1 year ago

I wish producers were required by law to honor such logic. Only then the true pricing of things will appear.

wiremine2• 1 year ago

I'm not optimistic, but my recent experiences with Gemini's mobile app gives me pause on my pessimism.

My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation.

If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.

bhhaskin• 1 year ago

The big issue with LLM is how can you trust the information it gives you? It could be flat out making all or some of it up.

kahmeal• 1 year ago

I mean that's one of the value propositions these folks have to weigh into their product offerings. At some point you either have a reputation for delivering accurate responses or not and that will dictate who uses it and how much they're willing to pay for it.

tokioyoyo4• 1 year ago

It doesn’t take much effort to verify and cross reference check in most of the scenarios. But I have no idea how they will fight against LLM-optimized SEO-hell. Like I could see products flat out flying in the ads, hoping for LLMs to pick that up and suggest to users. Source of truth will matter even more.

happyopossum2• 1 year ago

That's one of the things I like about the current implementation of Gemini - they seem to really be leaning in on grounding, and there are ref links for pretty much all of the stuff that I'd normally want to fact check form a chatbot.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

The built in web search

https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a...

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

Gemini is laughable. Please check the advice it gave you, I promise it got some major things wrong.

rurp2• 1 year ago

I feel like for any place that Gemini can give you worthwhile information about there will be a number of other sources that can give you more reliable info about it. Granted I tend to take trips to oddball places so I might not be the best judge.

I just tried asking Gemini about some popular destinations spots near my house that I know well and the answers weren't very impressive. Much of the responses didn't actually pertain to my specific questions and the useful info was pretty standard stuff that could be found anywhere. Some of it was straight up wrong as well. For example I asked about good hikes that aren't too crowded and it recommended the single most crowded trail in the area.

taeric12• 1 year ago

I'm more than a little curious on what sort of questions you would have needed an AI to query regarding a trip? Like, genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had.

We travel as a family a fair bit nowadays, and building an agenda for each day of the trip is surprisingly not that difficult if you are going to any common destination. Biggest thing to not forget is to add slack so that you can rearrange on the fly if needed.

wiremine2• 1 year ago

genuinely curious what sort of conversation you had

We're in the US, and we're looking at a UK trip. I've lived in the UK, and we've done a fair amount of international travel. We're in the "brainstorming" mode. I'd characterize the conversation as verbal googling.

We were asking questions about distances between cities, typical ticket rates for trains, things to do in various locations, etc.

lostmsu• 1 year ago

How can I try it? My Prime expires in 3 days.

bookofjoe• 1 year ago

The problem for both Amazon and Apple is that they've sunk SO much money into Alexa and Siri that they simply can't walk away and start over with AI. Thus, their futile attempts at combining their original creations with state-of-the-art AI and LLM. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

lurking_swe• 1 year ago

it’s hard to believe apple has made any investment in siri (the voice assistant part specifically) since its initial launch. Most of the improvements in the last decade were lipstick on a pig anyway.

i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…

taeric12• 1 year ago

I find it interesting that the big companies are so sure that LLMs are somehow going to make a larger market for smart speakers than they currently have. To the contrary, I expect they are going to damage the market they have for people that just want easy kitchen timers and radio like functionality.

This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.

Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.

To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.

cruffle_duffle2• 1 year ago

If the only thing this does is make it easier to control devices whose names I forget, than it is worth it. Because I never, ever remember what I name devices and to address them with the current implementation of Alexa I need to be pretty spot on.

taeric12• 1 year ago

This could be solved with a reliable way to ask the device its name. Which, for the life of me, I don't know why they don't let that work easily.

mgiampapa• 1 year ago

You can take a few minutes to make a routine and give it a custom name. "Ziggy, goodnight" turns off all the lights in my bedroom, closet and office (in case I left them on), sets DnD mode on the Echo, turns it's screen off and sets my ceiling fan to speed 1.

This took about 5 minutes to setup.

cmrdporcupine• 1 year ago

Google has already done this. Destroyed its existing assistant product -- removed key functionality, de-staffed the team, moved it all under Gemini.

I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google.

It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not.

Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.

taeric12• 1 year ago

I'm a little biased, but I do think "voicexml" probably covered far more use cases than people are willing to admit. Some documents wouldn't have been pretty, I don't think, but would be far preferable to the inability to reason about how things actually work. And, indeed, the messier the document, the more obvious that you were making it too consuming.

esafak2• 1 year ago

I bet the people involved in the decision to bork it up don't even use the product. Management by OKRs. The numbers look good, ship it!

cromka• 1 year ago

I've been saying this for years, but I am still surprised there was no class action against Google for borking up their Home speakers.

Mine literally don't even understand "STOP" anymore when I ask them to stop playing my podcast. I am not kidding, every couple months they lose some basic functionality.

If that's not a modern version of planned obsolescence then I don't know what is.

652• 1 year ago

I never understood how people find setting a timer on their phone so excruciatingly difficult that they need to buy a $100+ device they can speak to to do it for them. Or perhaps it's another case of shiny object syndrome.

taeric12• 1 year ago

I don't have my phone on me at all times. More, it is often the case that I will set the timer for whatever I just put in the oven and let the kids know to take it out when the timer goes off while I go take care of something in the yard/other. That is, the timer is often specific to the room I set the timer in. Not to me.

theultdev3• 1 year ago

would be nicer if there was a cheaper / simpler alternative (offline voice recognition, just timers and clock, possibly weather)

but it's nice to use your voice so you don't contaminate your phone. (preparing chicken and such)

the kitchen is pretty much the only use-case for voice assistants imo.

Larrikin2• 1 year ago

If you already have one the utility is obvious in the kitchen. You don't want to touch your dirty hands to your phone and you definitely don't want to touch your food after touching your even dirtier phone.

I don't think that is useful enough to allow Bezos to listen to everything in my home, but will absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.

drusepth• 1 year ago

It's convenience. I have a device in my kitchen that's hands-free, can set timers, show recipes, etc, that's always there when I'm cooking.

I don't usually have my phone on me, but even if I did I need to at least unlock it to enable voice commands, which instantly kills any notion of it being truly hands-free.

kemitche• 1 year ago

Here's a few dozen use cases based on my own use of smart home devices:

- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.

- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.

- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)

- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.

- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home

- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.

- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.

None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.

taco_emoji• 1 year ago

This is so disingenuous. Echos are nowhere near $100 at the baseline, no one is buying it JUST for the timer, and no one finds setting a phone "excruciatingly difficult". Calm down.

Underphil• 1 year ago

On the rare occasions I watch TV, I'm incredulous at the adverts for technology that create these almost utopian looking lifestyles. I think to myself "who is taken in by this?". As it turns out, these are the people who are taken in by it.

dboreham2• 1 year ago

Massive lack of insight. The lady in the box on the kitchen counter is a "groupware timer". The timer on my watch is of no use to my wife in knowing when to turn off the oven when I'm in the bathroom.

kyleee3• 1 year ago

Obviously nobody finds it excruciatingly difficult, but you have a severe lack of empathy and imagination if you can’t see the utility here. Timers while cooking (hands dirty and/or full), measurements while woodworking/crafting/making, etc. and more as detailed thoroughly in other comments

skydhash• 1 year ago

I set time on my phone by voice (which is the only thing I use Siri for), because it's way quicker to say "5 minutes" than to try to set it through the app even with shortcut. But I have a kitchen timer (big, fat buttons and big digits) which I prefer to use in the kitchen because it's distinctly loud. My homepods are mostly for music.

iugtmkbdfil834• 1 year ago

It is not completely unexpected. Within executive ranks there is an odd FOMO on 'new big thing'. That's partially why you saw attempts to sell more passing fads like crypto-everything, blockchain-everything, iot everything, subscription everything. It is easy to make fun (especially in retrospect), but being wrong means executive may make the mistake that Dwight made and declare internet a fad.

taeric12• 1 year ago

This makes some sense, but I generally you'd make sure the TAM of what you are building isn't smaller than one you would be cannibalizing.

Amusingly, this is exactly what Google did with Reader back in the day. They actually had Reader and Buzz integrated rather nicely, but lit it on fire in an effort to get circles going.

AdmiralAsshat• 1 year ago

and free with Prime

Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.

brookst6• 1 year ago

Pricing for Prime is totally disconnected from costs. They will price at whatever maximizes p*q.

Exoristos2• 1 year ago

Which is impacted by perceived value:cost by customers.

NegativeLatency• 1 year ago

Cancelled mine recently, saved hundreds already by not buying dumb stuff I don't actually need on there.

rabuse• 1 year ago

Who actually wants this garbage?

brookst6• 1 year ago

Oh man, find memories of grandpa saying exactly that about electronic music.

dboreham2• 1 year ago

tbf grandpa was listening to Kraftwerk...

mkayle• 1 year ago

My main request is to add the functionality to inquire about the progress of running tasks, such as checking the time remaining on a timer.

Arthanos• 1 year ago

Let’s say you need to get your oven fixed—Alexa+ will be able to navigate the web, use Thumbtack to discover the relevant service provider, authenticate, arrange the repair, and come back to tell you it’s done—there’s no need to supervise or intervene.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.

scarface_744• 1 year ago

Apple didn’t try to summarize the news. It tried to summarize the headline and that was the issue.

MattJ100• 1 year ago

I don't think you can say that is the problem. It may have exacerbated the issue, but problems exist when summarising full news content too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0m17d8827ko

rs186• 1 year ago

Let me put this way: as a non native English speaker, I am fairly confident that I'll do a better job at "summarizing" headlines than Apple Intelligence. Take that however you like.

Marsymars8• 1 year ago

SEO, except your goal is to be the contractor that Alexa picks for the subset of customers that meet whatever criteria you're targeting.

VWWHFSfQ• 1 year ago

It's just SEO. Just targeted specifically at AlexaBot instead of GoogleBot.

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

Basilisk-flattery embedded in your site.

david422• 1 year ago

Imagine being on the support team trying to troubleshoot when something goes wrong for a customer. Maybe that's the catch ... there is no support.

seb12042• 1 year ago

I thought that is a given. Support is limited to a website with some superficial FAQ and a link to a live chat that never is available.

dangus10• 1 year ago

It also seems like it's ripe for just being an outright lie. People will pay Amazon to be ranked as the preferred service provider. You won't get the best service provider, you'll get the one that paid Amazon the most money.

codebje• 1 year ago

That’s the best service provider, by Amazon’s criteria.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo• 1 year ago

I can already see Alexa+ acting like this when someone says they are hungry:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oa8s07agHeY

rurp2• 1 year ago

Yeah there's roughly zero chance that works reliably. It's so prone to bad failure cases I'm skeptical that they'll even ship something that tries to do that automatically.

On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"

brewdad4• 1 year ago

"I backed the trailer part way up the driveway. I hope that's ok, sir."

"You'll want to feed him some oats unless you're ready to butcher him in the next two hours."

schnable• 1 year ago

I'd expect this to be like when you call the bank and go through the phone tree, enter your account, birth date, SSN, zip code, etc. Finally get connected to the rep and the first questions are "What's your name and birth date?"

smcleod• 1 year ago

Especially not one owned by Bezos

jhp123• 1 year ago

This reminds me of Facebook's "M" assistant from 2017.

Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.

https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...

serial_dev• 1 year ago

Just like nuclear fusion is always 30 years away, you can find a handyman and schedule an appointment with a voice assistant / chatbot in 6 months, and everyone will use self driving cars in 5 years.

WheatMillington• 1 year ago

Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.

I'm not aware of any failures that could reasonably be described as "catastrophic".

theamk• 1 year ago

well, what's the worst thing that can happen when summarizing? The summary is grossly incorrect, opposite of the text being summarized.

This is exactly what happened, multiple times.

bttrpll• 1 year ago

I remember when Alexa in a household appliances (e.g., microwaves) and nearly burned people's houses down. This should be interesting.

vrighter• 1 year ago

They already failed at this. Adding something to a shopping cart is just one of the steps the mentioned example states. And consumers have already indicated that they don't trust it, because they prefer to know just what they're buying. So this project, by doubling down on that, is DOA

1oooqooq• 1 year ago

i can picture your ancestor saying "what? i will go to one mega store and buy something made in asia instead of getting a suit made to measure by Giovanni across the street?"

or your mom complaining about "buying shoes online without trying then" (or maybe that's you if born before 2000)

AI slop will define your identity tomorrow, doesn't matter what you think

sbfeibish• 1 year ago

Your home might have a single provider you've previously contracted with for fixing your fridge, air conditioner,... We had such a service.

system7rocks• 1 year ago

I think this is an interesting curiosity, but I am a little worn out on every company announcing AI as some kind of major upgrade. Alexa has already been sort of a waning product, and in some ways, it was already kind of cute since you could play goofy games. But cute gets old.

With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?

cyberax• 1 year ago

I can't care less about Alexa ordering me something on Amazon or booking tickets. I can do that better from my computer.

I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".

TeMPOraL7• 1 year ago

Home Assistant has been doing it for a while. All it takes is to add OpenAI or Anthropic integration, plug your API key, and you have a better voice assistant than anything Google, Amazon and Apple have offered so far.

phillipcarter• 1 year ago

I'll take "smart speaker that actually understands the music I want to play" first, then we can get into scheduling appointments to fix my oven.

yuehhangalt• 1 year ago

I had Alexa devices throughout my home to control music and lights and set timers. Over time, the amount of advertising on anything that had a screen and the overall annoying reminders about tipping my delivery driver or leaving a review when I asked the time made me realize that I didn't want or need them anymore. I sold them all last year and just use my phone/smart watch to do what Alexa had been. For music, Sonos' voice assistant has proven to be good enough, claims to be on-device, and actually has been more responsive.

Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information.

It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.

criddell2• 1 year ago

I increasingly want less of it

I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit.

Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.

modeless• 1 year ago

The video here [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCCNHWV5] promises a whole lot. I am skeptical for now but at the same time I do believe this will all be possible in the next two years.

The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?

_xerces_• 1 year ago

Prime customers tend to buy more stuff from Amazon, so they get you that way maybe.

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

You know what I really want?

Rosie, from the Jetsons.

I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.

kridsdale12• 1 year ago

It’s been pretty shocking that a Turing-test sentience at genius level was easier technology to make than a consumer level robot with 1950s level design expectations that stupidly picks up and moves objects.

It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.

ramon156• 1 year ago

Hate these kind of claims where they go "Alexa is sooo good at doing X, omggg". I don't care, show me that it works.

wayeq• 1 year ago

She knows what you’ve bought, what you’ve listened to, the videos you’ve watched, the address you ship things to, and how you like to pay

really advertising to the hackernews crowd with this line

stacktrust2• 1 year ago

Identify or find objects with Alexa+.. use the camera on Echo Show devices to identify objects and get help with daily tasks. For example, reorder pantry items by showing them to the new Alexa, ask Alexa to identify a type of plant and its care instructions and set reminders for when it needs to get watered, or get fashion or décor ideas. This new feature is particularly game changing for people who are blind or have low vision

This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images?

It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden.

Alexa use cases for elderly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989

In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control, https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

Fully open software, firmware, and hardware.. Grove port for connecting sensors and a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting external speakers

haddonist• 1 year ago

In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control

Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums

twitchard• 1 year ago

Crazy how many voice AI related updates there were this week. Grok voice mode, Alexa+, Hume OCTAVE, Elevenlabs Scribe SST... big day for Voice AI!

insane_dreamer• 1 year ago

So will the next major Alexa release be Alexa++ ?

SteveJS• 1 year ago

I really did like that kitchen timer. This seems like it would have been pretty good.

However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv.

The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping.

I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon.

I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.

j_timberlake• 1 year ago

Hot take: If AI ever gets smart enough to actually do these activities well, the USA government will decide AI is a "national security risk" and not allow companies to sell access to it. Terrorists and drug cartels might use it!

Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.

bluesounddirect• 1 year ago

i may box all of mine up and "return" them back to mr bozos . i use them for glorified alarm clocks that can start a internet radio stream . i dont need anything else . i wonder if new alexa will still tell me how much protein is in a 42 inch flat screen tv !

Alexa+

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