Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company’s plans.
Alexa was never supposed to make money by itself. It was supposed to do two things, collect information and lower the barrier to buying things.
They must have either collected enough data to lower the value of collecting any more, or they have realized that people got over the novelty of asking Alexa to order more dog food.
My guess is the latter, because buying anything from Amazon now requires 15 minutes of research to make sure it’s actually what you want and not at some ridiculous marked up price. I wouldn’t trust Alexa to pick the best result on the first try.
Alexa has a tendency to give you the ‘featured’ product no matter how precisely and specifically you ask her for something. Even if you don’t have to research and know exactly what you want, it’s almost always easier to just go find your phone.
The real game changer for Alexa was always having a voice assistant that you can integrate with just about whatever you want that isn’t tied to someone’s phone. The idea of going into someone’s house and just saying ‘Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights’ or ‘Alexa, is it cold outside?’ is where the Alexa magic lies, but Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it’s own, just doesn’t contribute to the business case.
Amazon never could figure out how to make that profitable on it’s own
They are so dumb. Every house could use their products, they just need to charge normal prices. Everyone has light switches in every room. Imagine if most new houses came with “Alexa” switches and electric plugs.
They tried to make money on a few hobbyists who could set it up for themselves. They needed to go after the construction market. Charge half of what they were charging and sell a ton to every house in America. It’s not an iPhone. It’s a basic device to turn on the lights.
You’re right that is a real loss. Really, an Alexa that didn’t require a personalized amazon account could still be huge if they could figure out how not to have to justify the costs of running the servers. I think that unwillingness to let Alexa be just a voice assistant is the key roadblock. In a similar vein, Alexa for business could have been a really big deal too if they could have worked it out a bit faster but now I think interest has mostly died out before it had a chance to be adopted.
I’m not a huge fan of the company and I think it’s a coin flip as to whether they would just completely screw it up, but I wonder what would have happened if someone like Crestron had taken a real interest instead of just half-assing an integration.
Imagine if most new houses came with “Alexa” switches and electric plugs.
Oh boy a bunch of added expense to get the light switches swapped out with ones that don’t spy on me.
You’re right, but the reason that hasn’t caught on is that talking to your “smart” house is stupid. You can’t possibly program every possible command or situation, and telling Alexa to dim the lights in your kitchen to 40% is slower than using a dimmer switch. Actual smart homes are automated to the point where you don’t need to talk to your room.
This. Running Home Assistant on literally anything stronger than a raspberryPi means you can automate damn near anything. And yea, it might be a pain in the ass to setup, but once it’s done it basically runs itself.
And it’s infinitely, overwhelmingly better than than asking Google or Alexa to do any of it.
I have a bunch of wireless light switches all over the house, it’s stupidly convenient once you stop thinking they have to be stuck in thy wall.
Got a bunch of Google home minis I use for smart lights and music. Do you know if it’s possible to jailbreak/degoogle them to use with my own setup?
Jailbreak no, but you can sync them with home assistant and run them through thst as a bridge. Opens up a lot more flexibility in how you want to use it.
Is it much different from Google home? Seems similar from what I could tell from a quick glance.
Think of it like a connective layer. You will still need to run your Home stuff through Google to function best, but you can then have it forward its actions and commands to fake listening devices on your network, that can make it work with anything you like, or do more than that.
It’s powerful. I haven’t delved fully into it yet, but it’s also a great way to marry various smart home garbage together without being locked into a system. Use zigbee, z wave, matter, hue, and wifi blubs and devices all together seemlessly.
I’ve had a few Alexas over the past five years or so, and I honestly don’t think I’ve ever used any of them to actually buy anything. They’re all glorified Bluetooth speakers for my phone.
Alexa makes an excellent weatherperson :)
I wouldn’t trust Alexa
Trusting Alexa/Amazon is insane. It wasn’t insane X years ago (your value of X will vary), but it definitely is insane now
This is just it, it can barely handle manage my lighting system. How am I going to trust it to make purchases? Brought to you by the same people who can’t keep fake reviews off their platform.
Won’t keep fake reviews off their platform. It’s not a matter of ability, but of will.
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It’s true you will never get rid of all of it but, just like crime, basic enforcement is a deterrence. They know who’s buying, they know where they’re shipped, they have a fair idea if they’re returned. Just requiring reviews to be from purchasers after they’ve received the product, removing positive reviews for returns without replacement (or flagging them as returned), and a few other steps would make fake reviews either very expensive or very expensive for the results.
The fact is, Amazon makes most of their money on AWS, and I don’t think they care to put in the real effort to make their marketplace trustworthy again. Without that, it will continue its downward spiral.
As someone with ASD, GAD, and MDD (all diagnosed if it matters), smart home devices are an essential service to me. I can quickly set redundant reminders to help me with personal routines, add stuff to my shopping and to-do lists, and quickly get my lights and music set to what I need them to be when I am experiencing an anxiety episode. I definitely understand that my data is good and harvested at this point, and I don’t trust them to have done anything good with it. But these dots have made my life work since I bought my first one, and they’ve significantly reduced the anxiety I used to be riddled with.
I’m glad these devices have proved useful for people like yourself, even at the expense of your data. you take the bad with the good, as they say.
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Between inserting ads into Amazon Video, scaling back on fast delivery, and this it looks like Amazon has maxed out their growth and are scaling back on their loss leaders that were used to get where they are.
For the first time in at least a decade of being a Prime member. I have set a reminder to cancel before it renews next time.
So many deliveries fail to be on time, I’m getting too many ads in my face when I use products I paid for (Fire TV auto-plays ads for content or cars or whatever now).
Don’t set a reminder, just cancel now. If you cancel, you get the rest of the time you paid for and it just doesn’t automatically review, so there’s no penalty to canceling early versus right before the deadline.
I’m not sure that’s true. There’s a pause option and a cancel option. It sounds like canceling ends your benefits immediately, and the pause leaves them. I want to cancel, but at the right time.
It’s absolutely true, my friend. Only takes a minute.
They just wanna scare you out of cancelling.
Well, I’ve set the reminder. There’s no urgency to cancel with 6 months left on the clock.
I’m not sure that’s true.
Well, I’m sure it’s true. I’ve started and stopped Prime benefits multiple times.
It’s true, I canceled mine last year. I also haven’t missed it, if I need things from Amazon I just have to spend over 35 for free shipping, and while it’s slower it really doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it might.
Cancel now! It’s incredibly convoluted process that makes you think you’ve done it but no, there’s always one more confirm screen hiding behind a tiny button
Last time I canceled it it was very easy to do (amazon.ca)
Nah, I’ve paid for it and it seems there’s no refund.
Unfortunately, I’m still getting overnight and next day delivery on a lot of stuff, so I’m not giving Prime up. I did stop watching Prime Video already, since I’m not paying yet more.
Now I’m already way into the Apple ecosystem, so if Amazon insists that I give Apple yet more money for airpods, I’m ok with that
I use the overnight and next day delivery a lot, but when it goes wrong it’s very frustrating, because there’s seemingly nowhere else to buy an 8TB HDD in-person. Fry’s closed down, Best Buy is garbage, etc.
We made this bed by giving Amazon all of our business and shutting down all their competitors. :-/
… and pushing ads on echo show devices.
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Sadly, that’s what we do with phones, cars, tvs, etc
Fortunately, there are solutions to each of those:
- phones - alternative Android ROMs and fdroid
- cars - remove the connectivity module
- TVs - don’t let it access your network and don’t use the apps
That’s not true for Alexa, you need to allow it to spy for its core functionality to work.
Yeap I’m just saying it’s sadly all too common
I’m actually degoogling at the moment precisely because of all this
I wouldn’t be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.
I’d buy 2, start a neverending conversation going between them, and lock em away in the corner in the attic.
Make it three, call it The Ellipsis
With how garbage Alexa is now, there is no way in hell I’m paying them anything. I’d love a refund for the three useless dots I have now.
. . .
Those are periods!
Sorry
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Home Assistant will always be free.
Any recommendations for a voice tool? It felt like I would need to setup a room microphone on my orange pi when I was reading the docs.
I haven’t done it myself but it looks like you’ll need some esphome devices like a speaker and a microphone
It doesn’t help you if you need something right now, but Home Assistant is looking into building / engineering their own voice satellite device
https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/06/12/roadmap-2024h1/
That’s good, because it’s dog shit.
The models? The interface? Spinning your own? Home Assistant in general? What the fuck are you on about?
Skill issue
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I’m still getting my feet wet with HAOS. Mainly got it for frigate but I’ve been trying to do more and more with it every week and I think I’m way over my head lol. It seems really cool if you know how to make everything work but I’m still trying to figure out so much I end up having to walk away and come back to it later after getting confused. It’s helped a bit to start writing out what I’m trying to do on paper and tinker with things while keeping notes.
Do you have a hook up on some free dog shit?!
Download the Alexa app and have at it.
Is it able to use a LLM?
Yeah, you can plug it into a few external services like OpenAI or even use a local LLM like LocalAI. Not used either, but I know it’s possible.
Seeing as how I’ve never used it for free …
I wouldn’t put one of those amazon spy devices in my house even if they paid me. There’s no way in hell I’m going to pay to use one.
Eh … it’s not spying. It can’t even understand me when I’m talking to it.
But the one in your pocket is fine?
If my Alexa stopped working because it needed a subscription it’s going straight in the trash.
Already there. Finally got fed up with the “by the way” trash prompts
This is going to flop.
A big appeal of assistant devices was the barrier to entry was extremely low. So low that they could be purchased in multiples and given as gifts and were easy for the recipients to set up and use. So low that Alexa integration was common on many types of devices at many pricepoints.
Setting one up and being asked to pay a monthly sub might not go so well. People are getting burnt out of constant subscriptions bleeding them dry. I really don’t know how many would be willing to pay for something that was once free and was basically taken away from them.
this is also not including the growing amount of people that are goddamn sick and tired of hearing about AI constantly being shoved into everythingFor me ….
On the one hand it worked. The cheap price introduced me to something I wouldn’t have bothered with. And the cheap price encouraged me to buy many. Now I count on it. But if it’s not cheap, I have no reason to pick that option
Neat, lots more e-waste incoming
All the two alexas I own were given to me. Fuck no I am not paying $10 a month for a talking weather reporter.
I never used to understand why Picard and the crew got upset with Data’s long winded explanations until I got a Google Home. Now I understand very well.
“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”
People don’t want that shit for free… Why would they pay for it.
Just slap more ads on it, I don’t know haha
The New Siri seems to be quite useful, with “personal context” understanding my calendar, messages, mail etc.
ChatGPT 4 voice mode is very impressive, with the conversation getting clarifications and finding exactly the information I want (when it is not hallucinating). ChatGPT-4o will be amazing if it is as good as what we saw from the demo.
It is not for everyone, but I personally use AI chat every day and find it useful.
Chatgpt finds you useful also!
I’ll integrate ChatGPT into my household when I can run it locally on my own server computer.
You can do that right meow. Not ChatGPT but open source models.
Are you not able to access ChatGPT-4o? Its what my app defaults to instead of regular 4
I am a free user, and it is still chatgpt 4.
And the new voice model doesn’t seem to be available yet, even for paid users.
Alright I’m a paid user and I do have the voice model. Had it for a few weeks now.
That’s voice chat which has been there for a long time.
The 4o voice model is different. 4o can chat much more naturally, and you can interrupt the voice chat in 4o.
Try it, you can’t interrupt the chat unless you touch the screen.
You can go back to see the 4o voice chat demo, and you will find out which different it is.
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Based on what I’ve read, you can still do what you bought them for without paying the monthly fee. You just have to deal with the old dumb Alexa.
By the way…
One day they’ll want to stop maintaining two systems, and you’ll either have to pay up or lose functionality completely.
Then there will be class action lawsuit from all the owners who paid for the devices.
Devices stop functioning eventually. You can’t make Apple support your iPod.
Using free users to train the paid version and then flipping the switch on enshitification of the “free” tier to force need for premium.
