After a decade of free Alexa, Amazon now wants you to pay

Same as a lot of people on this forum I don't even want the basic version.

But I think a lot of people will pay for a more advanced version. $10 seems cheap, ChatGPT is $25.
 
Personally, I don't need anymore "spyware". Anything that "listens" for you to speak a "magic phrase", by definition, is always listening.

But, you can believe that it's all coincidence that items you just discussed (only verbally) are now showing up in your "whatever" feed. In fact, I think it happened to me today. Time to go out and buy a scratcher, I feel lucky!!
 
I use it to verbally play music or set a timer. Cant imagine needing it to be better than that especially for a fee. Even those tasks come with an advertisement anymore it seems so i really don't use it as much as I used to.

Also, screw monthly fees for EVERYTHING, and at $10 a month, you would really need to be using it a lot to justify that imo.
 
LukeTbk said:
This sound like it would be such a more healthy and better business model, people that pay for the product and become the actual clients........
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The smart business case was include it in products to be cheap, get a foot hold in people's homes and reliant on said tech, and then decide to charge for it, because most people will just say screw it, pay for it, vs no longer have useful devices.
 
Nah. I'm going to use Home Assistant and integrate my own voice assistant into it. As local as possible, but it will grab weather, sports, stocks, news, etc...

Alexa has gotten pretty bad the past couple years, getting worse and worse. This is too little, too late. A couple years ago, yea I'd do it. Not anymore.
 
I think I still have an echo device I got free from Verizon a long time ago sealed new in box that is now unsupported by Amazon, so I'd say no I won't be paying it :).

Though you know Amazon is not going to give up and probably do something like raise prime by $9 and say Alexa is a value added feature to show how much people love paying for Alexa even if the buyer doesn't use it.
 
kyang357 said:
You know how they have Kindle but with no ads for extra? I want a fire TV cube with no built-in mic.
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Okay thats fair. I only use the echo speakers so when i pictured it without voice or mic, it really has no other function than bt audio. makes sense now.
 
sleepeeg3 said:
You don't even have to login anymore. Click on the little ? mark in the bottom right and it won't add your questions to the model. Careful: it resets if you are idle long enough.
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Heh.

I don't want any AI.

Like NONE.

It bothers me when an AI icon or another pops up in an application.software/OS I'm using as even an option.

I even wish I could block others from using AI, at least when interacting with me. I don't want to talk to someone using their AI assisted writing or waste my time with some AI interaction when I am trying to talk to someone.

It's time to rewind 15 years and do this all over again, because we as a society completely failed at the tech revolution. Absolutely 100% of every part of tech since ~2007 completely sucks. And this is coming from a life long tech enthusiast.
 
Here we go again ..

"I can't afford to buy a house but I have my mouse subscription, my alexa subscription, and my daily $9 coffee. At least I'm happy".
 
bigdogchris said:
Here we go again ..

"I can't afford to buy a house but I have my mouse subscription, my alexa subscription, and my daily $9 coffee. At least I'm happy".
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Something something Let them eat cake something something blah blah blah.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
It's time to rewind 15 years and do this all over again, because we as a society completely failed at the tech revolution. Absolutely 100% of every part of tech since ~2007 completely sucks. And this is coming from a life long tech enthusiast.
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I love a lot of the new tech out there. It's just the implementation of a lot of it that I don't like. A lot of it is a solution without a problem, other times it's just very poorly done (with the long term excuse of "it's still early and needs to mature"), or just no real reason to exist. But, the tech behind it and some of the ideas are great. Alexa/Google Home/etc. helped bring a lot of home automation things to the mass market that can be done locally via Home Assistant (which is awesome). There's a ton of self hosted AI things if you want to play with them (voice, images, face recognition, text, both SFW and NSFW). But, most of what we do would still be a solution without a problem. Which is fine by me. I never had a problem of not enough servers, lack of a home server, lack of a full featured firewall, enterprise grade switch, etc., but I created a good solution for all of that, rack mounted, Proxmox VM cluster, firewall, switches, AP's....

But, when I go to a website and need to talk with a person, I don't want an AI agent that doesn't really know anything at all. And definitely nothing about my personal account for the reason I'm there. Of course, sometimes it's still one step better than Kevin from India that doesn't know ANYTHING and for some reason is worse than AI...
 
Yea, nope. I don't want anything to do with any of the assistants when they were free. I got free devices that I didn't ask for that went straight into the trash.
 
I feel like it will be a win for them though. Seems like the most backlash is from people who didnt use the devices to begin with, so no loss of sales. Of the ones using them, some will pay for extra features and i imagine a large portion will not, but then again, no loss there as they already have the device. As long as they don't nerf it into uselessness, this will almost be free money.
 
Lakados said:
I can’t express accurately how excited I am for this.
I can only hope it kills the product and it’s no longer just added to everything for the sake of it being there.
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The subscription, or the AI? I agree either way.
 
Darunion said:
I feel like it will be a win for them though. Seems like the most backlash is from people who didnt use the devices to begin with, so no loss of sales. Of the ones using them, some will pay for extra features and i imagine a large portion will not, but then again, no loss there as they already have the device. As long as they don't nerf it into uselessness, this will almost be free money.
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I think Amazon wanted to shut down Alexa a year or two ago, or they were considering mothballing the program or ceasing development.....because they envisioned the tool to be primarily used to order items from Amazon, in other words...generating Revenue.
Instead, nobody uses it for that and they use it for dumb shit* like:

Alexa, what is the weather going to be like today?
Alexa, where's my stuff?
Alexa, show me my Shed Camera
Alexa, stream Traditional Christmas Music to All Speakers.

Amazon isn't making a dime off this, so it's unsurprising they want to monetize the next iteration of the tool.
(*yes, my dumb shit)
 
HeadRusch said:
Instead, nobody uses it for that and they use it for dumb shit* like:

Alexa, what is the weather going to be like today?
Alexa, where's my stuff?
Alexa, show me my Shed Camera
Alexa, stream Traditional Christmas Music to All Speakers.
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That means there's a potentially huge market for something that can do this stuff, that you buy and pay for once, and doesn't spew to the cloud.
 
I'd actually pay for it to do some home control.
As long as I can change the trigger name to 'Aziz'

:ROFLMAO:
 
Would it say dirty things to me in a non robotic voice when I'm ... ahem taking care of my needs?
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
Lol.
They would have to pay me to put this garbage wiretap in my home.
Actually no. There is no amount of money that would convince me to put one in my home.
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What if we throw in a free set of steak knives

1724961493448.png
 
Ur_Mom said:
I'd love that.

AZIZ! LIGHT!
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Bingo !
I'd laugh every time I turned on the lights !

I have a friend who uses an echo to control lights, display weather and listen to the radio.
I won't lie, the lighting control is very cool.
"Aziz light ! , movie room, half power, 35%red, 10% blue"
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We discussed this at length. Apparently there are ~5 names worldwide that are acceptable.
Trigger names are not programmable.
The decision we came to was it was probably the scope of Ras-Pi self made voice control.

I think if Alexa/ Echo allowed/supported custom trigger names, it would revitalize it.
I would, here's my money.

(y)
 
Amazon is really trying to push the boundries of what people are willing to pay for. When they added commericials to prime I almost bit. Until I thought about how much prime video I actually watch, and it's not that much.
 
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So for $10 a month it will listen when it decides to start automatically ordering something for you.... I don't know is it worth $10 a month to not have to yell ALEXXXXA CANCEL all the time.
 
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1_rick said:
That means there's a potentially huge market for something that can do this stuff, that you buy and pay for once, and doesn't spew to the cloud.
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I think the type of commands I was referring to above are so innocuous that 'who cares' applies if they go to the cloud or not. But I agree, stuff like this...why does it require a hive-mind to process? I'm curious as to what an enhanced Alexa would deliver, besides more boxes to our stoops. No intention of piling on, if Amazon takes away the features I'm using.....I'll just check the weather the old fashioned day. I think people are growing tired of subscription models for everything, so not sure how much longer this "its only $10....added on to the $500 you already spend on $10-a-month items" mentality is going to be able to survive.
 
HeadRusch said:
I think the type of commands I was referring to above are so innocuous that 'who cares' applies if they go to the cloud or not.
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Sure, but you don't get to choose which commands do and which don't, and, of course, it has to listen all the time for the trigger word, even if (supposedly) that audio doesn't go to the mothership, as they claim.
HeadRusch said:
But I agree, stuff like this...why does it require a hive-mind to process?
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Aside from the obvious, snarky answer ("monetization"), it's probably because until a few years ago you needed a pretty hefty processor. Nowadays you can do simple voice recognition of a couple of words with a cheap $2 microcontroller, but they don't have anything like full language recognition yet.
 
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