I used to find my Alexa devices useful, until they took the widely-discussed quality nosedive and started understanding less than half of what they used to. I can't think of anything else I've purchased that became so markedly worse of a thing after I bought it. 1 experience of misunderstanding stomps out 10 of it working perfectly.<p>I'd read a book on the inside story of the failure of this product. From cute, moderately useful novelty to glitchy, nagging revenue grab that takes it upon itself to come into your home with "offers". Eroding goodwill, missing the boat on AI you're naturally leveraged to integrate with your large installed base, it's shiny object middle management bingo.
> Would you pay to use Alexa?<p>I won’t even use it for free. We already live in a surveillance state. At this point the wisest course of action is to launder your thoughtcrimes through multiple privacy-enhancing services.
I am very doubtful this will happen. If it does it's among the most boneheaded moves of the century.<p>No one's interested in paying for it. It's a mild convenience at the cost of letting Amazon into your home. It's not something I believe basically anyone is willing to pay for. It's something we use begrudgingly because it's convenient.<p>The only reason I even have Alexa devices in my house at all is Amazon kept throwing them at be for free when attending Amazon events like Re:Invent - I wanted to go Google Home, but I just got buried in devices.<p>I control my lights with Alexa and listen to podcasts. I'll just use my phone if they try to charge me.
Execs think progress towards human level intelligence is on a linear trajectory, inevitably to be finished soon after waiting out some development delays, just like any CRUD app. And it's adorable.
I use Siri on my phone every day. Mainly to set timers and alarm clocks or to check the weather.<p>I don’t believe I’ve ever used it regularly for anything else. Maybe once in a while I’ll be driving and I’ll ask Siri for directions to some place.<p>It’s difficult to see why anybody would bother paying monthly subscription money for Alexa. If you have an iPhone Siri can do all the basic stuff (set timers, look up the weather) that Alexa can.<p>Do some people use Alexa to adjust their home lights and stuff? Would non-wealthy people actually pay money in the form of a monthly subscription just so Alexa can adjust your home lights?<p>Seems like Amazon’s strategy here doesn’t make sense to me. But I’m not Jeff Bezos so what do I know….
I've avoided Alexa for years. I've never had any interest in anything voice controlled. Anyway one day at the Amazon checkout, Amazon wanted to sell me an Echo Pop for I think it was $20. I figured I'll give it a try, I can afford to lose $20 and not be too grumpy about it.<p>I found the whole experience very underwhelming. Alexa frequently misunderstood me. At one time I tried asking it to play a particular type of music and it said I require a subscription. I tried some of the skills and they were total garbage. And then there are the privacy issues. I live alone so I was not too concerned but I would always make sure it was off before using the phone.<p>The only thing I would really want to use a product like Alexa for and pay for it with a subscription is if I could use it for language learning. But my bar for this is very high. I'm not interested in something that just feeds me phrases to learn. It would need to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the ability to adapt its output to my level, provide useful feedback, and have excellent voice recognition for bad accents and the ability to suggest improvements to my pronunciation and grammar. I don't see this happening any time soon.
I’d not be surprised if the hardware division of MSFT (Surface) is working on a personal assistant product powered by OpenAI. It’s easy to see how good it could be : I find the hands-free voice interface of the ChatGPT iOS app really good at handling conversations, some slight improvement above that (eg dealing with latency on either side) in a polished MSFT hardware product would beamazing
Zero percent chance I would pay for these assistants. Due to how useless they are I have been considering removing my Google home devices. In some ways they are worse now than launch. I suspect Alexa devices are similar.
I was pretty bought into the Alexa ecosystem, however I started selling devices with a screen, and never connected my wired smart-home to it.
It’s pretty stupid that I can’t easily watch YouTube on it. Also it’s becoming really annoying with talking a lot more instead of just doing what I asked for. With moves towards LLM integration I fear we will soon get dialogues like „switch on the light“ - „I’m sorry, Dave - I can’t do that“.
We used our Echo daily for years until one day I factory reset it and couldn't get it to connect to my network. After that it got unplugged and never replaced. I really liked having a home assistant, and wished for an even-better TNG-type voice computer. The shopping list app wasn't very good (bad sync). Now I use Siri on my Apple watch, and most of the time it works fine. My demands aren't complex.<p>I wish the voice assistant field got more complex and better. It was a neat tech diversion.
As a standalone service I think most people would switch to Siri or Google assistant rather than pay Alexa plus unless it was significantly more useful.
I think people would pay for an all encompassing home awareness ai integrating smart devices but also Blink cameras. Subscribing to Blink is already compelling, if you add control and identification of people and intentions into Blink along with an ai controlled home that could be worth a subscription
They are considering charging because Alexa is about to get a massive update with agent capabilities. If you are paying 20/month for gpt4, you are probably willing to pay much more for amazons equivalent but that can actually do things for you like get groceries, get things delivered, one command purchase, etc. maybe even buy plane lowest cost plane tickets or make reservations.
Do the current Alexa devices do their voice recognition on device on in cloud? Curious what are their operational costs for the service, because I naively thought that the device handled the basic operations (timer, weather) with some API calls which should be minimal data.<p>Switching out to a novel AI model just to stay hip sounds expensive.
I use my Alexa to start my vacuum cleaner (maybe 3-5 times a week), to set timers (about once a week) and to check the temperature outside (less than once a month).<p>I wouldn't pay $1 for this, it's all stuff that my phone can already do.
From the article it sounds like it will only be the AI-"improved" version that is charged for. Which is fine, because I really don't want that version.