Alexa, why have you charged me £2 to say the Hail Mary?

I don&#x27;t think this particular incident is any kind of big deal, though it&#x27;s funny. It was only a £1.99 a month and there was a 7-day free trial anyway. Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation. I think the issue it shows is how you can&#x27;t trust voice control for anything important. It&#x27;s just a bad interface for buying stuff particularly. If I am buying some dog food, I search dog food, glance over the options, check prices and delivery dates and reviews then plump for one. Thinking of doing the same by voice drains me.<p>&quot;Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow&quot;. Could that work? Would I trust that it had worked, if Alexa just said &quot;ok&quot; without me running off to a computer to check the order details and defeating the whole object? More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.<p>(I actually tried that sentence just now. Alexa remained in a stunned silence.)

Short version: Alexa supports third parties extending it with &quot;Skills&quot; apps which may be commercial. Paid functionality may be enabled via verbal confirmation via an in-app purchase[1]. Paid functionality may be one-time or recurring.<p>Her sister caught the corresponding email just before the paid subscription would have started. The documentation says developers must mark skills targeted at kids and those aren&#x27;t eligible to have this flow enabled.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.amazon.com&#x2F;es-MX&#x2F;docs&#x2F;alexa&#x2F;paid-skills&#x2F;overview.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.amazon.com&#x2F;es-MX&#x2F;docs&#x2F;alexa&#x2F;paid-skills&#x2F;ov...</a><p>edit to add -- that was all presented without comment. But having a device that can start up a recurring subscription if anyone says &quot;yes&quot; to one prompt exist at all, and having the toggle for the feature on by default and in options is in the &quot;no thanks&quot; column for me.

I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.

Yeah, Amazon is terrible about this. It claims that it must have had the user confirm the purchase, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t. I order from Amazon about once a year, and the last time I did, they ran the, “Would you also like to sign up for Prime while making this order?” scam on me. I hit the button and immediately realized what I had done. I hit the back button before the next page loaded, but it was too late. I already had an email saying I had signed up without confirming anything or agreeing to any terms of service. Luckily I only had to go through about 3-5 pages of “Are you really sure you want to cancel?” And “how about we just suspend the service but don’t cancel it,” before I was allowed to cancel it. This company is disgusting.

Be smarter than a smart speaker by never purchasing one. Why put an always on snitch in your home? Such convivence is a trap.

&gt; <i>set up by my sister... and is attached to her... account</i><p>&gt; <i>can inadvertently enter into premium subscriptions simply by saying yes</i><p>So this individual (sister to a journalist at the Guardian, which facilitates information spreading and highlights the possibility of under the radar cases) gives somebody else a voice controlled machine linked to a credit card. What could possibly.

Seems like the email should be the confirmation, and without the confirmation the trial stops. Opting in with a yes alone, when my four year olds can now ask Alexa for stuff, seems like a terrible design choice by itself.

Never mind prayers. The new frontier for AI is confessions. And Alexa should sell indulgences.<p>Seriously though, how long before we see AI-powered therapists? Or do they exist already?

Anything I don’t expect to use to make purchases I try to enable whatever “child lock” features it might have.

Does God answer prayers from robots?

god runs on a freemium service

Oh this dystopian future.

&gt; Thank goodness she didn’t ask Alexa to say the Rosary<p>The highlight of the article there.