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

Alexa is a wonderful idea in search of a serious use case.<p>It does timers, tells the weather, and, uh, shouts at me from Ring when someone is at the door.<p>Handy when cooking and I don&#x27;t want to touch something.<p>The voice recognition is iffy, the misunderstanding is constant, the vocal command line is painful. The plugins don&#x27;t work seamlessly at all.<p>But it&#x27;s a good timer.

We only use Alexa to turn the lights on and off, set the thermostat temperature and tell us the weather. No way would we pay for that.

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I would pay if it worked well. But it seemed to have gotten worse over the last couple years.

I have 4 Alexa devices. I use them every day as an alarm, a radio in the morning, timers, and to turn lights on and off, and make video calls to my parents.<p>Like most people when I got my first one I played around with some other things but quickly stopped bothering. I&#x27;m perfectly happy with them as they are and don&#x27;t know what else I would use them for. In browser and on phone AI have already filled the need for AI that I have at the moment.

The only amazon device I own is a kindle and I still hate the idea that I can&#x27;t know if its listening in, or trying to share my wifi with other devices through amazon sidewalk, or whatever.<p>They can charge as much or as little as they&#x27;d like for it. The idea of using such a service is repulsive, even for free. Amazon is the enemy, not your friend. Giving them more access to more of your life is a bad idea.

...for extra features. Its existing capabilities are still free (at least for now).<p>Considering I only ever use it as a timer, an impromptu alarm clock, and to ask what the time or temperature is when I&#x27;m about to head outside sometimes (can you believe there used to be a phone number you had to call to get that information if you didn&#x27;t want to wait 7 minutes for the weather channel to do its forecast again?), I will just go without if they ever try to charge for that.

If you&#x27;re able to have an actual conversation with it to clarify your intentions or for it to interpret more complex instructions, there is actually a lot of potential here

Honestly I never feel the need to have high quality always on mic, or a macrobug (as opposite to classic spaying devices, payed by those who spy instead of me, and well hidden instead of being in plain sight)...<p>Sure, if we live in the house, not at a desk, might be nice to have some &quot;audio-based UI&quot; but it&#x27;s far from being a normal case. While I work or anyway I&#x27;m at the desk I can see anything quicker, when I&#x27;m not I&#x27;m typically do something else so I&#x27;ve no need to ask for current weather or something like that.<p>On contrary I do like MUCH home automation, but on MY terms. I do not like much Home Assistant but that&#x27;s the least unusable of all I&#x27;ve tried, and I do like to have for instance:<p>- auto close&#x2F;open certain roller blinds following the Sun position and the home+outside temperature<p>- run or not run water heater depending on water temp, available p.v., others running&#x2F;scheduled charge, next day weather forecast<p>- auto-closing main home water valve when I go out for more than one day, also auto-close inlet, open purge in case of food sensors alarm<p>- ...<p>Long story short SIMPLE things, but beyond Alexa capabilities anyway. And things that could be far easier if a concept of OPEN, STANDARD appliance exists instead of the current sorry state of IoT...

I trust GOOG more than AMZN so I doubt I would pay ever.

No one is going to pay unless its part of the prime membership. Put a decent CPU and memory into new devices and run it AI locally.

This is better than the usual story, where a company abandons a product and the units are sent to the landfill. Kudos to Amazon.

I use it as a reminder , timer, and my lights. That&#x27;s all it&#x27;s really good for, maybe a joke every now and then.

Do they have their own LLM under the hood or are they using someone else&#x27;s?

I wouldn’t use Alexa if Amazon paid me.

And yet another way to try and destroy journalism: AI summaries of the news.<p>Why not just listen to the news? You can listen to BBC on Alexa, along with almost any other news radio station you please. If you want short summaries, just look at the AP.<p>AI summaries might not be correct or might miss out on important context: in the news, the details are everything. And I doubt Amazon will be paying for the news services they scrape.<p>Are AI summaries of news really that much better than just listening to the news? Does the AI part mean it&#x27;s going to try and figure out what news stories I listen to? Or will it just be the same for everyone, and then you might just say Alexa give me the news, and you can program it to give you news summaries from a huge list of available sources, which are not AI generated.<p>This seems like a stupid product idea, akin to subscription mouse. And I actually like and use my Alexa devices quite a bit (nest thermostat, smart water heater, smart lights, timer, weather, use as a speaker for my laptop), so I think I&#x27;d be their target market.

thank god, finally my relatives will uninstall it in their homes

no.