This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don't trust an LLM to choose between two brands of dish soap for me let alone pick a contractor, schedule a repair, and make a payment. Even if there was a demo showing this working in a sterile environment, reality is so complex that something is certain to go wrong. Even the "simple" task of summarizing news had so many catastrophic failures that Apple had to pull it from the market.
Amazon is making bold claims about the capabilities of their voice assistant to sell their subscription service so that they can make the Alexa division profitable, but if any of their claims were real, they would be demoing rather than writing science fiction in a press release.
> Today, a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users will open their Messenger apps to discover M, a new virtual assistant. Facebook will prompt them to test it with examples of what M can do: Make restaurant reservations. Find a birthday gift for your spouse. Suggest---and then book---weekend getaways.
https://www.wired.com/2015/08/facebook-launches-m-new-kind-v...
On the plus side if they do ship this we should get all sorts of amusing stories out of it. I'm picturing someone saying offhand "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse!"
"You'll want to feed him some oats unless you're ready to butcher him in the next two hours."
I'm not aware of any failures that could reasonably be described as "catastrophic".
This is exactly what happened, multiple times.
or your mom complaining about "buying shoes online without trying then" (or maybe that's you if born before 2000)
AI slop will define your identity tomorrow, doesn't matter what you think
This feels like the VR plays some of the big companies have made. I'm willing to bet that the market for people that want to play VR games is far larger than the current market for any other VR use. To a silly degree.
Could this change with overwhelmingly amazing technology? Maybe. But a bit of a moot point, as we don't have that technology, yet. And in the meantime we are just making the existing markets depressed.
To that point, is it time I look into making my own kitchen timer/radio device? Was never really that tough, all told. A raspberry pi is more than powerful enough to do so. Difficult part is largely the packaging aspect of it. Upside will be that you can do what people largely want 100% local.
I'm in a few Polestar car user groups, and people are pissed that their Android based head units can no longer do basic integration via assistant stuff that the car was initially sold to them able to do. In some cases they are blaming Polestar, in some cases connecting the dots back to Google.
It's beyond foolish. And destroys goodwill with customers. Who they seem to consider there being an infinite supply of. There is not.
Beyond that, there's the fact that stochastic "fuzzy" AIs are maybe not such a great fit when you just need to have the pod bay doors opened. Basic deterministic, symbolic, "AI" makes a lot of sense, especially once people get used to the quirks for the right way to talk to the thing.
Mine literally don't even understand "STOP" anymore when I ask them to stop playing my podcast. I am not kidding, every couple months they lose some basic functionality.
If that's not a modern version of planned obsolescence then I don't know what is.
Amusingly, this is exactly what Google did with Reader back in the day. They actually had Reader and Buzz integrated rather nicely, but lit it on fire in an effort to get circles going.
This took about 5 minutes to setup.
- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.
- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.
- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)
- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.
- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home
- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.
- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.
None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.
I don't think that is useful enough to allow Bezos to listen to everything in my home, but will absolutely enable this feature in a product like Home Assistant.
I don't usually have my phone on me, but even if I did I need to at least unlock it to enable voice commands, which instantly kills any notion of it being truly hands-free.
but it's nice to use your voice so you don't contaminate your phone. (preparing chicken and such)
the kitchen is pretty much the only use-case for voice assistants imo.
Gee I can't wait for my Amazon Prime renewal price to go up this year when Amazon decides they had to raise the price to justify the inclusion of AI.
It's a good air fryer.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/air-fryers-without-bluetoot...
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-recommend-a-hotel-mo...
How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is. So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
> earbuds that have the wire in between so I can dangle them around my neck
First result: Sony WI-1000XM2 Wireless. These are neither earbuds nor do they have a wire.
Pointless garbage. It also doesn't let me copy and paste the result, for no reason. Bad software.
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them.
They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).
One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
"Everyone will have one!"
It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
This is true in general, but LLMs do search better. Everyone already does search.
I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?
The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).
[1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...
With AI, there is still this massive trust issue. How can I trust that AI is steering me in an actual helpful way? How is Alexa+ integrated with Amazon's core model of selling stuff... lots and lots of stuff?
I always thought that data was meaningless if it takes a person hours to go through it. Now we have AI. Which means the data is not meaningless. And the always on feature actually means something. And that means all your data at home can be at someone's fingertips ... because say they are looking for ways to make your home and government more efficient?
However, Alexa and similar devices don’t actually record everything. Amazon doesn’t get a recording of everything the devices hear. They have to be triggered by the wake word (or possible a false positive).
Here’s a case where the Alexa command was used as part of the case, though it didn’t have recordings of the actual crime: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
https://apnews.com/general-news-343c0f5ed0884d1eb1dbe911e8ce...
https://broward.us/2023/07/18/amazons-alexa-is-surprise-witn...
Rosie, from the Jetsons.
I want a physical robot to do domestic tasks. All the things that Alexia+ automates are things that don't take much time, nor are things I want to hand over to AI.
It’s humbling to humanity. We differ from animals in our “spirits” but that part of us was less difficult to invent than “legs” which every macroscopic creature has mastered.
My wife and I are planning a family vacation, and we had some questions about various destinations. I opened Gemini, and we had a helpful 10-minute conversation.
If Alexa+ can provide a similar experience, I can see us having more of those voice-based sessions.
I just tried asking Gemini about some popular destinations spots near my house that I know well and the answers weren't very impressive. Much of the responses didn't actually pertain to my specific questions and the useful info was pretty standard stuff that could be found anywhere. Some of it was straight up wrong as well. For example I asked about good hikes that aren't too crowded and it recommended the single most crowded trail in the area.
We travel as a family a fair bit nowadays, and building an agenda for each day of the trip is surprisingly not that difficult if you are going to any common destination. Biggest thing to not forget is to add slack so that you can rearrange on the fly if needed.
We're in the US, and we're looking at a UK trip. I've lived in the UK, and we've done a fair amount of international travel. We're in the "brainstorming" mode. I'd characterize the conversation as verbal googling.
We were asking questions about distances between cities, typical ticket rates for trains, things to do in various locations, etc.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67bf76e2-5124-8010-8f54-50d967625a...
I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house.
I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?
Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa.
> Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo?
Because it isn't out yet?
Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!
People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.
Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"
The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
It makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.
I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.
On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
Likewise.
Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".
These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.
It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.
Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.
On a bus or plane, no, absolutely not. In the kitchen of a busy household, yes, definitely.
Asking what the name of the artist is while running with earbuds.
And so forth. We have different interfaces to adapt to the outputs we have available at the moment...
It’s always some garbage that they had clicked on at one point.
Suggested: the “AOWFIZ Toilet Brush with digital thermomteer” is 10% off
Like they paid $200 to have that in their kitchen
Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573
Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...
I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.
> On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.
The pricing is silly. You can get it for $20/mo, or free with Prime, but Prime costs $15/mo?
They were definitely more entertaining when they were written by GPT-2.
I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.
i ask it to turn off the lights in the guest bedroom, siri says it can’t find that in my home. oops, i see i named the room “guest room”. Saying guest room specifically works. Sigh…
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...
They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
really advertising to the hackernews crowd with this line
Considering I've had frequent issues with LLMs hallucinating and giving me blatantly wrong information, it will be quite a long time before I trust them, especially through a voice assistant where I can't easily request citations that I can follow up on to validate the information.
It's strange, but as someone who grew up during the dawn of the personal computer and built my life around technology, I'm realizing I increasingly want less of it.
I think that’s because computing isn’t very personal. So much of what we do on our computers is really done partially or wholly on somebody else’s computer for their benefit.
Panay says Alexa+ is personalized for you. Well, I’ll believe it when I see it. If you ask me, most of the Echo’s problems so far stem from Amazon tailoring the device for their benefif, not mine. They wanted their cash register to be in my kitchen and when I didn’t use it like that, they made it worse with their “by the way…” bullshit.
> We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.
Thank you for nothing, then?
I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?
--
Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
I wonder if /how that will change now after this.
1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too
I want it to be able to deal with home automation. It looks like even simple: "turn off the light at 9pm" is not going to work. Or setting up something like "on sunrise, open the window shades".
This has so much potential, but it will require a workflow for Alexa to learn about specific objects and layout (of multiple objects) within the customer's home. Apple's "live audio descriptions of video" had similar promise at launch, but hasn't evolved beyond the launch demo, https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/iphone/iph32deb9296/18.... Could Alexa+ enable self-service RLHF on home video/images?
It's a testament to the latent market opportunity that Amazon has sold 500+ million devices, despite the obstacles that greet customers trying to customize Alexa for their specific needs. With open developer interfaces, Alexa could have been the "IBM PC" of voice AI, instead of just another walled garden.
Alexa use cases for elderly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41062989
In theory, Home Assistant voice hardware could be integrated with local LLMs for private voice control, https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
> Fully open software, firmware, and hardware.. Grove port for connecting sensors and a 3.5mm headphone jack for connecting external speakers
Lots of people are running local LLMs with their HA Voice Previews, plenty of discussions about it in the forums
My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically
Chatbots will be fine, but anything actually useful? Banned.
I see this kind of junk in their prime video adds when we are trying to watch a movie. "While we show this add, click here to add the item to your cart".
But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
However. My wife is super pissed at Bezos. She unplugged all our echos. She has me researching to try decide between a Roku or Apple tv to replace the fire tv.
The amazon card went from 90% of our non-mortgage spending to 10% and dropping.
I honestly didn’t believe it would ever happen but I think we are probably going to drop Prime soon.
I’m still thankful for the Expanse, that show was great.
