Technology @lemmy.world Wilshire @lemmy.world 10mo ago

Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price

www.cnbc.com Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price

Amazon is upgrading its decade-old Alexa voice assistant with generative AI and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to offset the cost of the technology.

82 comments

Just what the cash-strapped people of the world want - more monthly fees.
- And for something that is already data-mining you. Adding a fee just adds insult to injury.
  
  Yeah, I think that's the bigger issue here. These devices pay their way by collecting data to sell off. What this "overhual" is indicating is that they haven't quite figured out how to make these devices not only pay for themselves, but also, generate a net background profit for the company.
  
  The only thing I'm reading from this story is that Amazon is just aiming for more dollar signs from Alexia. I'm going tell you in the day and age of Siri and Whatever Google's thing is, this is going to backfire massively on Amazon. This will likely collapse whatever paltry Alexia that's out there. And I have a good feeling they'll look at this collapse as "well the technology just isn't a good money maker." No you idiots, it's not a mass profit driver. I get how something not drawing double digit percentage gains is a mystery to you all, but just because you cannot buy your fifteenth yacht from it, doesn't mean that the technology is a failure.
  
  But it's whatever, Amazon's ship to wreck.
- Looks like companies are shifting to charging users whose data they are stealing.
  
  The saying 'if you aren't the customer, you are the product' is outdated. Now you are the customer and the product!
  
  Windows has done this for ages now. Buying a laptop, you pay well over $100 for the windows license alone, yet it is the most egregious operating system when it comes to datamining the user.
With Sonos shitting the bed with its app update and now the prospect of Alexa being destroyed by fees and AI, my smart home infrastructure is falling apart. So disappointing.
- Never use anything that depends on the Internet for your smart home. There are entirely offline text to speech and voice recognition plugins/libraries for home assistant.
  
  Yeah I learned this lesson by starting with Smartthings and grew to hate the lack of reliability pretty quickly. Home Assistant and a raspberry pi has been significantly better.
- Home Assistant is a great alternative. It gets better and better as all Google and Alexa get worse and worse.
  
  What are you using for microphones?
- Alexa has had AI backing its services for the better part of a decade.
  
  Source: I worked on some of it.
  
  Not fees though.
- This is why I went with HomeKit devices. I do not understand why people trust Amazon or Google, their business models are not pro-consumer.
  
  If Apple pulled at one of the maneuvers these two have, there would be a flood of articles condemning them. No one expects Amazon or Google to respect you.
  
  It's hilarious you think Apple is in any way pro-consumer. Apple is all about their walled gardens, but they're a trap. Their entire business model is designed to use various underhanded means to entice you into their ecosystem and at every step make it increasingly difficult to escape it all so that they can keep extracting money from you. Google and Microsoft aren't much better but they are better ironically because they're not as good at disguising their bait and traps as Apple is.
  
  It's why I've avoided anything smarthome tied to any particular vendor.
  
  My endpoint devices are almost entirely Zwave or Zigbee/Matter based. I started out with a SmartThings hub but migrated it all to Home Assistant last year. HA has honestly had easier integrations than SmartThings did and supports almost anything under the sun.
  
  I don't have to worry about suddenly losing control of my devices and the only 'subscription' associated with it all is $15/year for a domain name to make setting up remote access easier. This approach requires a little more research, but it opens up the ability to mix and match devices however you'd like. Absolutely zero regrets.
  
  Everyone learns for a first time, often through a negative experience. You should take the opportunity to promote FOSS alternatives rather than semi-gloat about your foresight.
Oh no! Where else will I find a Bluetooth speaker that also tells me the temperature outside?
- Without datamining and that works out of the box? Please let us know when you find out.
And this is exact the reason I'm building a Home Assistant instance with local voice processing. Right now it takes a few seconds to process a request and take action on my crappy 1.8ghz laptop with only 4gb of RAM, but it basically does everything I use Alexa for. This announcement is just encouraging me to build a better server with an esp32 satellite.
- I'm in the process of this now too. The only need that I can't figure out within home-assistant assist, is unit conversions. Converting measurements when cooking is one of the main things we use the Alexa for these days.
- What are you using for microphones?
  
  I'm still working on question one too. It seems like a microphone array is the best option but a lot of them seem over built for the task.
  
  Honestly, nothing yet. I've only been playing with it for a few weeks. I just use the web interface on my phone to test the voice control. I've been looking at the esp32 devices that people have been building, but a lot of them admit that they can't come anywhere close to the reliability of the microphone array used in the Alexa.
- Can it play music from YouTube or Spotify or something? Because that's literally all my kids want an Alexa device for.
I wonder how many fools are out there that will pay for this.
- Too many, way, way too many,
- The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.
Watch the existing one become even more insufferable to push you into paying for the upgrade.
- Will the existing ones still operate without the subscription?
  
  I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that
  
  What do you think ^^
- "Sorry, I don't understand your question. Could you try again?"
Not having Amazon is great and cheaper than having it.
Well, once again a tech company gives a service I don't care for an overhaul I don't want and tries to charge a fee I won't pay.

I suspect when this doesn't do the numbers they want they'll try adding a user fee to oxygen as a retaliation.
- You should watch Spaceballs. They have Perri-Air.
  
  And you could also look at the real world. We have boost air.
Since it won't come with my Prime sub, it'll just get unplugged and thrown away.

Also, because the AI part.
- Uhhh....it's had AI backing it for most of the decade
Lmao, charge us for everything which was at first an incentive to buy your shit products
I'm sorry Bill. I can't open the pod bay door until you subscribe to Omni-zon
- But I have to pee really bad HAL!!!
If I have to pay to have my dots and ring, i will throw the shit out in the street

Edit: Yeah, I'm done with them anyways, they're trash.
Looks like I'll be selling the few Amazon Alexa-centric devices I've got.
- Please don't do that to other people..
I will pay exactly zero dollars, thanks!
Yeah nah, not gonna pay for that
I hope for one good thing to come out from all this AI madness : people might get used to pay for a service on the internet again. If this miraculously happens it could lead to people more cautiously choose services over quality instead of the one with darkest patterns.

One can still dream...
- I wouldn't get your hopes up too high.
  
  You're thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?
  
  This is not that scenario.
  
  You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.
  
  Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.
  
  If you use a different company's product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.
  
  Yup. Any entity ties to Wall St. must make that $ line go higher every quarter. The how doesn't matter.
  
  I was more thinking that if people were paying they might give more thoughts to what they are diving into. But yeah I agree that's just a wet dream.
I didn't think people really expected to believe that their smart stuff was really theirs. Did they? Imagine renting your bulbs to Amazon.
Won't last long. Free apps will ruin that Amazon subscription plan fast. One can already get a local and free chatAI and it's already just a few clicks setup and I wouldn't be surprised if these get made more easier for the mainstream any day. The tech is just too new, but were getting there soon.
I wanna know how to flash the echoes to custom firmware. Then I'll be set to migrate.

82 comments