Technology

Don't be paranoid. An Eco Dot literally can't tell you the time w/o phoning home. You can watch the network traffic it produces. No way it's transmitting 24h of audio. And if you think about it, millions of Alexa devices recording 24/7 audio would generate more traffic than porn. And that's before Amazon has paid a nickel to process any of that audio.

When it comes to eavesdropping on "every little conversation" They don't, they can't, it would be stupid to try.

I can see why people are quick to think this but I don't see any compelling evidence this is the case, and as others have pointed out it would be impractical for them to do so.

More likely they use it for consumer lock-in and to collect data through its api endpoints. Collecting media activity and smart home device information is valuable enough on its own, before even approaching the value of collecting recorded audio.

They can already intuit consumer habits/word of mouth exposure from other associated data with your online activity. After locking down all my other privacy, the ads I get are far less relevant to me, even though I have a number of smart listening devices in my home

Some hackers have found that there is builtin protection in the hardware that guarantees the led turns on when the device listens

This isn't even conspiracy loads of people report Alexa going off randomly without any sort of prompt. Don't tell me the device isn't listening closely to every little conversation you have.

This definitely is conspiracy. You're claiming that Amazon is secretly conspiring to make Alexa devices behave differently than they advertise them to. That's like the definition of conspiracy lol. But that aside, I really don't believe this. What's the exact claim, that they're always listening? No, they don't. People can analyze the traffic and tell that's false. That they're intentionally overly sensitive? I have an easier time beginning to buy that but I still think we'd see more quantitative articles about that if it were true. Like we haven't had whistle blowers or security researchers saying anything like that.

I got a free Echo Dot a number of years ago when I attended an AWS conference. I played briefly with it but never found it all that useful. I certainly never would have trusted using it to order things from Amazon, which is one of the things they hoped people would do. It sat in a pile of junk for a year or so before I finally got rid of it.

Even if it is listening, based on the article, it seems the current CEO wants Alexa itself to be profitable. He doesn't want another division of Amazon to be profitable because of Alexa.

Alexa and LLMs are fundamentally not too different from each other. It's just a slightly different architecture and most importantly a much larger network.

The problem with LLMs is that they require immense compute power.

I don't see how LLMs will get into the households any time soon. It's not economical.

Alexa skill store is a "prime" example of Amazon's we don't give a shit attitude. For years they've turned their back on third party developers by limiting skill integration. A well designed skill on that store gets a two star rating. When everything in your app store is total shit - maybe the problem is you Amazon?! It's been like that for years ; I completely avoid using skills as they only lead to frustration.

LLM integration into an Alexa device could be a big improvement, but current speed performance at that scale seems concerning that we'd get a laggy or very dumbed down system. Frankly Id be happy if Alexa could just grasp the concept of synonyms and also have the ability to attempt second guess interpretations of speech comprehension rather than assume user has just asked the exact same question in rapid succession but with a more frustrated tone.

I kinda feel like voice search is just an inherently bad platform for shopping.

Supposedly... Home & Kitchen is the most popular category on Amazon, consumer choice comes into that so rapidly that it's hard for it to make sense with just audio feedback or even a tiny screen like the show.

Not to mention the mess of sellers on the individual items. Sometimes it's Amazon, sometimes it's a rando third party with ridiculous shipping fees and times.

Even when I was an Amazon customer, which I no longer am for the usual reasons, I would never have used Alexa to make a purchase of a physical good. Hell I wouldn't trust it to get "order a 12-pack of diet pepsi" right, I'd get sent the mini cans or bottles or diet caffeine free pepsi or whatever.

Often when I'm looking online to buy something it's because I can't get it locally, which means I'm being kind of particular.

Maybe. maybe. I would use it to make a media purchase of some kind. But I very rarely used Amazon for multimedia; Audible, maybe. I bought one DVD and two streamable movies from Amazon EVER.

And as a Kindle Fire user, I found Alexa to not work very well anyway. Because it's designed for a device that doesn't have a screen, it can't do a lot of things that Siri or Bixby or Android Voice Formerly Google Talk Is Being Replaced With Play Assistant can, and the syntax of "Alexa, ask a skill to do a thing" was just something I wasn't going to fuck with.

"If you'd like to set a timer with a specific time, please subscribe to Amazon timer unlimited. You have a trial available, would you like to activate your free trial?"

I asked Alexa what the weather was like, and they shoe horned a sponsorship.

Mine also does weather, turns the bedroom lights on, plays Spotify and settles random arguments about whether old celebrities are dead.

Although she did once claim that Ray Parker Jr was white, so sometimes an extra googling is needed for that.

I did get an Echo Show many years ago that showed the time, but now it just shows ads so the screen is now the base.

Billionaires really seem to think if they just cut in the right place the rocks will start bleeding for them.

A paywall?
WSJ the paywall??

For your consideration, I present an anti-paywal-inator!!! TO THE ARCHIVES! https://archive.is/5VPB5

Isn't that the reason why Amazon gutted their Alexa development team? It turns out there isn't business case for Alexa.

It's like they shockingly didn't think people would ever realize they didn't need it.

"Alexa, turn off 'by the way'."

You're welcome.