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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

"Besides [a bunch of useful stuff], Alexa is useless! Therefore it's a gimmick."

I have an Echo Dot which I use almost exclusively for a few static purposes: the weather, setting alarms, turning my lights on and off, and asking what time it is.

I also ask it basic questions like whether various sports teams won or what time they're playing, which it also answers well.

Not sure why you think it is useless just because it's not a magical general AI that can do everything.

I find it extremely useful.

> For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense

I'm not visually impaired and I use this feature all the time. It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch.

> most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong

Yeah, exactly. How does this make it useless?

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The point is that these few useful things can be all achieved much cheaper with much greater ergonomics.

> the weather, setting alarms, (...) and asking what time it is.

You can do that on your phone. Even assuming you wanted it hands-free, it doesn't justify an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. We had the tech to do this level of voice recognition reliably in the 2000s.

> It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch.

Kids from my generation used to solder clap detectors for like $5-$10, and they're already more reliable and faster to use.

Voice is cool, it's like being in Star Trek. I get it, I built my own system to control music in the 2000s, complete with audio responses snipped from Star Trek shows. But the feeling of "living in the future" wears off pretty quick, and you're left with a ridiculously expensive and user-hostile gimmick.

an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud.

This is a dishonest characterization of how every smart speaker in existence works. There is no continuous stream as this statement implies.

There is a continuous buffer of a couple of seconds for the device to locally catch a wake word. (You can verify this by disabling the device's internet connectivity - it will still catch the wake word and speak an apologetic message about not being able to connect). Also, changing the wake word requires a full restart, which says "firmware" to me.

After the wake word is spoken, that buffer and anything immediately after it is what gets sent up to the cloud for voice recognition.

The buffer serves a purpose in that it prevents an awkward pause between the wake word and the action reqeusted. (So you get to do "Alexa, turn on the lights" rather than "Alexa? bong Turn on the lights.")

The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have.

I'd say it beats the alternative from a pure functionality standpoint.

In an ideal world that's true. But Alexa doesn't only upload your audio when you say the wake word, it uploads it when it thinks you said the wake word. Unless the recognition is 100% accurate, that's an important difference.

There was the one very publicized instance where it recorded private conversations and sent them to a random contact, but you have to wonder how many other non-Alexa commands have been picked up and sent off to Amazon even though they shouldn't have been.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/24...

So even if you trust Amazon with recordings of your weather queries, you also need to trust Amazon's wake word recognition to not pick up anything other than your weather queries.

And there was that other time when they took 1700 of their recordings, accidentally sent them to the wrong person, and a journalist was able to track down the recorded person based on their personal information from the recordings:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sends-alexa-shower-re...

So, I used to think the same thing, and have several Alexa devices in my home. However, last week I got an ad from Amazon about shower head installation. I have never searched for that on any device, nor asked my Alexa about it. But I did have a meatspace conversation about it the day before I got the ad.

Maybe I said something which triggered it? No idea, but I'm sure that Alexa listening in caused the advertisement to show up.

I promptly set them all so they no longer listen and I'm trying to figure out a better solution (HomePod? Mycroft?). I absolutely love the (limited) capabilities smart speakers provide. But I'm done with Alexa.

> [description how Alexa works]

Citation needed. I don't think the actual process is publicly available (though I may be wrong). Call me too cynical, but given the bugs that happened to both Google and Amazon, and that the law can force compel companies to do things with leased hardware they ordinarily wouldn't, I don't really trust it.

> The "user hostility" and "gimmick"-ness of this design is entirely subjective and quite overblown, in that "nobody will ever use Dropbox when they could just use rsync and a cronjob"-type bias that HN tends to have.

It's not like that. Dropbox is a simple service - syncs files, optionally allows sharing them. Doesn't do any weird stuff around it. Doesn't force an Internet round-trip for things that can be done locally. The user hostility of voice assistants comes from the way it's designed - cloud-based voice recognition instead of local one, forcing a cloud round-trip for doing things entirely over LAN, being tied to an "ecosystem" of third-party integrations you can't easily manage or complement with your own as end-user, etc. The "gimmick-ness" part comes from it doing very little, and doing it worse than alternatives.

> Citation needed. I don't think the actual process is publicly available (though I may be wrong). Call me too cynical, but given the bugs that happened to both Google and Amazon, and that the law can force compel companies to do things with leased hardware they ordinarily wouldn't, I don't really trust it.

I don't think you need a citation here. The network traffic is not sufficient to send always-on audio and the power consumption is not sufficient to do always-on speech-to-text or other similar analysis.

>Also, changing the wake word requires a full restart, which says "firmware" to me.

Well to me it says "static variable".

You use case almost exactly mirrors my own. Even if weather, alarms, time & lights was all it ever did, it has 100% been worth the purchase price.

It is genuinely useful to have a no-hands-required timer in the kitchen, and being able to turn off the bedroom lights when I'm done reading for the night without having to reach for a switch is great.

I was even pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Alexa's Skyrim. Sure, it's really more of a joke as it is, but it made me think that some choose-your-own-adventure skills would be a lot of fun.

(Asking Alexa to play white noise to help me sleep has been nice, too.)

The issue here is that a not too powerful local device could do that without recording everything you say in the cloud and keeping it forever with a label with your name on it.

I don't disagree on that point at all. Just commenting on how even if these devices aren't particularly smart, they still provide useful functionality.

Call me crazy but, but paying 30 dollars to lose all of my privacy just so I don't have to get up to turn off the light at night seems like a poor trade. Maybe not useless, but I honestly think you can do better.

And a basic raspberry pi could be programmed to cycle through the weather, alarms, lights, time. I guess the crux of doing it that way however, is taking personal responsibility for security, which still seems better if you're slightly lax at it, than sharing your "house microphone" with a multi-billion dollar company with motivation to exploit it.

I already own other microphones, for example my smartphone, laptop, various earbud/microphone combos, etc.

I already trust all those manufacturers not to secretly upload everything I say to the cloud. Why is amazon any different?

Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud, and saves it for undisclosed amount of time, and has the ability to link those recordings to your account and the motivation to exploit it for business purposes? Not to mention possible data breaches in case that data is not perfectly secured.

> Because it does upload everything you say to the cloud

What evidence do you have of this?

That's a necessary component of how it works: these devices don't do the speech recognition locally. They upload it to their cloud and run it through their machine learning network.

They're not supposed to upload "everything" you say, only the stuff you say after the wake phrase. The issue is that they're known to wake up and start recording when they're not supposed to, because they're not perfect about recognizing the wake phrase. There's also the fact that they have to be _listening_ all of the time in order to hear the wake phrase, and the security fear is that, due to a bug or malicious software, they could end up recording and uploading everything they hear as well. That's not a problem of the stated intent of the device, it's a problem of the latent capabilities being used improperly. The best way to secure the device is to remove those capabilities.

Yes, everything you said is true, but none of it contradicts my point.

"You could hypothetically be giving up all your privacy if there are bugs, and in some cases there are known bugs causing you to give up a limited amount of privacy" is a very different level of threat from "you are giving up all your privacy to Amazon who will use it for ad targeting".

I'm willing to accept the former, in return for the amount of convenience I get from the device.

However, others in this thread are arguing that nobody should accept the latter, which is irrelevant because it's not the real situation.

Not that I agree 100% with this argument, but it's the best I've heard.

With laptops, smartphones, earbuds, etc. they're not designed to be heard from across the room.. Or even in your pocket. Even when my phones on speaker across the room people will have problems hearing me properly. With Alexa, Google Home, and others, the microphones are specifically designed to hear you from a distance away, over music and other ambient noises.

Simply put, an Alexa or Google Home is a much more effective listening device.

I fairness to your bed time reading example, it’s very common for people to have bed side lights - even if they’re just little lamps that rest on a table. At least this is the norm in the UK. So for a great many of us, turning our reading light out would just be an extension of our arm.

My wife tends to prefer using the TV as her reading light. I find that rather bizarre but she likes the background noise. In any case, TVs have remote controls and sleep timers so that mitigates the need for voice control.

To be honest, I couldn’t think of a place I’d less want an Echo than the bedroom. Even the bathroom seems less inappropriate (eg you might want music when in the shower / bath).

Why am I getting downvoted? Do people disagree that it’s common for bedrooms to have lamps? A little context would be appreciated because my comment is 100% accurate in terms my own experiences yet several people seem to disagree. Genuinely interested to know why.

I didn't downvote, but just to answer- yes, I have a nightstand light, like most bedrooms here in the US. However, I also use a CPAP machine, and it is a genuine convenience to be able to put it on with the lights on, then use words to shut the lights off instead of reaching over to the side and having to deal with a slightly-too-short hose length. And frankly it's nice to not have to leave one's blanket cocoon for light/dark, not even it a little.

A small thing? Sure. But it is a genuine comfort that I enjoy.

To be honest I’d lump you into the same as the caveat made earlier about people with physical disabilities because even though you’re (presumably) able bodied, at night time your movement is restricted.

I can totally see the benefit for people in circumstances like your own (and those with greater concerns too). But for the average Joe? That’s another matter. Like any accessibility tool, I agree they are fantastic for those who depend upon it. However I wouldn’t advocate everyone gets a blind dog, hearing aid or wheelchair unless they actually needed it. Similarly would you actually want an Echo device in your bedroom if you didn’t have the accessibility concern that your CPAP machine creates?

Ultimately it’s harder to justify that privacy vs convenience trade off when accessibility isn’t an issue. But I accept that’s a decision which will be as divided as it will be personal. Myself; I have an Echo in the kitchen but I have no interest in allowing them to migrate upstairs.

Also thanks for the response. I do appreciate reading someone else’s perspective:)

True, but not everyone does, and for them, the Echo provides extra functionality. I've also added a lot of dimmable lights in my home, and voice control to set a light or set of lights at 50% is much much less impactful to whatever I'm doing than pulling out a phone.

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