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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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