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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

I read alot about them, but I have never come across one in the wild despite living in a fairly wealthy, gadget friendly environment. I agree that the whole idea of voluntarily installing something like this seems mind-blowingly nuts. Are real people actually using Alexa? If so- what for? Are there killer reasons for using Alexa like there are for, say, a Tesla or an iPhone?

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Some buy it to play music in their living spaces. My dad came back with a free Echo after moving his phone plan to Verizon. Thankfully I got him to be skeptical of it just because they are giving them away for free. Sibling got a google one for novelty. Over time they also stopped using, it got annoying having to plug it back in every time (since I dont let it stay plugged in). cus fuck google, amazon, fb, apple, microsoft, am I missing anyone? Samsung seems to stay lowkey but eff em too.

I have three friends that own an Alexa. I think they bought it as a novelty and now it only replaces the Bluetooth speaker and looking at the weather.

Still haven't seen a single reason to own one.

One glance and swipe down in Dark Sky shows me more weather info than Alexa could tell me in two minutes, I don’t get the weather part.

Owned three, threw all of them out. The AI was underwhelming in understanding, even finding music. We ended up using it to tell the time when sitting at the table without a computer. Now I own a wrist watch.

It would be very interesting to see how many bought them as a novelty, and then got tired of them and unplugged them.

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