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Comment by villgax | Hacker News Reader

They do charge a subscription fee for it, but sadly enough this could have been done with any speaker they had & using the official app as well

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But could it have been done with the resilience/volume/sound quality/redundancy/etc of the speaker?

A situation that comes to mind is a vendor stepping away to go to the bathroom, and asking their neighboring vendor to sell while they are gone. A cheap enough, but fail proof and versatile solution is not necessarily a waste.

At less than a USD a month--currency vs. cost of living conversion--this subscription is extremely cheap considering the many positives: confirmation of payment from a new revenue stream, multiple language support, low-ish latency, fraud prevention for the seller. While a lot of Indians have smartphones, this speaker is the ideal example of a device that solves one specific problem and nothing else.

That would require leaving a smartphone and a speaker lying around where they might be stolen. Having it be a cheap, single-use device reduces the incentive for theft.

You can buy a smartphone good enough for the job for less than 60 GBP even in the UK, I'm sure they can be had for considerably less in India. And it doesn't need to be lying around, the user can have it on them.

It's 200 Rs/mo as per a shopkeeper I talked to. It's pretty affordable for many shops as it cuts down on fraud a bit and they see utility in it.

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