Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know.

But, yeah, all the voice assistants are pretty bad or at least bad enough that I mostly give up trying to use them for anything other than certain rote tasks. Siri may or may not be marginally worse but none of them are good enough to, say, really use hands-off in a car unless I've carefully pre-defined tasks to perform. (e.g. pick from a handful of memorized playlist names).

View on HN

Gah, my mother has a few Echoes dotted about her house and it’s the only inanimate object I feel compelled to tell to shut the hell up on a regular basis.

Give me a direct response if warranted, otherwise a simple chime or acknowledgement. Multiple years into ownership no-one wants a “by the way…” with upsells to other Amazon services.

It’s even worse if the reason you were talking to it in the first place is to turn something down so you can actually speak to someone.

Make a routine with these commands. It has to run daily because those cowards at amazon aren't quite ready to let us off the upsell leash.

1. Set volume to 0

2. "Turn off by the way"

3. Set volume back to your preferred.

I wonder what the conversion on 'by the way' is. Like how many BTWs have played and how many customers have taken alexa up on that offer?

"By the way" is alexa's entire business model. They sell these devices at a loss and don't require a subscription for the nlp so they can "by the way" you into buying random shit. I'm surprised they let you mute it at all, especially after devices lost $10 billion last year.

I wonder why they sell these things at a loss. Wouldn't they sell at cost?

Internal cost accounting is complicated.

At 10 billion dollars the accounting doesn't have to be precise.

I am not really sure why people buy into this. These devices cost next to nothing to make, the royalties to the tax haven holding co and the private jet fuel are thrown in to the "cost" as a write-off and a tax dodge.

Then maybe it should try to make a sale instead of blathering on about how I can ask it what sound does a pig make.

They have 15 years of purchase history, prime video usage, and presumably are snooping on what podcasts I play over Echo. They should be able to suck a little less. Any random page of a 20 year old sears catalog would carry more relevance to me than anything Alexa has suggested.

I HATE that it does that, it made me try to move to Homepods, but even with Homebridge I couldn't get everything to work with Homepods. Also, it has its own drawbacks, like no screen to see a timer.

This is exactly the reason why I replaced all Amazon echo devices with HomePods. Siri makes many mistakes, doesn't hear me correctly, doesn't understand me correctly, and so many other issues. I can tolerate all these mistakes that Alexa also makes.

I just cannot tolerate Alexa talking back to me, especially when I'm trying to do something important. I've lost my train of thought too many times because of Alexa.

Same with Google Home! One too many times, I asked it what temperature it was outside, and it went on some monologue about how I should try asking it to give me a summary of my day or something.

The optimal amount of times a product should interrupt your workflow to tell you about a new feature is 1 or fewer.

Why not use Google Nest? It has Google Assistant, which seems to be better than Siri.

Just preference honestly, we have a lot of apple devices, and it's nice to be able to keep things consistent. If we both had Android Phones we would've probably used Google assistant.

> At least Siri doesn't pester you to buy various things or to use it for additional purposes like Alexa does as far as I know.

I was pretty happy with Alexa until they started that crap. Retired it immediately. Now I only have a HomePod but even on this I have Siri disabled.

Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone

> Amazon screwed the reputation of the voice robots for everyone

I don't think amazon screwed the reputation of anyone's assistant but their own. Plenty of people I know use voice assistants at home, none use Alexa.

Voice assistants are genuinely useful for some scenarios, especially in the smart home space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com