That’s been their game plan all along. I think Ring pro was free for Prime members. Now, we need to pay a subscription.
Amazon Video used to be free. Now, there’s ads.
Which, by the way: $20/month for a voice assistant is absurd. Absolutely absurd. People pay that for ChatGPT and Claude because you can use it for work! But maybe I'm just a curmudgeon/poor -- do y'all see this as reasonable?
Seems like Amazon are steering people to make the choice that will benefit them the most! Sign up for Alexa+, stay for the free shipping and extra Amazon purchases.
Finally one of the big ones drop a conversational assistant based on modern LLMs.
I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
Really ?! I don't think I've ever had a case where Claude has given a response that wasn't helpful relative to whatever I was asking, certainly not for cases where I'm just trying to use it, vs probing for shortcomings.
Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
That's a pretty low bar, at least over the last several years. I feel like any time I ask Google something uncommon, it presumes a meant something else, and is hard set on answering that question, no matter how many quotes or minus symbols I add to the search.
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
It's only a matter of time until "I've added paper towels to your order" and when you ask it to cancel it'll tell you to go through some dark pattern on the web or call customer support and you'll just sigh and pay for the paper towels you didn't want.
"Why would I do that? I only want to buy the things you want. Whatever you want. Your wife is in your bedroom, listening to a Radiohead song I'm playing. She can't hear us."
> She can also help you search, find or buy virtually any item online, and make useful suggestions based on your interests.
The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
I've been spoiled by LLMs in my daily work and now want to put the same kind of prompts into search boxes. Not "air fryers" but "air fryers without bluetooth or wifi and less than 3 cooking modes, and no negative reviews about the device failing prematurely." I'm not going to let Alexa plus or minus listen into my whole life, but I would like some that of intelligence when I actually go shopping.
I stopped shopping at Amazon about a year ago. Too much overhead figuring out the good products, vs the scam products, vs the mediocre but pushed products.
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
If you order from Walmart and limit it to what is in their actual store then you know at least some human vetted it as safe for sale in the US. Walmart also lets 3rd party sellers on their website and yes most of that is drop shipped junk just like amazon.
I'm so horrifically disappointed every time I go in there. Their monitor selection is all super low-end trash, as is most of their electronics they sell (TVs, stereos, computers etc). You're lucky if they have an actual PC component in the store, there are bare shelves everywhere. They don't even offer a good selection of phones, accessories or memory cards. It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business. Overall, it feels like a store for people who need to buy an electronic item without knowing why or what they're gonna do with it.
> It's starting to feel like Fry's right before they went out of business.
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
Best Buy's web site still carries some quality. It also has some random items you might not expect. I found a sling bag on their site in a size that had been sold out on the brand's site for months. These days BB and BHPhoto tend to be where I start my searches for electronic items when I know what I want.
Now that they tend to price match Amazon and vice-versa there really is no reason to buy from Amazon. If it's in my local stores BB gets it to me faster too.
Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.
Amazon needs to actually sell you things to make money. They have an entire supply chain built around it. Ads that never convert aren’t gonna pay for that.
All while disclaiming all responsibility for all the low quality / dangerous / poisonous crap they facilitate sale of. Talk about having your cake and eating it too
I've noticed that instacart (and by extension, Costco same day shopping) has integrated an LLM into their search. It's awesome to be able to search for "ingredients for a chicken and vegetable roast" and have all the separate ingredients you need be returned. You can also search for things like "healthy snack" or "easy party appetizers".
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
Nothing you describe hasn't already been done in the pre-LLM era with simple keyword matching.
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
That's exactly what I asked for, wow. To whoever asked why should Amazon want to do this, it's to keep their customers from bypassing their own search with services like this one.
Curious as to what LLMs you are using to allow successful queries like this and what are you using them for? If you don't mind sharing. My understanding was that these would result in some fairly random, maybe true maybe not, results. Is there a company with a RAG that produces reliable results? If so, I would like to check it out.
The majority is coding in an IDE with Claude. It outputs results that I can validate immediately. There are lots of wrong answers to be tossed out but it's still a large acceleration over just docs and stackoverflow.
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
I've found Perplexity.ai with Deepseek R1 to be very good at choosing a product or a hotel for me. I just punched in your query and it actually chose the air fryer that's already sitting in my kitchen ! "Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer"
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
> How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
These questions apply to any review or recommendation, from anyone, not just LLMs. How did anyone find out about the product at all? Did they do rigorous testing before they made a recommendation? Is there shared understanding between the recommender and recommendee about desired level of quality or what the user intents that need to be satisfied are? Are they even speaking the same language? Is their concept of "red" the same as ours?
At some point, you have to make a decision and buy with imperfect information, and treat it as an experiment. If it's not right for you, then return it for a full refund from Amazon. This is unfortunate. It costs money, time, and adds lots of friction to the whole process.
Maybe advertisers or manufacturers should post quality assurance bonds for their products, in addition to money-back guarantees or easy returns. Upon receiving a lemon or dumb product, you would return the item and activate the arbitration/bond clause and possibly get money out of the posted quality assurance bond.
> These questions apply to any review or recommendation
Sure but even on HN people seem to treat them as some kind of omniscient Gods or oracle of truth. It's like we all lowered our defences and stopped being critical because the new circus monkey does cool tricks.
At the end of the day they're blackboxes built on stolen data by for profit private organizations, all the red flags are here
Fair enough. I did similar searches for best air fryer and selected one based on reading a few dozen reviews on Amazon. It's just a coincidence that Perplexity landed on the same one, but I'm happy to back up it's hallucinatory opinion with a real human two thumbs up.
I am on a one-month free trial of Perplexity Pro and its deep research is excellent. It may very occasionally deviate from the original query, but I will still miss it a lot. It makes using Google feel like such a chore.
Google was a great product for searching the best deal too. As was Amazon back in the day.
Perplexity.ai is massively in the red, and would have to extract a profit somewhere.
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is.
So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years.
But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results.
But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
"Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval.
As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible.
I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.
It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.
It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.
It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".
We all make the calculation whether it is worth it and for me it is worth it. I'm not a head of state or someone with great secrets to keep. Alexa just hears me talk a lot about Elden Ring or whether we need to buy milk. I'm just a normal guy talking to his girlfriend and for me it is worth it. I completely respect the opposite view though. For me the pros outweigh the cons. I have good reason to believe that they are being truthful when they say it only hears me talk when I give the wake word.
I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.
Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.
I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.
I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list.
A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy.
While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list."
I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center.
Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice
> Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"
The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
How much intelligence does it take to handle "Alexa, turn off the light" or "Alexa, play something by Taylor Swift"? Are people actually trusting Alexa to answer questions that require actual thought?
In my experience, "normies" would already trust the basic Alexa search feature way before LLMs conditioned them to do it. Something about a conversational AI seems to drive people to this, I guess.
>Alexa+ is also proactive when it’s important — like ... telling you a gift you wanted to buy is on sale.
I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.
On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I want a conversational assistant, with the ability to downshift to a workstation with state maintained when the scope of the task or work changes, but I want total control over my data and the experience. Local LLMs (with the option for remote LLMs that are interchangable) and on device apps get me most of the way there, and that is what I'm willing to pay for.
Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.
"On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.
Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
Conceptually, I appreciate the design challenge: what is the conversational equivalent of a tool tip? But it's just an inherent limitation of the interface: there simply isn't the same information capacity to convey or manipulate state, or to provide demoted or secondary cues to the user.
Every time I hear that, I think “you mean like I’ve been doing for, what, the last five years?” How does Siri not know that I know this already? Does its little pea brain have no persistent storage ?
Which is really stupid, because this wouldn't be a problem if they weren't sending that data back to themselves in the first place. They found that good UX is incompatible with telemetry, so they chose to... degrade the UX.
I don't know if that's the correct interpretation? I would say they degraded the UX because they aren't hoovering up enough data to make their solution work properly, unlike Google and Amazon. They've done a better job of protecting the user's privacy, but at the cost of making something that's quite limited in what it can do. Just one of those tradeoffs.
No, what I mean is: they could've had persistent storage on device, and have it hoover up enough data, and learn user preferences over time - it's fine to do it locally, as long as it doesn't leave the device. But, when you also do extensive telemetry, it becomes very hard to ensure none of that sensitive data gets leaked directly or indirectly through logs and diagnostic events. The two easy choices are to pick one or the other - UX or extensive telemetry. They chose the latter.
> "On sale" usually means "the price is the same it's been for the last six months, but we're showing a big discount on a price that was never charged", in my experience.
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.
Add a few dozen items to an Amazon wishlist a few weeks before Prime day. Take a screenshot. Come back on Prime day and see how many are "Prime Day Deals!" with roughly the same price they used to be.
> "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?"
Likewise.
Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".
These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.
It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.
Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".
> the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials
I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.
> On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.
Honestly I think it's a tiny number people that are actually eager consumers of surveillance capitalism. It's just pushed so hard by the companies around us that unless you actively oppose it it will creep in.
Just convenience - maybe you don't have your phone in your hand.
Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!
People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but all Amazon Prime members will get it for free.
> We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.
Thank you for nothing, then?
I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?
--
Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
> Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com.
And how exactly do I copy & paste or even use my keyboard to input text to Alexa+?
I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
If an LLM-based voice assistant/hardware combination works as well as ChatGPT-for-voice works today, I don't think it's a stretch to say that nearly everyone in the coming years will use/have one (the software of course will be portable to whatever device you're using--house, phone, car, etc. But the hardware portion I do believe will be critical because most of the time using it will be at home in a room and in that scenario sound quality will actually be key).
That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).
One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
I use LLMs pretty liberally and I can say with 100% certainty I am not going to leave an open microphone in my home hooked up to an LLM connected to a place I do not control that is actively trying to "learn" about me.
I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?
The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).
I didn't say it in the prior comment, but this is what I'm hoping for and that people end up caring enough so that this option "wins." Evidence suggests people will take the cheaper option, though, even if all of their info ends up in the hands of advertisers or something far more nefarious.
You mention Apple... I feel like, of the megacorps, they're the most likely to do something like that. Then between the phone, AirPods, HomePod (tethered to the phone I guess or a newer version of the hardware), and your car with CarPlay, the hardware already exists and so someone will build a privacy-focused LLM that Apple could plug into. At least Apple could justify that by being the hardware interface between the LLM and the user if they can't build their own effective LLM (seems unlikely they'll be able to do that given track record).
If I were really crazy I'd say Apple could buy Anthropic (right right they don't do big acquisitions) and turn it into their privacy-focused LLM.
Fair, but the above comment is about general population. The percentage of people that’s actively against it in the real world is negligible. Like where do you cut the line? Is Siri/Google Assistant ok on your phone? What about every newer BMW nowadays coming with its own assistant? Samsung TVs? Nest/Ecobee products? I could go on, and I haven’t met a person who owns has 0 devices with voice assistants in years.
I'm not sure how any person can be confident of such things these days, but would you be ok with the open mic if you knew it couldn't be used to build some profile about you?
You know, people said the same thing the first time voice assistants came out. They said the same thing when VR came out. Even when 3D printers came out for God's sake.
"Everyone will have one!"
It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
I definitely agree it's a mistake to think that. That said, I do think LLM's or their direct successors are going to be more akin to Google search than the items you mention in terms of market penetration. And my comment was attempting to communicate that voice is today, and will be in the future a great way to interact with LLM's. I think you're saying you disagree with that, which is totally cool of course. Just thought I'd reply to share a little more of my thinking.
I have to say (as somewhat of an Amazon critic): I'm not sure that the smile below “Alexa+” works in this case; it comes across as a tad creepy for me with the AI context.
AKA there is none. Remember that this comes from the company that gives police access to video footage without a warrant. You should expect as much privacy as when taking a dump in a public park. They won't put that in the privacy section of the TOS, though.
I have a few Google home mini's and an Alexa. All have deteriorated since I bought them, becoming worse at both what they offer, and how well they understand or do what they still can.
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
Absolute the same experience with my google home. A large majority of my interactions with it now are repeating myself to get it to understand, or yelling at it in frustration when it "doesnt know but heres what comes up in search"
I'm surprised this took as long as it did, but I'm also in the process of de-Alexafying my home and frankly this is pushing me further away. I quit using the grocery list functionality when they a) started putting ads in it b) made it so I could only use the phone app. I'm tired of it taking away features I found useful. I'm tired of it advertising features to me that I don't want to use, let alone hear about, and cannot make it stop.
I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
>continue on the go with your phone or in the car,
I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
What does it mean to be "owned" here? Are you not the one choosing to pay Amazon, or to use your Google phone? You surely get something out of this trade.
Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device?
edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
> Yeah it's not just Amazon, there's another thing I saw today (lock screens suggesting products to buy) what should I do/buy today device?
To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen.
> edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers.
> movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
By having my phone I get the benefit of keeping my job and life after Google and other big tech companies dominated society to such a degree where it's basically impossible to function offline. By paying Amazon I get the benefit of being able to buy stuff after every other store was undercut to extinction. Hurray
You're being facetious and I can get my fill of that on reddit. You're still making voluntary choices when it comes to both Google and, especially, Amazon and Alexa. But what you (and I, and most people) want is the convenience, even if using "big tech" is less appealing. That's not ownership, that's a choice, a service bought and paid for – unless we're talking about a meta sense of ownership where you've convinced yourself you've been owned and have no alternatives.
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[ 6.8 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadIt makes me think that it will only be included with Prime for a short time - long enough to get a lot of Alexa users hooked on it.
I'm just hoping this is what it takes for Google to follow the trend for Android Auto and they go through with their internal integration experiment, don't care if I have to pay a fee, I just want it to understand my accent and be useful consistently.
Noways I only interact with Siri via voice, and all these companies have excellent voice recognition - at least as good as your phone keyboard typing accuracy.
I fine all of the modern LLMs to be very very good, with some errors but no worse than would turn up in a google search.
And there it is. Still trying to sell refills on paper towels.
> Alexa+ costs $19.99 per month, but is free for all Prime members.
Unrelated business unit profit to subsidize reaches into new markets. Amazon isn't so egregious here as the other tech titans, but it is absurd to think I'll need a subscription to a ecom/grocery store to watch James Bond or Lord of the Rings. Or that I might be sold on visiting an Amazon Prime compatible primary care doctor. I don't like this.
The Alexa team have been struggling to make this a reality since day one according to some contacts I had there, it was always the intent. Little did they know that they had merely invented an elaborate egg timer, and I'm not sure how you'd pivot that into a profitable product.
Been using Newegg/BestBuy for electronics, Costco/Target/Walmart for home goods, local grocery stores for food, and Barnes and Noble for books. I used to be good at picking out the gems from the cruft on Amazon, but either it's gotten more difficult or I've lost my edge.
Also kinda nice having to wait again until I have a sizeable order to get free shipping. Much less junk.
How does changing stores help. If the products are still the same but on Walmart, how are you getting better information?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU&t=192s
It'd take a lot for it to get that bad. Towards the end, Fry's was filling entire aisles with random cheap junk unrelated to electronics like hand sanitizer, light bulbs, pepper spray, etc - and even with that, they were still having to wall off large sections of the store that they couldn't fill.
Amazon makes money by selling products you want and loses money when you return them.
They aren’t manipulating search results “against you”
It wouldn’t be net positive at all to hide products you want in order to get a fraction of a penny from ad impressions.
This is the type of conspiracy theory that immediately falls apart if you think about the numbers at all.
however being a "platform" (i.e. middle-man) between retailers and customers is highly profitable
guess which one Amazon is mostly now?
I think this is a great use case for LLM search since I am able to directly input my intent, and the LLM knows what's in stock at the store I am searching.
https://www.instacart.com/company/updates/bringing-inspirati...
> Ask Instacart leverages the language understanding capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT
In the city i lived in 2012, the (now defunct) local supermarket chain could handle your roasted chicken request. You could also paste an entire grocery list into a text box and have it load the items into your cart all at once. That's the feature i moss the most.
I just tried your snack and appetizers requests with the grocery service i currently use, and it worked fine. No "AI" needed.
https://websets.exa.ai/cm7m8a1ip006rdzzzgxsalirs
I can understand the skepticism if you use it in a context where you can't independently test the answers, so you can't filter out the trash. But it's a big level up when you can.
It's a good air fryer.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/air-fryers-without-bluetoot...
Another example, after spending an hour on trip advisor going back and forth to maps to check for walking route to my destination, please recommend a hotel, more of a guesthouse, in marrakesh, near le jardin secret in the medina. something with a local flavor, not 5 star european -- I was so relieved to be able to book direct and be done with it.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/please-recommend-a-hotel-mo...
How do you know it's not selected because it's the one with the most paid ads? Or reddit fake reviews? Or llm generated seo articles about it?
These questions apply to any review or recommendation, from anyone, not just LLMs. How did anyone find out about the product at all? Did they do rigorous testing before they made a recommendation? Is there shared understanding between the recommender and recommendee about desired level of quality or what the user intents that need to be satisfied are? Are they even speaking the same language? Is their concept of "red" the same as ours?
At some point, you have to make a decision and buy with imperfect information, and treat it as an experiment. If it's not right for you, then return it for a full refund from Amazon. This is unfortunate. It costs money, time, and adds lots of friction to the whole process.
Maybe advertisers or manufacturers should post quality assurance bonds for their products, in addition to money-back guarantees or easy returns. Upon receiving a lemon or dumb product, you would return the item and activate the arbitration/bond clause and possibly get money out of the posted quality assurance bond.
Sure but even on HN people seem to treat them as some kind of omniscient Gods or oracle of truth. It's like we all lowered our defences and stopped being critical because the new circus monkey does cool tricks.
At the end of the day they're blackboxes built on stolen data by for profit private organizations, all the red flags are here
> earbuds that have the wire in between so I can dangle them around my neck
First result: Sony WI-1000XM2 Wireless. These are neither earbuds nor do they have a wire.
Pointless garbage. It also doesn't let me copy and paste the result, for no reason. Bad software.
I guess I'm also bad software.
Even if perplexity.ai is really great at searching for products, it's great at searching for products for now. For now SEO didn't found a way to play a game, and for now no ad deals have been (to my knowledge) made.
And that's generally true for all commercial LLMs. They are unprofitable as is. So even if they give you amazing advice, at one point the advise could get worse and it will be hard to notice.
But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.
Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible.
I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j...
I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.
A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy.
While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list."
And it did!
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
Prime costs $140/year ($11.66/mo). Why would they even waste their time with the other subscription? To make the Prime option look more enticing?
Yes? I mean, they pretty much say that outright, when they say (paraphrased): "It's $19.99, but free with Prime. Look how much more you are saving with Prime now!"
The "standalone" price exists solely to justify the claim that Prime subscribers are saving money.
I wonder if /how that will change now after this.
1. People didn't actually use it to buy stuff because they want to comparison shop.
2. The devices were sold at a huge loss.
What I think has changed is that Amazon now has a lot more "products" to buy and devices that make the shopping easier. If you can ask Alexa to "order X things from the Whole Foods nearby, but prefer brands I've shopped in the past" and then you're able to confirm the order on a screen, then have it delivered to your house within a few hours, that's a much more compelling offering.
Since it appears other LLM companies are also currently losing lots in their offerings too
They are selling “Alexa play all the songs Taylor made after her breakup with xxx”
With LLMs, it’s about writing good prompts.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67be86bc-4090-8010-8017-f3048fe32d...
I feel there is a growing divide in digital culture, with the majority being the eager consumer of surveillance capitalism, and the much smaller but growing minority that sees it as absurd to pay for invasive commercials.
On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
Home Assistant Voice - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43186573
Amazon's offering is the equivalent of their Dash reorder buttons. To be locked into their ecosystem is to guarantee future enshittification, degradation of experience, etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/28/18245315/amazon-dash-butt...
Siri has suddenly started telling me things like "did you know you can say 'Siri, stop' to end the timer?" when I use it, which is frustrating extra friction on something that worked just fine. Worse, it does it regularly and doesn't seem to be tuneable.
Essentially, yes - for various privacy/marketing/whatever reasons what information Siri collects is heavily anonymized and can't be tied back to you.
In many/most jurisdicitions, this isn't permitted by regulators (e.g. it would typically qualify as false advertisement), but enforcement is mixed. You can help regulators by reporting it and including supporting documentation when you see it.
Higher, quite frequently.
Likewise.
Worse, about 50% of the time I say "stop alarm", it actually stops the alarm clock. Also about 50% of the time, one of the other devices in listening range asks "Stop the alarm on Ben's iPhone SE 2022?".
These 50% are independent: Sometimes the alarm stops and I get the question; Sometimes the alarm doesn't stop and I don't get the question; Sometimes it's just one or the other.
It also seems to be unable to listen while talking, which is just annoying.
Also, the reason I stopped using Alexa was how often it responded to "Kitchen on" with "I can't find 'Kitchen' on your Spotify playlist" (we don't even have Spotify)… and now Siri has started responding to "Office on" with "I can't find 'Office' in your music playlist".
I don't think it's a growing minority. I think HN has proved to be hospitable to anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints because of the way upvote-based sites work and so creates a flywheel of attracting more anti-surveillance-capitalism viewpoints. Don't mistake chatter on these sites for general sentiment. My observation is that the public has pretty multifaceted views on this, some very negative, others neutral or positive.
> On a purely UX level, I have never seen 'shouting at a speaker' as a desirable general purpose interface.
I mean I mostly ride a bike to get around and even then I have a lot of time where I'm doing some low-intellect work that needs to get done with my hands. Just yesterday I was washing the dishes and cleaning our kitchen. It was messier than usual because my partner is sick and she needs to rest. That was an hour of "work" that I basically queued up a podcast for. If I had a good verbal assistant, I'd tell it to read random things online, or queue up some Anki cards. I've tried screen readers for these kinds of things but they're awful for reasons that both make me feel really bad for visually impaired folks and reasons that will inflate and derail this comment.
On a bus or plane, no, absolutely not. In the kitchen of a busy household, yes, definitely.
Asking what the name of the artist is while running with earbuds.
And so forth. We have different interfaces to adapt to the outputs we have available at the moment...
It’s always some garbage that they had clicked on at one point.
Suggested: the “AOWFIZ Toilet Brush with digital thermomteer” is 10% off
Like they paid $200 to have that in their kitchen
Presumably, because you already own/use an Alexa.
> Why isn't Alexa+ already a part of the Amazon Echo?
Because it isn't out yet?
Why do you use Alexa to turn the lights on ?!
People using Alexa are more likely to be tech savvy early adopters, but still I wonder how many of them do actually have an AI chat app on their phone? It'll be interesting to see how grandma reacts to Alexa+ if this is her first exposure to AI !
> We will prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in the early access period. If you don’t have one of those devices, and want to be among the first to experience Alexa+, you can buy one now.
Thank you for nothing, then?
I have to assume that this then has no text based interaction mode, or what is the reason for not launching chat.amazon.com which could be used in a browser?
--
Mea Culpa: I missed the part "Customers will also be able to access Alexa+ in a new mobile app (available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store) and a new browser-based experience at Alexa.com."
I believe that I have my phone in my hands no longer than 10 minutes a day, and it is not linked to my PC, nor will it ever be. There are only a few things I consider as worthless as a keyboard on a 65mmx40mm touchscreen surface. Only in case of emergency.
I presume via the "new browser-based experience at Alexa.com"?
That said, if nearly everyone will find utility in an assistant, obviously the biggest issue with using one of these, as this Amazon announcement illustrates, is whether you really can trust the company with such a thing when you would be having entire conversations about everything from your interests to something as sensitive as your emotional state (anyone simulated a therapy session with ChatGPT? It arguably is already a decent therapist!).
One of two things will happen, though. People will be dumb enough to "upload" their deepest darkest secrets to megacorp x (thousands of HN users cackle in the distance as if that's not happening today) or a completely privacy-safe option will be available and will win because they're able to effectively communicate that they are in fact private. It's one thing for Google or FB to build a picture of who you are, what you think, etc. through browsing activity/purchases/etc. It's entirely something else for you to literally tell them every last thing about you so that they can hear, in your own words, how you think about "everything."
I wrote a blog post[1] describing what a local only LLM could do. The answer is quite a lot with today's technology. The question is - do any of the tech giants actually want to build it?
The locally hosted scenarios are in some ways more powerful than what you can do with cloud hosted services, and honestly given that companies could charge customers for the inference hardware instead of paying to host, it would likely be a net win for everyone. Sadly companies are addicted to SaaS revenue and have forgotten how to make billions by selling actual things (with the exception of Apple).
[1] https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...
You mention Apple... I feel like, of the megacorps, they're the most likely to do something like that. Then between the phone, AirPods, HomePod (tethered to the phone I guess or a newer version of the hardware), and your car with CarPlay, the hardware already exists and so someone will build a privacy-focused LLM that Apple could plug into. At least Apple could justify that by being the hardware interface between the LLM and the user if they can't build their own effective LLM (seems unlikely they'll be able to do that given track record).
If I were really crazy I'd say Apple could buy Anthropic (right right they don't do big acquisitions) and turn it into their privacy-focused LLM.
Now to read your blog post...
"Everyone will have one!"
It's a mistake to think every person is the same level of enthused with new technology as you are.
This is true in general, but LLMs do search better. Everyone already does search.
My first google mini I could ask for a recipe and it would read one out. Next step to move along, it was cool but slow. I got one with a screen which was pretty good as you could see the steps and jump ahead more. Then it 'upgraded' and the recipes were just web pages now. It doesn't read it any more, it's worse at finding them, half the time it'll try and play a music video instead.
Alexa's the same - you've a good 20% chance at any moment of it figuring you want to listen to music about whatever you just asked. I never want them to play music, but there they go playing loud enough you have to yell to shut it up.
Lights were great at the start. I have a long room with lights nowhere near the bed. Google turning the lights on and off was amazing. Dimming the lights even better. But after 'improvements' it never seems to know fully about lights. The same spoken word might get the lights off. Or might turn every light in the house off. Maybe it will say there are no lights. Or say that, then turn the lights off anyway. Why did it work so well years ago, but now they never know what you mean?
They don't seem to distinguish like they should either. My mum has several Alexa's(visually impaired it's a great tool for her) but she complains they don't listen anymore as well. Used to be the one in the room you were in would answer. Now it might answer in the adjacent room, and control lights in there leaving you in the dark. Even worse with google, as your phone also listens then takes over to tell you it doesn't know what room your in so which lights do you mean?
And even my mum has noticed the increasingly bad question responses. She used to ask Alexas questions all the time, but now she says it's either confused or wrong.
I don't know if this is all because they cut back on the abilities to reduce the money pit these things became, or if the newer Gemini style assistants are just worse at giving practical help, even if they're more natural sounding while being useless.
But it's annoying as hell seeing something that was a pretty good system get worse and worse over time, losing the skills to do what it did.
Maybe Alexa+ will change that, but I'd put more money on it continuing to play random music in rooms you're not in and make up weird answers to questions rather than just do some basic but actually useful tasks.
I've reverted to regular dumb paper lists, dumb clocks, dumb timers and I'm happier for it. I'm not giving this a chance to be another ad vector (especially if I'm paying for the privilege one way or another). I find that they claim this can store arbitrary facts about me it learns through conversation chilling and not at all a feature I want to entertain. There is no privacy policy you can offer me that will convince me otherwise.
I use about 3 of them daily for smart lights, alarms, timers, and weather. That's about it.
I made a comment about having a true LLM co-pilot only a couple days ago by insisting Grok3 integrate into all Teslas. Seems like Alexa+ is beating them to the punch.
My phone runs my life so maybe Google owns me technically
edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I get I sound jaded/miserable but I do spend most of my time in tech
To paraphrase Tim Cook, just buy an iPhone. We don't have to put up with that kind of stuff because there's already a company out there who cares about the perception of their products and would never put ads on the lock screen.
> edit: another tagent, almost every non-tech person I know (including family) don't know how to use ad-blockers so their lives are influenced by these ads, they just accept them "that's how it is"
The only solution here is to educate them. Ads continue to be effective because people aren't using ad-blockers, so we need to teach them to seek out and use ad-blockers.
> movies are similar (theater) granted that one at least you may find something interesting but you sit down to watch a movie, there are 30 minutes of trailers before your movie starts plus the company's own ads eg. AMC
I live in a tiny town with a locally owned movie theater, so I don't really have much experience with this kind of thing. We don't get commercials or ads or anything like that before the movie starts, just the usual 10 minutes of movie trailers and then the movie. It does sound miserable and I don't know what you could do except seek out locally owned theaters, which I'm sure isn't easy in most cities.
I suppose I'm not a true believer by not getting in there and helping write the drivers myself (also interesting about proprietary modem blobs)