My neighbor's wife uses it for things like setting a timer for cooking, setting reminders, playing music, queries about things she and her kids are curious about, and ordering things on Amazon. She seemed pretty happy with its usefulness.

>My neighbor's wife uses it for things like setting a timer for cooking, setting reminders, playing music, queries about things she and her kids are curious about, and ordering things on Amazon. She seemed pretty happy with its usefulness.

This is why I will never understand the appeal of these "smart assistants". All of the above can be done with simple voice command recognition that has existed for decades. Why do I need to send my commands through a third party selling my data and tracking me?

Sure, but Alexa does it much better. It just works. With voice platforms the biggest hurdle is not trusting it will work (like with Siri) which means you stop trying. When I drop pasta in while watching over a saute pan I don't want to go open an app I just want to say "set a timer for 8 minutes" and get on with it.

Why does any software need to send commands back through home base? Embedded systems are powerful these days and storage costs are tiny. I’m so tired of these “smart” devices that needlessly require an internet connection.

In order to watch video from my Dropcam over in the next room, that video stream gets uploaded through my internet connection to some backend, then downloaded back through that same connection to my viewer. Madness.

I agree with you on the dropcam issue. They should've done two TCP streams. My guess is it's a hardware limitation or something. Also their big thing is to sell cloud DVR.

I’m tired of “smart” employees that needlessly require Google.

Has there been a device before that worked as well as Alexa? Remember, user is not a programmer.

I have read like 1/3 of the comments but its interesting that the most interesting problem of everything we are talking about was only noticed by a non-programmer (so far). Everything that was talked about in the comments all hinge on the state of the art (SOTA) of ai in natural language processing (nlp). John Carmack recommended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQQ-W_63UgQ stanford's nlp class (i didnt know who he was until i saw that post on hn). That class is good. it should take a long time to grok. you'll be solid up to LSTMs a general current standard.

I can do it without a voice assistant even quicker.

Exactly. I'd love to use one of these in the kitchen to set timers and ask ingredient amounts -- so long as it was local only.

Playing songs with the kids (this is actually a lot of fun, changing songs while wrestling with the kids, lots of laughs =) ), audio books, news, weather, timers, answers, buying things, turning things on and off, such as the lights. I can do all that without doing anything more than talking.

These are the average things my wife and I use ours for at the moment.

Edit: Hey, and just to be clear, yes, we find it useful enough we have several devices.

I dunno. I can and do do almost all of those things(minus maybe changing songs while wrestling with my kids, but I don't have kids) without a smart speaker and none of them are very difficult to do in the first place. For instance, when I want to buy something, I open an app on my phone. If I want to turn on a light, I walk to the light switch, and then I turn it on. I'm not trying to be facetious, I really don't see much of a benefit to having an alexa or similar device. I think smart speakers are going to have to do a whole lot more than I can currently imagine in order for me to adopt them.

Sure, you can do all those things, but I can still do them when you can't. Like when your hands are holding something, or dirty because you are washing dishes, or turning on the lights while your hands are full.

And the benefit is, I don't have to remember my phone. It can be sitting wherever, and I can still do these things.

> I really don't see much of a benefit to having an alexa or similar device.

So? I like having a remote car starter, too, despite being able to walk out and start the car manually.

I like GrubHub, even though I could call up and order from places on the phone.

I enjoy streaming video over DVRing shows.

I value convenience. Maybe you value other things. That's fine.

So then...

> I dunno.

What? What don't you know?

>If I want to turn on a light, I walk to the light switch, and then I turn it on

Compare this to: "What's the point of remotes? If I want to change the station, I get up and walk to the TV". Once you get used to being able to turn lights off by voice, you get lazy and happy.

And it's not just one light, BTW. Suppose when I go to sleep, I want all lights except the porch lights off. I don't have to walk around the whole house[1] switching them off, when instead I can just say "Sleep mode lights" or something equivalent.

[1] You know, the 3000 sq ft houses people outside of SV have.

I typically turn a light on once when i enter the room and when I leave the room- I do the same thing for my exterior lights on the outside of my house. Once every couple of months or so I or my wife will have to get up and go shut a light off in the living room when we go to bed that we forgot to turn off. People often change the channel multiple times in on sitting...which you really don't do with lights. I guess maybe having children complicates this.

Also, maybe I'm the outlier here your proposed situation is particularly accurate (and funny) to me- a couple of years ago a dog chewed up our TV remote and I have still yet to replace it. I get up and physically go to the TV to turn the volume up or down or to turn it on/off.

I'm really not trying to sound like a luddite, I just really don't care enough to adopt this stuff, at least not for the foreseeable future...I don't see the purpose of life as an endless march towards total comfort and ease, though. I will concede that these devices and smart home technology makes life much easier for those with disabilities, and I ultimately support it's development for this reason alone.

Well, no one is saying this is definitely a gain for every person. As an example, I refused to use a smartphone until 2012, and even after that, I refused to use cell phones for non-emergency calls until, well, even now. I still have a conventional phone at home, and unless I'm coordinating something, I don't answer my cell phone and simply call people back when I get home.

But on the flip side, it's a poor assumption that if someone is not turning off the lights manually, that the primary goal is comfort or ease. I used to think manually doing all chores was a virtue in itself - I had a dishwasher in my apartment for years before I started using it. I no longer think that way. Now for me, if I can eliminate mundane stuff like dishes, lights, etc - it is because I want to spend the time on more quality stuff.

As an example, too many older people say they wish they had just paid the money to repair stuff in the house, rather than spending the time to repair it themselves. They took pride in their work, on top of also saving money. But later in life, they wished they had used that time better.

I definitely agree with some of what you're saying- I guess my point would be that I don't think that these smart speakers are anywhere near the innovation that the smart phone was...and I think that people who aren't early adopters have a valid place in the consumer space because we are the majority and therefor we are growth. If things like Alexa want to be as ubiquitous as a smartphone then I think they're going to have to become a lot more novel.

In its current form, I find it less useful than a lot of people seem to. But reasonable extrapolations of natural language processing and other advances in conversational interfaces make it seem at least plausible that Alexa could become a fairly general-purpose virtual assistant. Lots of hard problems to solve but at least plausible in 5-10 years.

> Do others find it useful?

They have sold tens of millions of Alexa devices, is it really surprising that people find them useful?

That logic could also apply to fidget spinners.

> That logic could also apply to fidget spinners.

Or stamps. Or shoelaces. Or umbrellas. Or wallets. Or lipstick.

All useful things to millions of people.

One fundamental difference with fidget spinners: they have already peaked and faded in popularity, Alexa continues to grow year by year. That's the true difference between something tens of millions of people (soon to be hundreds of millions of people) find useful, and something people temporarily find amusing.

... You write as if Alexa wont also 'have already peaked and faded in popularity' in a couple of years. Growth doesn't mean shit. Retention does.

The example of fidget spinner is to highlight a counter example to the belief that selling well is an indicator for usefulness. It isn't.

That's a stretched supposition. How do you know something is actually useful before you purchase it? You're ignoring the sell-ability factor- At 50 dollars it's something people can give to another that offers interactivity and an experience with less guilt if you don't end up using it than a goldfish that gets flushed down the toilet.

The customer reviews are across the board overwhelmingly positive. 4.3/5 with over 100,000 reviews of the Echo Dot for example.

Also the facts that they keep bringing out new devices and are hiring extremely heavily would lead you to believe they see a very bright future in the product.

When Alexa can control microwaves, ovens, blenders, TVs, phonelines, dishwashers, bathtubs and showers, Roombas, pressure cookers, WOW holy shit, an OS for your entire house.

I envision pick and place robot arms that swing around your kitchen grabbing things and preparing meals too.

Home automation is something that can be handy. Example: When I'm watching a movie, I like all the lights nearby to be off. Being able to say "Turn off TV lights" and have specific lights turn off is nice (and expensive - all those smart switches cost money).

Being able to make a sound when an action occurs (e.g. garage door opens alerting you that someone has arrived home) is nice.

Not sure what else. But satisfaction seems to be high. I think it falls squarely into the category of "Seems not worth the expense, but once I have it, it is kinda convenient".

(I do not own one).

I tend to agree, the trust I have in Amazon around handling my information security is quite limited - I mean that goes for a lot of cloud providers, but Amazon just doesn't seem like an organization that cared much about data protection. I once submitted a couple of bugs to them and wanted a CVE, but only thing they said is. Thanks you, we fixed it but we won't acknowledge any of this externally via CVE, because well, it's the cloud, we don't have bugs or something along those lines.

> but Amazon just doesn't seem like an organization that cared much about data protection

I challenge you to provide a single shred of evidence in support of this claim.

Did you read my paragraph, I have a first hand example. Not being transparent is exactly part of this

Perhaps the bug you submitted wasn't worthy of a CVE. It's impossible to know from a single anecdote with basically no details.

What I do know is that, to my knowledge, there has never been a single verified publicized breach of any AWS systems that were due to a vulnerability in AWS itself. Care to provide a counterexample?

Anecdotally, it's certainly gaining market share. Most of my friends have an Echo/Alexa at home now (silicon valley selection bias disclaimer). Even though they do not use it much yet, I can see why Amazon would want to capitalize on this.

We started with Alexa but now replaced with the Google Home.

I am a super curious person by nature as also a couple of my kids and do get a lot of use out of the Google Homes. Often times during family discussions.

It is a $150 kitchen timer. And it is worth the money.

You could bolt a Kindle Fire HD to your wall and install nothing but a timer app and save money.