>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.