> It's a little more than just that. Every light in my house is controlled with Alexa which is a very nice and hard to explain until you have tried it. Also my home theater system is all controllable via Alexa as well. This kind of thinking makes no sense to me.

There's no reason why your house needs to be "tapped" for either of those use cases. All those things could be accomplished without leaving your home network.

There is a massive difference between walking a few steps to turn on a light switch (which is only useful when you are in close proximity) vs having a accurate real-time mapping functionality when on the go.

Similarly, there is a massive difference in the privacy implications of listening to every conversation everyone in your home (including guests) is having vs. having your current location known. Wiretapping laws exist for a reason.

Turning off all the light switches that have been left on in a big house though is a meaningful convenience. I think the privacy point is strong enough without having to trash people's use cases.

No trashing it at all, just contrasting it. I do see the convenience (luxury) of home automation, but when you compare that against accurate mobile mapping, location finding and navigation, the difference in usefulness is orders of magnitude. One can literally save your life.

> having a accurate real-time mapping functionality when on the go.

To be fair, you can have all the maps without the location tracking; the location tracking just tells you where you are on the map.

There is a drinking water appliance in our breakroom that will not dispense water if it can not reach the internet.

This is not the world we should be engineering. Actually, I would say, this is not engineering.

I never thought that voice control would be that useful until I had my daughter... being able to turn on the white noise, turn off the tv, play her music, etc while having my hands full of toddler is very useful.

How did we do it before? I can't even imagine. /s

He said that it is useful and makes his life easier. He did not said that whole family would die without it.

What I am saying, is that I think the increase in convenience is largely perceived.

Are you arguing that we should just stop creating anything new, since we clearly survived before without it? This comment could literally apply to ANY new thing.

No I'm not, I work on home automation for a living. I am saying the value and added convenience is largely perception and it doesn't. I raised my first kid pre-echo and my second post echo. I think for the most part, raising a kid is easier than we thing, and we are surprised at how well we are doing and attribute that to things around us, much like our old superstitious ancestors.

Clap on

clap clap

Clap off

clap clap

Clap on, clap off. The Clapper!

clap clap

You can't clap with a baby in your arms?

That’s about all we use ours for

“Alexa... play white noise”

“ALEXA... stop”

Do you notice that it randomly fades out and then fades back in every few hours? I don't understand why it does that.

Is it pulling a track from their music archives? Maybe it’s just a several hour long loop and the date is when it repeats.

Yeah, that is kinda my guess, but it doesn't seem to be predictable... sometimes it happens within a few minutes, other times it takes an hour or more.

Then I'd assume it's a playlist, and some tracks are just longer than others.

Why do you want to turn on white noise?

Blocks out other distracting sounds. Helps kids, animals and some people relax. Helps some people sleep.

It can help babies sleep. Supposedly it simulates the noise in the womb

Heck it helps me sleep -- I'm a light sleeper. I started using the Noisli app every night this past year and my sleep quality improved in noticeable ways.

I also live in a city, so white noise (actually brown noise) masks out tiny noises that interrupt sleep.

It helps kids sleep.

Not having to use light switches or a remote does not seem comparable to mobile internet connectivity.

Of course: convenience!

Mankind has made countless decisions to trade convenience for some degree of personal freedom. I can live without mobile internet - its just so convenient to have it. Voice control for home appliances is exactly the same.

If I'm home and don't have my phone (or have my hands full, or it's dark, or whatever) I can easily turn lights on or off and without fumbling around for switches or trying to juggle a cat or a child.

I can also control my tv, thermostat, get a news briefing, check my calendar and set reminders.

Yes, it's ultimately a convenience, but so is indoor plumbing and store bought bread.

>Yes, it's ultimately a convenience, but so is indoor plumbing and store bought bread.

I’m sorry, clean water and food are not conviniences. They are among the most basics of human needs. That’s the kind of thing that scares me. That someone would make such a comparison with a straight face.

This is the kind of argument that seems really common and I find very annoying. So 'indoor plumbing' is obviously used to provide us with clean water, but the convenience aspect is the indoor part - you can have clean water from an outdoor communal well, instead. Similarly 'store bought bread' is food, but so is home made bread. I just cannot work out if the commenter was being deliberately obtuse or really misunderstood?

> you can have clean water from an outdoor communal well, instead

Have you ever considered that this is not the case in most of the world? Resources are far from evenly distributed.

It is not by chance that the availability of indoor plumbing correlates to increase in life expectancy. It's nice that I can just open the tap and clean water comes out, but it's also a lot more sanitary than people carrying and storing buckets around.

>I just cannot work out if the commenter was being deliberately obtuse or really misunderstood?

Same here. Comparing the savings of a few steps towards a light switch to clean water and cheap food is intellectual dishonesty at best and severe ignorance at worse.

The whole point is that they were not comparing anything to clean water or cheap food. They were comparing something to water that doesn't need to be moved inside manually and bread that doesn't have to be made at home.

Neither of which is needed to live. Both of which are conveniences.

It's not though, please reread the comment above. Water brought and stored in buckets from an outdoor communal well would not be nearly as clean or as plentiful. There's a reason we have indoor plumbing and convenience is just one of them. And I can't believe I have to explain this here.

You seem to be intentionally missing the point. Change my earlier examples to remote controls for your TV if you prefer.

Convenience does, absolutely, have strong value and can be meaningful improvement to one's life. Generalized voice control is a major and meaningful convenience - even if it's currently early and might have some problems - because it drastically changes how we can interact with our environments.

Sure, we can short sell the case as "not needing to walk to a light switch", but even then if it's dark, my arms are full, and the path to the switch is littered with children's toys then that's a meaningful improvement to be able to say "Hey google, turn on the living room light".

Consider cases of people with severe MS or who otherwise can't easily walk. Sure, they could hook up a remote control and keep it near them, or get one of those stupid clapper things, but even then that only works for the lights.

A generalized voice assistant gives me control over my house, from anywhere my voice can be heard, and not only executes my actions, but can give me realtime feedback and data. Best of all, this requires no special skills on my part, just a willingness to talk to the damned thing loudly and clearly with simple words.

Can it act as a wire tap? Of course it can. My store bought bread can also be contaminated (right now in my area there is a huge contamination issue with eggs and lettuce), my indoor plumbing can burst and flood my house, so on. It's a new technology, it has kinks and flaws, and we're currently in the early adopter curve of it moving towards the initial disappointment trend.

> Change my earlier examples to remote controls for your TV if you prefer.

My disagreement with you is precisely because you consider them equally interchangeable.

To me, putting those two on the same level is actually offensive.

If data on the increased life expectancy isn’t persuasive enough, I suggest you speak with someone with no access to basic sanitation. Ask them what they think of this comparison.

I don’t get why it had to go to the cloud and back.

Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device, and because doing it in the cloud makes training and improving it easier. The “wake word” is local, which is why it is constrained to a few choices.

I suspect we are only a few years away from being able to do a slightly inferior version using local processing, or a private cloud (already possible today when there is a market). I would probably opt for that, but use Alexa in rooms already already untrusted.

> Because the computational requirements of good speech rec exceed what you would build into a $100 device,

I have difficulty believing this. We had good speech recognition on <$1000 devices 10 years ago.

For unrestricted language, without training?

Yes to the former, pretty much for the latter - the "training" I recall was less than a minute long and consisted of repeating one or two example sentences, hardly anything that would be an adoption impediment to devices like an Echo. The resulting voice recognition worked, in my experience, better than that on modern Android phones.

I'm pretty skeptical of this. Apple has a pretty good commitment to privacy, one that is costing them on the AI front, and as far as I can tell they still upload Siri audio to the cloud for processing. If this was easy to do 10 years ago, I think Apple would at least offer as an option.

It's the reason everyone says Siri sucks - they do all the processing for her on the device, not the cloud.

Siri does more processing locally than Alexa does, but does upload to the cloud, and depends on the cloud, both for analyzing the statement and for accomplishing it. It can then execute local actions. The info uploaded to the cloud includes essentially all the relevant data for the query, so it doesn't particularly help with privacy -- it's just not the raw waveform.

But Siri sucks for MANY reasons, and not just technical ones. It does worse processing but also does worse cloud integration, and now vs. alexa, has a far worse ecosystem around it (alexa "skills" are pretty awesome, and trivial to create)

Pretty sure this isn't true. Siri won't work for me if I don't have an Internet connection.

That's not why people I know say Siri sucks: for us it's because it can't look up as much info as Amazon or Google. It understands the query, it just can't do as much with it.

Because it makes the voice recognition vastly better. Have you ever noticed that Google can get words correct in navigational searches, even if it only sounds like the name?

We are a long way from being able to do that on $100 devices.

Nobody is going to disagree that it's useful and hard to live without. That's why the big 3 or so tech companies know you'll sell your soul to have it. And yes,I and you should disable location services on your phone when not needed.

Does controlling your home need sending data to an external server thought? Has no one come up with a competing product where all the processing is done in the machine itself?

You can get voice control without Alexa.