Amazon is upgrading its decade-old Alexa voice assistant with generative AI and plans to charge a monthly subscription fee to offset the cost of the technology.
Ah yes, time to pay to have your conversations recorded. Had to happen eventually.
If there was any reason to believe they wouldn’t be selling data anyways, making it a paid thing would make it seem more trustworthy, at least. If it’s free, then you have to assume it’s generating profit through other means.
Though even if that means of profit is from people using it to make Amazon orders, I still don’t trust it because most of the time when I do order something on Amazon, I need to look through a bunch of sketchy results to find one that looks trustworthy. I wouldn’t trust a voice assistant to pick a better option, in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if the voice assistant is specifically designed to select inventory they have more trouble moving.
Wait I thought Alexa was a way to make money off people by making it easy to order stuff?
and now you can pay for that privilege, along with paying them to harvest your data. I guess the “If its free you are the product” no longer stands
If I remember correctly, that turned out to not work since people apparently don’t like ordering via voice interface. Doing it via an app or website tends to be faster and more convenient.
I wonder if ‘basic’ Alexa will stay. At home we find it genuinely useful for setting timers and alarms etc. my wife has an obsession with the weather and is always asking for weather info for our area - she doesn’t drive and works in an office so it’s beyond me.
We have Samsung phones so could resort to Bixby.
The only other thing we use Alexa for is playing music although my Sonos system has it’s own voice control for that, although I suspect that may go in a couple of years when they stop supporting my kit, it’s five years old now.
I’d rather not resort to Google.
Look into Home Assistant.
I certainly will- thank you!
None of my techy friends use Alexa, and the people I know that do almost certainly aren’t open to paying a subscription.
