Amazon has failed to make Alexa profitable thus far.
        • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          11·
          2 months ago

          It’s fun and I recommend it, but I’m hesitant to say you can ‘replace’ your existing systems with it. You’ll probably mostly be able do what you want to do, but we’re still in the enthusiast stage and there’s going to be annoyances and frustrations. Home assistant is also one of the easier things to setup as far as self hosting goes, but you’re going to pick up some skills on the path to getting it working.

        • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          How far away is the Home Assistant Voice Preview from what you’re looking for?

          It doesn’t plug directly into the wall but instead uses a USB C cable (that you provide). Other than this, mine can answer questions, search the internet, turn things on and off, play music via Spotify, Jellyfin, etc. Tell me about the state of stuff in Home Assistant (temps in rooms, how the solar is doing, what’s on my shopping list and can add things, etc).

          It requires you already have Home Assistant set up but it is a pretty good experience so long as you’re willing to do some amount of tinkering to make it your own.

          Like other comments say it’s not general public ready but it’s pretty close and costs $69.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    2 months ago

    Alexa already periodically makes “suggestions” that are annoying to disable if you misspeak.

    Counting down until it starts demanding credit cards in order to function. Maybe as a form of “identity check”, as that’s been a popular excuse to collect payment information.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Got 8 Google Minis around the house, mostly ceiling mount. First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        🎵I got a shotgun, and here’s the plot,

        Takin’ Minis out with a flurry of buck shot,

        Boom, boom, boom! Yeah, I was gunnin’,

        And then you look, all you see is Googles runnin’,

        And fallin’ and yellin’ and pushin’ and screamin’,

        And cussin’, I stepped back and I kept bustin’🎶

  • SoupBrick@pawb.socialEnglish
    13·
    2 months ago

    *Amazon testing public backlash before shoving ads into your conversations with Alexa+

    FTFY

  • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    It won’t be long until the LLMs are trained with for ad-RAG

    While each conversation happens a second model will scan it, send the contents to a vector search, return as embedding and a score, then give those outputs silently to the conversing model.

    You do need to train/fine tune the model to not mention that it received the ad and subtly push it.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      Actually, now that I think about it, you don’t even need to tell the model about the ad, you just weight some of the input tokens with the ad embedding and it naturally biases towards talking about that brand.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Duh. This is the AI wet dream. Ads won’t have discrete patterns that can be filtered. The LLM will deliver content specific garbage as if it were a genuine answer to a query. It will just bias towards ads and deliver the ad Ina different personalized manner each time. For as much as everyone likes to bitch about AI. This may be the golden age. It probably just gets worse from here.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Musk on the other hand already experiments on adding ideology and use such bots (makes as regular users) on social media.

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    Alexa has ads since the beginning and I can’t imagine that would change just because they are replacing the backend with AI. The first time Echo wasted my time trying to selling me something in my own home was also the last time. I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with that.

  • BeBopALouie@lemmy.caEnglish
    62·
    2 months ago

    You’re still using Alexa? Unplugged our listening er pod device about a week after we got it.

    • takeda@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      Same, I got Alexa (the first one with a good speaker) when attended a sales event of another company. I set it up, but after seeing its network activity even when no one was home I shut it down and didn’t use it again.

      I don’t understand why people don’t feel weirded out by having an always on listening device.

        • PancakesCantKillMe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Likely b/c your comment reads like you are stating OP is using it when you probably meant a more general public “you”? That’d be my guess. I think most, if not all, here would agree to not ever use alexa, that bitch.

          • BeBopALouie@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            That’s a them problem. I did not say it was OP. Ass/u/me.

            Based on the your still “insert whatever here”.