Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec::In an interview with Bloomberg, Dave Limp said that he “absolutely” believes that Amazon will soon start charging a subscription fee for Alexa
Alexa is so bad though. Who’s going to pay for that?
“By the way, you can now pay for Alexa AI option if you want me to reply in a slightly smarter way, but I will still cut you off with ads and other useless things. To activate AlexaAI say activate”
“Welcome to the PiHole, Alexa.”
Just made the switch to NextDNS. For $2/month I get a lot of the same features but also on my phone when not on WiFi. Still love my pihole though!
“No”
“I heard ‘activate’. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there’s no way we’re letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it.”
To cancel, please log on to the website because there’s no way we’re letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it.
Unless you’re in California
*to the same degree of intelligence as you’ve previously experienced. (Ps if you don’t we’re making Alexa have a room temp IQ)
Guess we’ll find out when they finally pull the trigger
Mine can’t ever seem to tell the difference between on and off if there is any sound in my house
I use “turn on ___” and “kill ___”. Much more reliable matches.
Do you change the names of all your devices to people names? The living room lamp is Steve, the bedroom fan is Maryanne…
Good to see people already training ai to kill.
Still better than Siri …
Siri was always shit but somehow managed to devolve even further lately. I never trusted her to do more than than turning lights on or off but now this shit happens:
Me: Siri, turn off the lights in the living room
Siri: OKAY, WHICH ROOM? BATHROOM, BEDROOM, KITCHEN, HALLWAY, LIVING ROOM?
Imagine living in a mansion with this cunt
I use Google to turn on my TV by saying ‘turn on TV’, easily done. But then when I ask it to adjust volume it asks me which TV… I only have one TV online and it had just turned it on.
Jeez… at least Siri has an excuse to some degree because of Apples privacy pledge
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It’ll eventually be very affordable.
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off… but noooooooooooo
I have home assistant, but have not heard anything good about rhasspy. Just want to control lights and be able to use it to play music and set timers. That being said I run home assistant right now and can control it with Alexa and Siri but… I would like local only
I have that with just my phone, using Wiz lights and ITEEE. It’s the only home automation I even have because it’s the only one I found that doesn’t necessarily need a special base station like an Alexa or Google Home.
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Yes, and you can use run a language model like Pygmalion Al locally on koboldcpp and have a naughty AI chat as well. Or non sexual roleplay
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And where would one look for these sexy sexy AI models, so I can avoid them, of course…
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Which models do you think beat Pygmalion for erotic roleplay? Curious for research haha
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Oh I see, sorry for the repeat question. Thanks!
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GPT4All is a neat way to run an AI chat bot on your local hardware.
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it does have a very funny name though
In five to ten years, imo, AI will be everywhere and may even replace the need for mobile Internet connections in terms of looking up information.
You’re probably right, but I kinda hope you’re wrong.
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Call it paranoia if you want. Mainly I don’t have faith in our economic system to deploy the technology in a way that doesn’t eviscerate the working class.
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I do wonder how much of those voice assistants could run on-device. Most of what I use Bixby for (I know. I KNOW.) is setting timers. I think simple things like that can run entirely on the phone. It’s got a shocking amount of processing in it.
It’s the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I’m hopeful they’ll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you’re on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.
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AI is being touted as the solution to everything these days. It’s really not, and we are going to find that out the hard way.
I get what you’re saying, but voice assistants are one of the main places LLMs belong.
Yes, but so much more. An actually useful assistant that could draft emails, set reminders appropriately, create automations, etc. would be worth A LOT of money to me.
I think if there ends up actually being a version of AI that is privacy focused and isn’t screwing over creators it’d be so much less controversial. Also, everyone (including me) is really, really fucking sick of hearing about it all of the time in the same way that everyone is/was sick of hearing about the blockchain. As in: “Bro your taco stand needs AI/the blockchain.”
You wouldn’t need any kind of special training for this. Just the ability to do simple things like make calendar appointments, draft emails/responses, and set reminders based on time/locations/etc. It really doesn’t seem very complicated but as far as I know no one has figured out how to do it yet. All the existing “assistants” are so bad that I don’t even bother trying to use them anymore. They can’t even do something simple like turning on a light with any degree of reliability.
Hey that’s only because Amazon, Google and Microsoft (et al) just doesn’t have the Money to Make it good!!
So what about 9.99 a month?
4.99 if you pay up front for a year?
Euh, or how much can you cough up, like for a year or at least for Q4, I’m literally on a bad roll here.
I’m not going to buy into a subscription model for something I’ve already paid for. This subscription model crap is complete bullshit.
We even tried to do it with heated seats recently. Like install heated seats in your car, but disable them in software. It’s crazy that companies think they can get away with this.
I think there’s a massive difference between unlocking a feature that’s already there and requires no maintenance and a cloud-based service that demands 24/7 uptime and constant developer support, as well as ongoing feature development
While I agree with you, they are 💯 going to get away with it, because your average consumer just doesn’t care.
If IBM actually manages to convert COBOL into Java like they’re advertising, they’ll end up killing their own cash cow
So much still runs on COBOL
It’s not even A.I. either
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I never got the appeal of those things even ignoring how their design is the antithesis of privacy. It just seems dumb to talk to the computer box, like it’s a thing to talk to when it’s just a microphone and software. I simply prefer direct, precise, and silent control of devices
It’s good for hands/device free control. Setting timers while cooking by simply saying “set a timer” or controlling lights from across the room without fiddling with a phone or remote.
Set a timer’s and set an alarm’s the only two I ever found useful personally. I stopped using google assistant because it just legitimately stopped understanding me correctly and I got frustrated with it.
It’s very sci fi. Star Trek amongst many others from the 80s. If you are old enough then you would remember that this was the stuff of fantasy. I can see why it appeals to people with disabilities and possibly kids for homework or something. But I am 1000 percent with you on the privacy part. No thanks.
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
It’s like charging you for cable and then shoving ads down your throat.
It’s like charging you for Prime Video and then shoving ads down your throat.
It’s like RAAAAIIAAIIIN on your wedding day
That’s often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
…charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
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Yep, used to be much better. There was SO much potential with it too. I wish there was a Smart Speaker with integration into ChatGPT. Id love to stand in the shower and ask it shit
You can do this with a Siri shortcut.
It still falls short because LLMs aren’t smart, they’re just approximately not wrong most of the time. I thought it would be a lot cooler than it actually is.
Building your own dystopia I see…
Not following
Yeah, they’re all pretty disappointing. I’d love to have something that feels like how movies portray digital assistants. Movie assistants never misunderstand you or say “I’m sorry, I couldn’t recognize your voice”. I’ve mostly used the Google one and it’s so bad at doing what I feel like is feasible even with inaccuracy.
Eg, I’ve tried to tell my assistant to like a song that was currently playing on YTM but could not find a voice command that worked (and some commands backfired by making it skip to the next song). I’ve had very poor success with getting assistant to cast something to my Chromecast with my voice. It sometimes works, but it fails or gets it wrong so often that it’s not worth the time.
Sometimes I use it for rewinding (e.g., “ok google, rewind 30 seconds”) because many apps don’t have granular rewind buttons and tracking on the track bar is way too inaccurate. But lol, it’s so slow! It takes a few seconds to figure out what I said (so I have to ask it to rewind more than I wish) and it seems every app is unoptimized for rewinding, as it usually takes several seconds of loading.
It can’t really do any kind of research either. You basically can just ask it to google things and it sometimes is able to extract the meaningful part from simple questions. It’s a far way from how Hollywood thinks a digital assistant will work.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you’re leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
Let me in your house and I’ll observe it for you for less money
Google did that with Nest Aware years ago as well. It’s super annoying.
Something tells me that they’ll still listen to you for free.
Their using the public to train AI. Then charging the public for the AI it trained.
Now you know why it’s called a smart device.
can’t be that smart if it’s using me for training
Yes?
I’ll happily join in bashing Amazon for plenty of reasons, but training an AI is a step that adds significant value to the material. Just like any other product that is an effort that people are willing to pay for.
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They thought people would be like “Alexa, but me a ton of shit on Amazon” but people just use it for timers and the weather
“Alexa, release the Roombas”
30 roombas make their way out from under my bed
Yeah, can you imagine trusting that thing to buy stuff for you? Bit scary, actually.
They had those “re-order product” physical buttons for a while which you were supposed to glue to your washing machine so you could reorder when your detergent ran out.
Besides legal issues (at least over here all they could do is put things in your shopping cart) apparently the primary customers of those buttons were hardware hackers, turning them into all kinds of stuff.
I already don’t use it, you don’t have to sell me on it.
Oh no!
I’ll just have to install a weather app and use the timer on my stove instead of using Alexa.
Exactly. I never did find another use for that thing. Had one 2014-2022. It didn’t survive my last move. Was voted off the island.
I use Alexa as a way to use an old speaker system. I wouldn’t pay to use any “smart” speaker systems. They are pretty dumb and I’ve already paid once
Ok. I’ll be the weirdo. If it’s actually useful, I would pay for it.
Not if it’s just the parlor trick that it currently is.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I’m concerned. All of it lives squarely in “huh…neat” territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
This is why I’m so confused by Amazon’s approach. I know they’ve already sunk millions if not billions of dollars into this, so why has the user experience not improved in the last 8 years?
I’m not going to buy things with my voice when just getting the lights to turn off or music to play can be an infuriating endeavor. Speech recognition has stagnated.
The third party integrations are just so clunky too. They could have made money by selling licenses to businesses in order to access the service, but again, they haven’t improved that experience at all.
The “Alexa, let me talk to dominos.” or “Alexa, ask LG to turn off the TV” is just stupidly cumbersome. Why can’t you set up preferred providers? I don’t have to say “ask Spotify to play music” I just say “play music”, so we know it’s possible. It would be trivial to implement other preferred service providers compared to the overall scale of Alexa.
I don’t know if you’re in IT at all, but the really crazy thing is that as half baked as Alexa stuff feels…a ton of AWS’s offerings feel the exact same way. Their marketing material is great, and I do believe their engineers are passionate and have the right intentions. But none of it feels “finished”. It all feels like an elaborate beta test. Things don’t work, documentation is out of date or just plain wrong, it’s impossible to get actual expert support from Amazon directly.
AWS is their biggest money maker and even that is a cobbled together, confusing pile half the time. Sometimes feels like everything is a house of cards.
