Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
“How much ya gunna pay for what you used to get for free…” Tom Petty, Last DJ. Underrated tune about the demise of free and independent radio and radio DJs.
We’ve learned with assistants we mostly need them to… turn off the lights and play music. I don’t want to have a conversation with my smart speaker, I don’t care about it being hooked up to an LLM. As soon as I can’t turn off the lights or play music it goes in the bin.
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Don’t throw it out… without first looking if you can flash a different firmware or somehow else reuse the hardware.
Unfortunately echo dots are very hard to repurpose. I have tried.
I see. There is some info from 2017 that looks promising, but seems like nobody had the proper incentive to fully root them… except maybe some Russian actors. Let’s hope some “right to repair” gets to unlock them for legitimate owners too.
That would be great. It’s pretty amazing hardware. It was very heavily subsidized, I paid 20 bucks for them IIRC. I’m sure the BOM (bill of materials) alone would have been higher than that.
I would actually. It’s not even good at turning off the lights. Half the time it turns off the wrong light, starts playing music I don’t want or other crap.
Having better recognition and the ability to actually answer a question I ask it, or to tell it to do things proactively would be amazing.