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Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp
(www.reuters.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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I'd pay $20 or $30 a year, especially if it meant they'd actually, like, improve the service (which has been almost 100% the same for me for the last 4 years or so).
But $60 to $120 would make me move elsewhere
If you have an Amazon Echo (or whatever they call it) in your home, then you already pay them by letting it spy on you, your family, and any guests that come over. Even if they improved the service (they won't), why would you pay $20 or $30 a year for it?
What info are they getting from me telling it to turn on the lights?
The service it provides I would expect to either pay a reasonable marginal fee, or do everything locally.
If the Home Assistant voice Appliance stuff can get its shit together and I can get one for reasonable prices I will move to that (or something like it) instead.
More than just "ripcord likes to have lights on at 6:00 pm," surprisingly.
It knows what brand lights you have, who's interacting with it, who you might be with if anyone speaks in the background, what times and days you're typically home... it'll even infer your mood based on how your voice sounds.
Unfortunately, Amazon isn't required to disclose every bit of personal data they take from you, so only so much is known about it. If you consider though that data collection is a new, multi-billion dollar industry, and how effective hundreds of PhDs in data science and social-engineering can be with near infinite resources to develop tools to extract as much information from these devices as possible, it starts becoming more believable.
Here's a good paper I found: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10920