Technology

Alexa was never supposed to make money by itself. It was supposed to do two things, collect information and lower the barrier to buying things.

They must have either collected enough data to lower the value of collecting any more, or they have realized that people got over the novelty of asking Alexa to order more dog food.

My guess is the latter, because buying anything from Amazon now requires 15 minutes of research to make sure it's actually what you want and not at some ridiculous marked up price. I wouldn't trust Alexa to pick the best result on the first try.

Between inserting ads into Amazon Video, scaling back on fast delivery, and this it looks like Amazon has maxed out their growth and are scaling back on their loss leaders that were used to get where they are.

LMAO, let me get this straight. You want me to pay for the privilege of being spied on. We really did jump timelines. Fuck all these greedy companies.

I wouldn't be able to find a use for Alexa if they were paying me $10/month to use it.

With how garbage Alexa is now, there is no way in hell I'm paying them anything. I'd love a refund for the three useless dots I have now.

Home Assistant will always be free.

Seeing as how I've never used it for free ...

I wouldn't put one of those amazon spy devices in my house even if they paid me. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay to use one.

If my Alexa stopped working because it needed a subscription it’s going straight in the trash.

Neat, lots more e-waste incoming

This is going to flop.

A big appeal of assistant devices was the barrier to entry was extremely low. So low that they could be purchased in multiples and given as gifts and were easy for the recipients to set up and use. So low that Alexa integration was common on many types of devices at many pricepoints.

Setting one up and being asked to pay a monthly sub might not go so well. People are getting burnt out of constant subscriptions bleeding them dry. I really don't know how many would be willing to pay for something that was once free and was basically taken away from them.

~~this is also not including the growing amount of people that are goddamn sick and tired of hearing about AI constantly being shoved into everything~~

I never used to understand why Picard and the crew got upset with Data's long winded explanations until I got a Google Home. Now I understand very well.

Two things:

• our alexa units are fine. We manage a half-dozen bulbs and a set-top box.
• if they want a subscription to keep doing that, HomeAssistant becomes the top job on the queue.

That's it.

People are missing the point. This was ALWAYS the plan. Get Alexa in hundreds of thousands of homes and get everyone to used to using it. Than charge money.

Even if only a quarter of the users pay, they'll make a ton of money.

Using free users to train the paid version and then flipping the switch on enshitification of the "free" tier to force need for premium.

I am quite interested in what Google and Apple will do about their voice assistant devices. The New Siri appears to be quite useful, if it can actually do what we saw in WWDC. But Apple hasn't mentioned anything about the HomePods.

Google Home/Nest has been stuck with the dumb version of Google Assistant, and has been getting worse. It has no integration with any other Google services, and there was no mention of Home/Nest in Google I/O.

If either HomePod or Nest gets released without requiring subscriptions, I might move away from Alexa devices.

How long till there's a solid project to gut Alexa devices and run them from pis arduinos and pico's?