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My girlfriend uses a wheelchair. She is physically incapable of turning on and off most of her lights, meaning if someone leaves a light on, she's stuck with that light left on until someone can turn it off. She can sort of use her thermostat, but not terribly effectively. Alexa has been an accessibility gamechanger for her, and I dislike kneejerk reactions like this one about as much as I dislike the fact that accessibility is so integrally tied into the Alexa ecosystem such that you've got this devil's bargain of increased accessibility and increased privacy loss. You can't have one without the other. I'm blind and in a similar boat, but at least I can tie all my appliances into my Home Assistant instance, and never have to worry about being stuck out of reach of a keyboard or phone. Even so, as a blind person, finding accessible weather websites is an absolute pain in the ass. I can get daily forecasts, no problem, but sometimes I need an hourly forecast to plan bus commutes, and nothing beats "Alexa, what's the hourly forecast at 4 PM" for getting a quick answer without having to check half a dozen sites searching for actual textual information vs. a damned infographic or radar display. I'd love to build her a Mycroft-based setup, but she doesn't need a cluster of RPis and USB microphones hanging around on her desk, and even so that ecosystem isn't ready yet. I say that as someone who literally spent days piecing together a HassOS Mycroft addon and hardware setup that barely hears his commands from a few feet away and triggers all sorts of false positives, and even so I don't think its weather skill does hourly forecasts. I own an Alexa as well, but it stays unplugged unless I need it. TLDR: It sucks, but don't just classify all Alexa owners as dumb and deserving of victimhood. Edit: Rereading your comment, I see that you don't really believe that. Apologies for the kneejerk reaction of my own, but I've seen this reaction enough from folks who do that I was finally tempted to speak out about it. I really wish there was an accessibility-oriented privacy-focused voice assistant, or at least, I wish I could pay more to Amazon to opt out of their more invasive practices. |