[robmiller]

My soon-to-be 8 year old son was devastated and ran into his room crying when he asked Alexa what the notification was and she described his hoverboard present just delivered to the front porch. Could we have anticipated that? Maybe. The surprise was the ruining of the surprise instead of the surprise itself.

[dylan604]

That actually made me chuckle. That's definitely not a scenario one would have thought of in advance. I wonder if the "Item is a gift" checkbox would have any bearing on how Alexa describes a delivery? Hey Alexa, hint hint...

[AlotOfReading]

There's a couple of settings for it. One disables the item reading entirely, one disables names for things marked as gifts or items ordered around major holidays.

[quantified]

Alexa is a box, not a butler. Discretion is not part of the makeup.

[dylan604]

It's a box made by programmers to be used by consumers. Programmers can make it do things that would make it even better and more useful to the consumers. As another comment has already indicated, these programmers have already taken this into consideration and provide the options.

Not really sure where you thought anyone was confused by a small box being a butler.

[quantified]

> The surprise was the ruining of the surprise instead of the surprise itself.

Not confused, surprised. A hallmark of a butler is discretion. I hope you didn’t read that I was contradicting you or disagreeing? “Don’t spoil the suprise by divulging the nature of the package to the intended recipient” is beyond Alexa’s programming. For a butler, it wouldn’t even be a checkbox option, it would go without saying.

[Handytinge]

It worries me how ubiqutous the idea of letting your single digit age children talk to a "voice assistant" that analyses and stores their words has become. It also concerns me that people describe this thing as a "she", humanising it.

[wenc]

Just curious, maybe I'm not understanding this well, but why was your son crying? Was a hoverboard not what he expected?

I'm thinking back to when I was a child -- I wouldn't normally cry if a surprise was ruined. The ruining of a surprise would not have been a big deal. But I might have cried if I hadn't gotten what I'd hoped for.