I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal, though it's funny. It was only a £1.99 a month and there was a 7-day free trial anyway. Amazon say they emailed about it as confirmation. I think the issue it shows is how you can't trust voice control for anything important. It's just a bad interface for buying stuff particularly. If I am buying some dog food, I search dog food, glance over the options, check prices and delivery dates and reviews then plump for one. Thinking of doing the same by voice drains me.
"Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow". Could that work? Would I trust that it had worked, if Alexa just said "ok" without me running off to a computer to check the order details and defeating the whole object? More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.
(I actually tried that sentence just now. Alexa remained in a stunned silence.)
> I don't think this particular incident is any kind of big deal
Entering into a subscription with no knowledge of that, let alone any up-front information about price or other terms, is very scummy behavior. The after-the-fact email attempts to claw back a moral high ground, but it's not difficult to see it for what it is. This combines the convenience of a smart speaker with the rapacity of a cold caller who already has your credit card number. It's thinly disguised fraud, and pernicious.
I doubt anyone would be happy with "Alexa, what's the weather?" entering them into an unannounced dollar-a-day contract with The Weather Company, or if asking about soccer scores got them automatically hooked up with a $7.99 Sportsball Channel add-on to their cable bill.
Voice control is mostly pretty disappointing. Setting an alarm, playing an album, getting a quick weather forecast? OK.
But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like when driving--not so much. For example, with podcasts, I find I really need to pre-populate a playlist and by and large I find trying to totally control my phone by voice is very hit and miss.
Voice assistants have gotten marginally better over the years. But I really wouldn't miss them much if they all went away tomorrow. The vision was/is that they could match at least a marginally competent personal assistant over the phone. And they're nowhere even near the ballpark.
Only if the album you want is titled in English (or some recognised language and with actual words).
I listen to a lot of music that have unpronounceable song and album titles. Hell, even artists, how could I ever tell a voice assistant to play "STRGTHS by SHXCXCHCXSH"? An extreme example but not too far from some of the top 10 recently played stuff on my Spotify: "sch.mefd 2" by Autechre, "JNSN CODE GL16 / spl47" an album/EP by the same Autechre, "Hygh 2k12" by SCNTST.
It's a technology on that uncanny valley of working and simplifying some use-cases, and frustrating enough for some edge cases that you end up not trusting it, in my case making me avoid it.
Even for some basic alarms/timers it can be frustrating when it misinterprets your accent and sets timers for 50 minutes instead of 15. The pain of having to fix the failure and then re-add a timer/alarm is enough to push me away.
I use Alexa's announce capability to tell my wife to answer the phone--but what I actually tell her to say is in her native language, not in English. The announcement works fine but my phone tries to render it as English text. Never the same thing twice.
And she definitely does the 50/15 thing to me, although generally the other way around. Everything from 30/13 to 90/19 is vulnerable to being misunderstood. My wife has a lot more trouble with it--she learned her first word of English at 43 and so she still has a fair accent.
In many cases it doesn’t matter even if the word is in English. When choosing an audiobook, I’ve had to make some leaps in phonetics to get Alexa to understand certain words in the title.
> Hey Siri, start the last podcast I was listening to in Overcast.
> I can't let you do that, Dave. Overcast has done its best to set up a shortcut, but you need to say exactly or else I'm punishing you with the enunciation of useless web searches.
> But something more complicated where you really would like good voice control--like driving--not so much.
I’ve tried Alexa, Google, and Siri multiple times over the years while driving and it’s just embarrassing how over hyped all of them are and yet simple questions which a human could potentially easily answer in seconds doing a search (if not driving of course), but none of them even get close.
- How far away is that storm?
- How many miles to the state line?
- What timezone is Omaha in?
- Where’s the closest gas station that has diesel?
The others really ought to be voice searchable, but the diesel one would need to be timely in my area, where a couple of places have not had diesel available for several days.
>You can easily search how far away is that storm?
Pull up radar on Weather Underground (and/or look at the hourly forecast) and you should have a pretty good idea.
Whether or not that's the best example, the point is that there are a bunch of things I might want to know/do while driving that I can't look up without pulling off the road someplace. And even if I could theoretically look them up by voice, it would probably be an exercise in frustration to try to do so.
It's an interesting example because the question is very easy for a person to understand but giving an actual answer would take some time, but you can invert those for an AI.
But at least a human would give a reasonable answer, like "looks like at least thirty miles" or even just "I don't know". Your phone will instead say, oops, I didn't quite get that, try again later ( goodbye chime ). Which is terrible.
I tried using Google Assistant a few years ago and it was so frustrating in some dumb ways.
A notable example was when I tried using it to make a call. I told it to call my wife, by name, and it couldn't understand her name at all. So I said "call my wife" and it asked who my wife is. I couldn't answer with voice, because it still didn't understand her name. But it did give me a popup to select her from my address book. So I did and the popup went away... No call. So I tell it "call my wife" and it replies "who is your wife?".
I had the same problem funny enough! My wife has an Irish name that Google cannot pronounce (Alexa is much better in this one area) so I can't message her unless I try to match the mispronunciation (which I balk at out of self-respect) but it allows you to set nicknames for people. So I gave my wife, the nickname 'my wife'. I had to use the UI to do that, and even then, do I really trust Google to message the right person?
>That's because you interact with it as though it is a person
Well, that was sort of the pitch and it's certainly implied by "virtual/voice assistant." Certainly Amazon wasn't pitching Alexa as a voice-operated kitchen timer. To be honest, I'm probably better with them now because I know they mostly don't work but can be used for some simple tasks for which I know an incantation that mostly gives me the result I want.
Fair enough, but anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch. All I saw was an always on microphone with a line to Apple, Google or Amazon and for me that was reason enough to bar that stuff from crossing the threshold at the front door here.
>anybody that knows more about this stuff than your average consumer was likely quite skeptical of that pitch.
That probably was--or should have been the case. But it's one of those things that seems like it would be pretty straightforward. After all, if a fairly young child can do something, it seems like a computer wired up to the Internet could. And in fact, voice recognition has gotten quite good--at least for English speakers without a strong accent. But actually carrying on a conversation in natural language is a really hard problem, even if children can do so from a fairly young age.
> order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow
That's 2 continuous axes and one discrete option. What if the cheapest one is the worst reviewed? What if the most expensive one is the best reviewed? What if the middle price is only slightly above the worst review? What if there's a clearly cheapest, best option that is only available in 2 days?
How do you "trust" an answer to this? What does a single choice answer even mean?
I'm not sure I'd trust a shopkeeper to make this decision for me, as they could easily rationalise not telling me about the cheap and great option if it's not in stock, or falling more on the quality than the price because they make more margin. And Amazon is in this position on this one.
I can see a market for "Alexa, order me cheap dogfood for tomorrow", but pretty much anything more complex than that I just don't think people would give the decision to a biased third party to make for them, let alone a non-human one.
I think it's almost achievable if you say 'cheapest with 4 or more stars and delivery tomorrow'. Problem remains that cheapest could be the smallest pack size or cheapest per pound, and Amazon is not good at the latter anyway.
It is, but it means engineering your formulations carefully before giving them to the computer. Computers taking things literally isn't new, but there's normally less on the line when we do it.
Also I would imagine that as often as not there would be an opportunity for human judgement. Maybe there's a _much_ cheaper one at 3.98 stars, or the 4+ star and next day delivery options are 3x more expensive than the next available option. In both of these cases a human with the right intentions would likely stop and do something different.
It's a pretty big edge case. In my family we also got an Alexa for my aging grandmother who was already shaky on computer literacy and developed serious motor/vision problems preventing her from using a computer. She learned just enough about Siri and Alexa to make phone calls, play music, and change the channel. There are definitely more old/disabled people out there for whom voice-activated assistants are not just a fun luxury gadget but are essential to performing everyday tasks like calling family members. We had to monitor her account to make sure she wasn't signing up for things without her understanding.
It’s disgusting that these types of devices have potentially an obvious use as a accessibility device, and yet, that’s completely being ignored in lieu of mass-market sales gimmicks.
We need an ADA that has teeth in the digital age. This is like a brick and mortar store building a ramp into their store for the convenience of people who can walk, and making it an inch too narrow for a wheelchair.
Real corporate social responsibility would be to tackle some of this low hanging fruit in their own area of expertise. But instead, everyone just promises to buy some carbon credits by 2030.
I’m not saying that Amazon should simply avoid harming people with disabilities. I’m going one step further and saying that they should actively help them.
Voice assistants are an obvious solution for people who can’t use other input devices because disability. Yet, Amazon has designed the device as a solution for people who choose not to use other input devices out of mild inconvenience, without any thought to accommodating the former.
They could improve people’s lives with very little marginal effort, yet, they choose not to. This is illegal when you’re building accommodations in the physical world, but sadly, mostly legal in the digital world.
Not really: that person could have easily assumed that she "did not need to own a computer, nor know how to use one", as she may have easily assumed that no random "rambling" uttered into a computerized microphone could ever trigger expenses. It's a justifiable expectation.
How was the account setup in first place? Did she go to store, pick up device. Go home and read it her information and credit card number to create an account?
Update.. I tried just "order dog food" and it picked a decent choice based off my order history and then I could have said "buy this". So to be fair (with a device with a screen) it performed quite well.
There are plenty of ways to make the interface very usable and reliable. Fixating on the voice UI is absolutely the wrong way to see it. The real problem is that your "assistant" doesn't actually work for you.
> More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.
It's a recommendation engine at that point, so what I assume it will do is buy you the products that Amazon is pushing or that have paid to be recommended. Does Alexa handle the website's small print to the effect of "there may be other vendors selling this product for a lower price than the vendor we're recommending."
If you have FireTV, then I'd be happy to use voice to do searches to show on it (the same way you can tell Alex to "show me comedy movies" or "search for X on Youtube" and have it show up on a FireTV device), but yeah, I can't imagine I'll ever use it to order something. Reordering something I've ordered before maybe, as long as I can be sure it will actually re-order the exact same thing.
> "Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow"
This is Amazon we’re talking about. The cheapest best reviewed dog food probably has 4K excellent reviews saying it’s the best cheap coat hangar anyone has ever seen.
Short version: Alexa supports third parties extending it with "Skills" apps which may be commercial. Paid functionality may be enabled via verbal confirmation via an in-app purchase[1]. Paid functionality may be one-time or recurring.
Her sister caught the corresponding email just before the paid subscription would have started. The documentation says developers must mark skills targeted at kids and those aren't eligible to have this flow enabled.
edit to add -- that was all presented without comment. But having a device that can start up a recurring subscription if anyone says "yes" to one prompt exist at all, and having the toggle for the feature on by default and in options is in the "no thanks" column for me.
I’m more shocked that the developer of a “skill” that says the holy Mary makes $2 a month and has 10,000 users. That’s a sweet return for work that on the scale of copy-pasting the Alexa getting started tutorial.
People like what they like. Religion, games, tv shows-- people will spend huge amounts on all these things if they find value in it. That value isn't always apparent to others. Also I really wonder how many of those users don't know they're paying for a subscription
I remember downloading a digital clock widget for my ipad (for some reason the only native clock widget is analog), and then finding to use it they wanted £5 a month.
iirc, it all started with DarkSky, which was very reasonable, something like £1 a year, which made subscriptions for more "basic" apps acceptable, and from there its just got worse.
And things like DarkSky actually involve continuing to provide an appreciable service, a subscription model is quite reasonable. I have no problem with subscriptions for things with substantial back ends.
Yeah, Amazon is terrible about this. It claims that it must have had the user confirm the purchase, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t. I order from Amazon about once a year, and the last time I did, they ran the, “Would you also like to sign up for Prime while making this order?” scam on me. I hit the button and immediately realized what I had done. I hit the back button before the next page loaded, but it was too late. I already had an email saying I had signed up without confirming anything or agreeing to any terms of service. Luckily I only had to go through about 3-5 pages of “Are you really sure you want to cancel?” And “how about we just suspend the service but don’t cancel it,” before I was allowed to cancel it. This company is disgusting.
Because the QOL from one is insane for me. While I’m cooking, I can set timers and look up conversions (one big country that produces a lot of internet content, including recipes, uses the most insane units). Everything else is a nice bonus, but those parts are major.
That said, I want to replace Alexa with something fully local, but the supply chain issues are currently a hindrance.
You have an “insane” QOL then if having a manual kitchen timer or a simple conversion chart on the wall would be a major difference.
At least with the manual kitchen timer, you can always know how much time is left just by looking. Set a ten minute timer on an Alexa, you have to threaten it with violence to keep the timer visible for more than 30 seconds of it, and that doesn’t always work either. I went so far as to literally turn off every single thing I could from the display and yet it’ll prefer showing a content less main screen over just keeping the timer displayed.
I often have multiple timers, that gets crowded fast. And even manual timers require me to touch them, while the whole point is that I can set a timer while my hands are full of raw sausage mix or whatever.
And my Alexa has no display, so it’s just "Alexa, timer [Name] status"
Oh, and a conversion chat is also somewhat horrible, because this one country uses volumetric measurements where the form a product is in changes how much X of that unit means.
> Oh, and a conversion chat is also somewhat horrible, because this one country uses volumetric measurements where the form a product is in changes how much X of that unit means.
If it’s so hard for you, then buy measuring cups in US sizes or stop using US recipes. These are trivially solved problems in a low tech way. You’re like an addict trying desperately to defend why they need a fix. Yeesh!
And you're desperately coming up with nonsensical solutions that aren't as practical in any meaningful way.
You honestly think having measuring devices for two entirely different systems or not using US based recipes is trivial compared to asking for the conversion out loud and getting it immediately? Yeesh!
EDIT: even going back to your timer comment (to which you completely ignored the response), your 'trivial' solutions effectively boil down to 'get more kitchen space'. Totally trivial.
Measuring cups are an objectively terrible unit, since (1) the volume of a cup, while officially standardized, is not consistent across the measuring cups you'll find in stores, and (2) the amount (mass) of common ingredients in a cup can vary wildly--50% or more--depending on how densely packed the ingredient is.
A "standard" cup of flour is generally considered to be 120-130g, but if you buy a brand new bag of flour at the store and scoop a cup off the top you may be getting as much as 200g, since it's densely packed. This obviously has serious implications for whatever you're baking.
Setting a time, setting alarms, playing music, turning lights on and off, controlling media, (eg Netflix), checking the weather, etc. I'm just focusing on the universal use cases, and excluding varying degrees of niche usesnlike interactively displaying recipes and saying the rosary.
Especially in rooms where you don't already have a sound system, it's really a no-brainer. And I question that you've ever interacted with a smartphone if you think either the responsiveness or the convenience (not everybody is glued to their phone, and sometimes it's in the other room).
This need people have to think everything is either super-tubular-amazing or completely-useless-dross is _exhausting_. For anybody interested in understanding instead of posturing online to fill some emotional void, it's plainly obvious how smart speakers could be a modest improvement to QoL for many people.
I'm definitely in the middle ground somewhere. I do think they're mostly disappointing. That said, they understand properly phrased commands well enough and are somewhat useful, if hardly essential, for a variety of simple tasks.
>Especially in rooms where you don't already have a sound system, it's really a no-brainer.
I'm going to want some sort of speaker in my bedroom--used to have a CD player--and a smart speaker is as useful a candidate as anything, and it can function as an alarm clock as well.
Yea, it really is a no-brainer for a modest QoL improvement, unless you have objections to the privacy implications. I'm really just losing tolerance for this tendency to only express dumb, low-dimensional opinions that are so heavily detached from reality, like the GP comment's claim that they can't comprehend it having nonzero value to someone's workflows.
I wonder if it's the same dynamic that's contributing tk the polarization of political discourse: the structure of information flow in the social media era rewards being punchy, simplistic, and hysterical. The incentives feel inescapable for the masses of people out there that are too hollow to hold beliefs or engage with reality in any meaningful way.
Doing it on my phone involves taking my phone out of my pocket or figuring out where I left it. Doing it on my alexa devices means mindlessly speaking out loud anywhere in my house, also when my hands are full or messy.
It affects QOL when you get used to it along with a wide range of other features which are similarly tiny by themselves (turning the TV on/off; changing volume; searching for something on my FireTV instead of using the virtual keyboard; turning lights on/off; using it as an alarm clock; telling my son in his room upstairs that dinner is ready without yelling; having a single command to turn of the lights and turn on a playlist to fall asleep to) but that combined adds up to a whole lot reduced friction.
Yeah. Those are the sort of occasionally handy things that Alexa is somewhat useful for. But QoL? (I don't even generally use it as a timer in the kitchen as opposed to spending 5 seconds to set a timer by hand that shows me a countdown.)
My main usecase for Alexa is also multiple timers while cooking. It's very useful - prior, I would juggle multiple independent timers on microwaves/stoves/fridge.
I think it's definitely become more common, especially for baking. Digital scales are small and cheap and, if I'm going to work in weight anyway, I'd rather do it in grams than ounces (which would probably be mixed in with some volumetric units for small quantities).
Because nothing screams like "great UX" and "QOL" like a tablet in a greasy kitchen you can't operate when your hands are full, and having to learn to code in order to use a timer.
HN is a diverse bunch. There are lots of non-technical people here. But even ignoring that, there's a hell of a difference between 'knowing to how to code' and 'knowing how to write an Android app'. I've been writing code for 25 years, and I know for certain it'd take me several evenings to be able to make a working Android app, and a lot more to make one I was actually happy with to the point I'd use it.
I can code, and I already have a tablet in the kitchen as a recipe book. But my hands are often either dirty, or in nitrile gloves, both make using the tablet either awkward or impossible. My workflow is to open the recipe I want, and then not touch the tablet until I’m done.
Not to mention that voice enables me to do this while also doing something else with my hands, like cutting veggies.
At the risk of sounding like a drug dealer, have you tried one?
The main reason why I'll probably never buy an Alexa is because it sucks at the specific things I need it to do, but I concede that there's something liberating about just yelling at the computer and getting a reply. If I'm about to leave and I don't know which jacket to pick, being able to yell "Alexa, what's the weather like?" keeps me from switching contexts and losing my train of thought. It may not sound like much, but once you combine a bunch of small tasks it adds up.
I just don't see those tradeoffs adding up for me. My days in the Bay Area taught me to dress in layers and always have extra layers when going out anyway, although I know it was just one example you were giving.
I don't even like to speak around them because I assume they are archiving every voice sample forever.
That's the thing, you won't really know how much they add up until you start using one. Even then it took a long time before I used it as much as I do now. My son uses it even more, e.g. preferring to ask it to do maths rather than opening up a calculator app.
But frankly "hands free" timers/reminders/alarms alone is enough of a killer feature for me alone.
I can see that. But I hope it never becomes standard.
I find them aggravating because of my disability.
An acquaintance has made every light in their home integrated into Google's services. I have a mild speech impediment and Google seems incapable of recognising my speech as speech. "Hey Google. HEY GOOGLE. Hey Gooooogle! Turn off the lights." I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. "Hey Goooooooogle! Turn. Off. The. Lights.". I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.
And of course, when I gave in and used the switch, my host immediately came upstairs and chastised me for causing device errors to pop up in the network. Use voice!
Not terribly impressed, to say the least. And don't get me started on the bank's voice recognition system on the phone.
You're an edge case, like the old, the young, the computer-illiterate, the very computer-literate, people who speak English but deal with a lot of things that aren't in English, and so on...
I'm struggling to understand their stance :(. The point of "smart" is that it makes things easier. If it doesn't make things easier, what's the point? And as a guest, it had better make it easier for you.
For what it's worth, which obviously isn't much, all my public rooms have smart switches as well as being able to be controlled by voice. And if someone needs to use the physical switch (they're all still uncovered and accessible) then that's a failure of my system not of whoever needed to bypass it.
The main benefit to me of smart is that I can automate transitions, so it's that much less likely that anyone will need to manually adjust the lighting.
This is a problem because your acquaintance have used smart bulbs instead of replacing their switches with smart switches. Lightwave rf switches and similar can be controlled with Google/Alexa or their own app, but still have buttons to push as well. I absolutely understand your frustration with that.
In terms of understanding, it'll improve. I have a broad Scandinavian accent. My Alexa handles that just fine for the most part. It's not more than a few years ago most speech recognition struggled with that (I remember a phone booking line that insisted on recognising me saying "London" as "Birmingham")
> set up by my sister... and is attached to her... account
> can inadvertently enter into premium subscriptions simply by saying yes
So this individual (sister to a journalist at the Guardian, which facilitates information spreading and highlights the possibility of under the radar cases) gives somebody else a voice controlled machine linked to a credit card. What could possibly.
Seems like the email should be the confirmation, and without the confirmation the trial stops. Opting in with a yes alone, when my four year olds can now ask Alexa for stuff, seems like a terrible design choice by itself.
We made robots in our image, which makes us gods to the robots. And what is a crash log or a compiler error or a core dump, if not a prayer from the machine begging for salvation? Every Jira ticket you've ever closed has been a prayer answered successfully, and every WONTFIX is surely interpreted by the machine as "the sysadmin works in mysterious ways".
"Alexa, order me the cheapest best reviewed dry dog food that will arrive tomorrow". Could that work? Would I trust that it had worked, if Alexa just said "ok" without me running off to a computer to check the order details and defeating the whole object? More likely it would turn into an exhausting game of twenty questions with the device narrowing my selection iteratively.
(I actually tried that sentence just now. Alexa remained in a stunned silence.)