Why would I pay for a spying machine? Good thing Home Assistant is steadily getting a full clone of homes and echos.
I’m waiting for a cheap ESP implementation of a device with wake words, then I should be able to move the remainder of my crap over to HA from other assistants for day to day automation.
HomeAssistant supports ESP with wake word now. Requires some CPU on the server, but works pretty good.
I saw some of the smaller push button devices a few months ago, but haven’t seen anything with wake word. I guess that’s something to dig into this weekend. Thanks!
I used to use mine to control a smart bulb in every room I had an Echo, but the experience has become so dire to the point that I now only use it for the one room where the light switch is in an awkward place to where I enter, and even then I find myself getting extremely frustrated with it. I would rather check the weather on my phone or control my AC through physical buttons than try to instruct something that seems to get worse at understanding me the more I use it.
The idea of paying for any Alexa service is baffling to me. I can barely trust it to flip a switch without mishearing me, trying to sell me something, or dropping a “by the way…”
I never really understood the point of Alexa. Its language recognition is abysmal to the point of uselessness.
A friend of mine has one to control music and it’s so frustrating. It doesn’t understand even the most basic artist or song names. Asking it to play anything is essentially a random song button for Spotify. Great value.
I barely trust it to control the lighting and tell me the temperature. Why am I ever going to trust it with financial transactions?
I could, but the service would have to be leaps and bounds more accurate than it currently is. I’ll simply turn them into speakers.
This is a misleading headline. It’s not talking about the existing Alexa products suddenly requiring a subscription for them to work, no the rumor is talking about a subscription for their upcoming higher tier Alexa Plus service with more advanced capabilities that’s based on generative AI.
Sweet. We get the option to pay for “more intelligent” advertising or get more advertising if we don’t. Win-win. 🤮
I am starting the research for migrating to a local voice assistant so any suggestions would be cool. It’s gonna take some work, but there seem to be a few promising models out there.
40+ years strong not using Alexa. I can probably go another 40.
