Submitted 10 months ago by lichtmetzger@feddit.de to technology@beehaw.org
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-paid-alexa-plus-service-issues-2024-1
Amazon is revamping its Alexa voice assistant as it prepares to launch a new paid subscription plan this year, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter. But the change is causing internal conflict and may lead to further delay.
“How much ya gunna pay for what you used to get for free…” Tom Petty, Last DJ. Underrated tune about the demise of free and independent radio and radio DJs.
We’ve learned with assistants we mostly need them to… turn off the lights and play music. I don’t want to have a conversation with my smart speaker, I don’t care about it being hooked up to an LLM. As soon as I can’t turn off the lights or play music it goes in the bin.
Tentatively called “Alexa Plus,” the paid version of Alexa is intended to offer more conversational and personalized AI technology, said one of the documents obtained by Business Insider.
But the quality of the new Alexa’s answers is still falling short of expectations, often sharing inaccurate information, external tests have found.
Do they really expect people will pay for a large language model making up results on-the-fly?
“If this fails to get revenue, Alexa is in trouble,” one of the people told BI.
I will not shed a tear when Alexa gets shut off, to be honest.
Considering you can put your own on a raspberry pi for free and run it locally, there isn’t much reason for Alexa anymore anyway
You have a good project you like for that?
I got it. “Alexa, you owe me rent for being in my home. Alexa, send me 1500 a month in local currency.”
Somewhere, a Jeff Bezos explodes.
megopie@beehaw.org 10 months ago
Ok, but almost no one got this spywear because they wanted it, they got it because cousin Jerry who they only talk to once a year needed to get them something for Christmas and just went with the trendy tech thing, and it’s just been plugged in in the corner since 2014 siphoning personal data to the big cloud in the sky.