I think some people may be conflating the voice command mechanism that has been in Mac computers for decades, which as I recall did let the user choose an attention word. It was limited in scope, not terribly flexible and I believe tended to get shut off in fairly short order by most users.
My mother did! Or at least, I did for her.
I surreptitiously borrowed all her spattered, fading, & dog-eared 3x5 recipe cards, typed the recipes into my brand new TRS-80 microcomputer, and then printed out nice new copies for her. I got a couple hundred punched card stock paper on sprocket feed from our operations center (in exchange for fixing some ‘bouncing betty’ tape jobs that were annoying them) and got them to work in my Centronics dot matrix printer. Took hours to print them. I had intended to cut off the slanted corner cut on the cards, but didn’t have time before Christmas, so I just wrapped them as they were. Afterwards, Mom wouldn’t let me trim that off – she had too much fun showing all her friends her ‘computerized’ kitchen recipes.
(I found out later from my sister that Mom didn’t really follow those recipes much – they were mostly just ‘reminders’ and she ‘modified’ them when cooking. And some of the spatters that I had such trouble reading were her notes to ‘reduce this ingredient’, etc. But she enjoyed the new copies anyway.) Somewhere here, I probably still have the 8" floppy disk containing those recipes, in ASCII text files. Wonder if I could find any equipment to read that anymore? Or is it even still readable?
But can you walk into a very large room and turn on four different lights that aren’t on one switch faster than you can say “Alexa… turn on lights.”? Then when watching TV later can you turn off two lights, dim one other (that wasn’t on a dimmer) to 50% and the other to 30% (also not on a dimmer) faster than saying “Alexa… turn lights to watch TV” all without getting off of the couch. I won’t even get into them turning on various shades of red and green by saying “Alexa… turn lights to Christmas.”
This may be more of a testimonial to Philips Hue lights, but it is nice that they are controlled by Alexa. I can do all of the same with my smart phone, but right now it is on a table out of my reach, but my voice is right here.
It was part of a holiday pair: HS100 plus the Dot. It works with: the Amazon Dash Wand, the TP-Link app, the Alexa app. Just not with the Dot! It says device not found.
As to the “flicking a light switch with your finger” comment above. I want this to be used for the table lamp for Mrs. FtG who has mobility issues. Also for timers, reminders, etc.
FWIW, you change the wake word for Alexa: “Echo”, “Amazon”, and “Computer” are now allowed. The last would be cool but is far too common in my household. Even “Amazon” would create too many triggers. “Echo” doesn’t do it for me. So, I’ve stuck with “Alexa”. Sure wish they had a much larger list to choose from. Esp. to get around the TV commercials that think it’s fun to fire up people’s devices.
It will be a comfort to know, next time the Dope is buried under a massive DDoS attack, that even the light bulbs will be participating.
I have two TP-Link wall plugs (for our living room lamps) controlled by Alexa, by switches do you mean some kind of wall switches?
No interest in it at all.
The functionality has been built in to my devices for the last few years and I’ve never used them and never felt any need to.
Switched plugs.
BTW, if you want to test out an Amazon Alexa device without spending much money Amazon Prime members can get an Amazon Dash Wand for ~14* and get $20 off your first order you make thru it. So it’s basically free and then some.
The Wand is battery powered and push button activated. So no wake word. Push the button and say “Tell me a joke.”, etc. It doesn’t play music, do timers, etc.
But it has a bar code scanner so you go do lookups/orders using that.
Mine didn’t have the latest Alexa upgrade when I got it so it was dumber than usual the first day. But it soon updated.
Note: requires a smart phone (Android or iPhone) to set up.
Or you can get the Alexa app for your phone or whatever and talk to it.
- The price bounces around, right now for me it’s showing $13.51.
Add me to the list of people who has no interest in adding always-on microphones owned by advertising companies to my home, or other poorly-secured internet-connected devices to my network.
The day I can’t buy a television without a microphone in it is the day I give up TV.
I do wonder if there’s going to be any kind of mass-culture privacy backlash in the future, or if we’re pretty much locked-in to a panopticon future.
Being unable to customize the wake word to sound like a name of a person is the primary reason I got an Amazon Echo instead of a Google device. ‘Alexa, do x’ sounds natural, ‘Ok Google, do x’ does not, to me, and that matters.
I did wind up returning my Echo because I felt I was not benefiting enough from its use. One of the reasons I got it was to play sleep sounds because I saw a number of sleep sounds ‘skills’ that were available, but none of them actually worked correctly and reliably. Once they get more functionality and improve what’s there, I’ll try again, but I still want one with a name which seems to limit it to Alexa or Siri at this point, and I don’t use many Apple products, so probably Alexa. Cortana would be nice if Microsoft would get off their asses and actually put out a product that can compete with Google and Amazon, but it’s not looking good. I was hoping Microsoft would do good with their phone OS, but that also didn’t work out.
I think there’s some confusion, or maybe some imprecise language here.
Yes, police could get a search warrant for anything that Amazon has recorded via the echo. But the original claim was that they could get a warrant to search “what was said within the hearing of that device”, which implies (perhaps unintentionally) that everything that was said within the hearing is searchable. But Amazon (probably) doesn’t record everything. Only things said recently after the wake word.
I guess if you have an Echo and someone is in the process of perpetrating a crime against you, you should say “Alexa” repeatedly to have plenty of evidence to hand over.
They will–but not by me. I was floored a couple years ago when my son said to his device, “Hey Google, how old is [Hari Seldon], mathematician?” and it came back with the correct answer. It will happen. Some years ago, they were discussing raising the internet address space from 32 bits to 64 or 128 or even 160, they said that in the future every electric socket would have it’s own address. I thought this was slightly nutty. Now I see it is coming.
There are already TVs that have the ability to listen to you. How To Stop Your Smart TV From Spying on You | WIRED
I’ll be the last kid on the block to get a Google Assistant, or Alexa or whatever. Supposedly these have not been directly hacked - yet - but by definition the company has to listen in on everything, and they’re up front about having to record bits to improve their speech recognition. The government has already attempted to use this kind of information in court (Can your smart home be used against you in court? | TechCrunch) and I imagine that kind of thing will become more and more common in criminal cases. I expect the NSA is already looking into exploiting it.
There are other ways of exploiting the system without touching it, as Burger King proved: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3190176/security/virtual-assistants-hear-everything-so-watch-what-you-say-i-m-not-kidding.html.
Some of the things the companies are trying to patent are creepy:
'Digital Assistant' Devices Can Monitor Your Showering Habits. | HuffPost Contributor.
There’s a voice response feature on my Android phone. I don’t use it… but one day my daughter and I were in the car, when the phone responded with “I don’t know what to do with ‘(something I had just said, verbatim)’”. It was hilarious in the context, but also a bit freaky - especially as I have never enabled the feature on my phone (I just checked).
They have to record at least some bits, to pick up on when you say “Alexa” (or whatever). However, look at the links I posted: they want to record and use far more than that, to “provide better service” (i.e. advertise to you better).
Count me out.