In Star Wars, the Death Star superlaser destroyed Alderaan, and that was evil. Now people willing pay money to use lasers for tattoo removal! I don’t get it.
OP here. Thanks for all the responses.
My Wife and I play a lot of chess and card games and listen to music while doing so. It’s great to say “Play that [obscure album]” that I have not thought about in years. Or play Pink Floyd, or whatever.
Also nice to be able to say to add an odd item to my groceries list that I’ll never remember to put on a list. “Alexa add item pumpkin seeds to grocery list” And the list travels with me on my smart phone. I like that.
Yeah, no doubt it’s kinda creepy. I never intended to have a voice activated device like this. But as has been said, I do have a smart phone. Only had my Echo for about a week. But so far, so good.
Ha ha. It is to laugh.
When the deathstar blasts your planet, don ‘t come cryin’ to me.
We have an Amazon Echo and Amazon Dots. The Echo sits in our kitchen. We have 5 Dots in different rooms of the house, which his a large 3 story victorian. Sadly, we really don’t use ours for music listening much other than “Kids Bop Kids” or other children’s music for our young daughters amusement.
The biggest things we use it for are weekly shopping lists. “Alexa, add butter to the shopping list.”. We regularly use Alexa to set timers when cooking and have multiple items going at the same time. My wife almost always asks Alexa for the weather when she is getting up in the morning and out of bed. We also use it as a home intercom system, again with 2 young kids and 3 stories in an old victorian it saves having to run up and down 3 flights of stairs to ask questions or tell the kids to come down for lunch/dinner.
As for the snooping part, I kinda get it but feel people really don’t understand exactly how much of their information is really out there. Sure, I suppose some weird Big Brother thing is possible but you know… just unplug it should that ever become a real thing. What’s harder is how much data and information is available just based upon your phone and phone usage. I work for a company in identity verification and it’s stunning the level of information that can be gathered and used just based upon your phone number. Sure, we all know about geo-location but make calls or send SMS, we see you. Dial your insurance company’s call center with a question? We see you. Log on to your bank’s mobile banking app? We see you. Order coffee from the mega-coffee company app? Change your phone number? Switch carriers? We see you. On and on and on. And that’s not even the really cool stuff. Other companies now can use your behavioral attributes. What hand do you usually hold you phone? What angle is your hand/phone usually in when using the app? Do you tap/swipe with thumb or finger? How firmly do you press on the screen? What style of motion do you use? How often do you lift the phone to your face? How often do you lift your phone to view the screen? Again, it goes on and on. Throw in voice biometrics and liveliness scans via selfies… All of these factors are captured, tracked, and used millions of time every day. Oh, and Siri is always listening too. 