... Because it was a huge privacy risk.

Whisper definitely blows AWS Transcribe out of the water. And, it's free. So nice.

Except execution will be subpar, as it always is.

- Why pay for Alexa 2.0 when you can get an alternative for free? - How to get people to do more than the bare minimum of music, notifications, and home automation? People can't even use lists anymore, because it's being deprecated. Same with Routines.

Alexas have been reduced to ads boxes; junk.

AGI Alexa is truly a work of innovation. It gaslights you into thinking you wanted hippopotamus.

I am literally laughing out loud, because Amazon had decided to fire majority of the Amazon Pay team, which is why there was no longer a clear way to handle payments.

Decent take.

I will say there is a huge missing piece in which teams/orgs would strategically kill each other's products, to try and show that their "version of Alexa" was better than the others. This was rewarded by senior leadership, so much so that the remaining players are those "winning teams."

We can see the clear likeness between the "GenAI" Alexa of today and The Emperor's New Clothes.

At any rate, Alexa is just "ambient home" spyware, both mic and camera. You can't even replace it with a better voice assistant internally. Maybe it's time to unplug it, for good.

Indeed.

It's been this way for some time. Same with Woot. Both Zappos and Woot used to be cool. After Amazon acquired them, they just sit and rot.

Wish the FTC would do something about this already...

When the company has to leak the project code name, you know it's bad.

If China tries Taiwan, all hell will erupt. "From above so below," as it were. Best for China (and Taiwan) if China relaxes a bit.

Seriously. Chill with this cold war posturing. The toys are too dangerous, with too little visibility or oversight.