Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec::In an interview with Bloomberg, Dave Limp said that he “absolutely” believes that Amazon will soon start charging a subscription fee for Alexa
Alexa is so bad though. Who’s going to pay for that?
“By the way, you can now pay for Alexa AI option if you want me to reply in a slightly smarter way, but I will still cut you off with ads and other useless things. To activate AlexaAI say activate”
“Welcome to the PiHole, Alexa.”
Just made the switch to NextDNS. For $2/month I get a lot of the same features but also on my phone when not on WiFi. Still love my pihole though!
“No”
“I heard ‘activate’. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there’s no way we’re letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it.”
*to the same degree of intelligence as you’ve previously experienced. (Ps if you don’t we’re making Alexa have a room temp IQ)
Guess we’ll find out when they finally pull the trigger
Mine can’t ever seem to tell the difference between on and off if there is any sound in my house
I use “turn on ___” and “kill ___”. Much more reliable matches.
Do you change the names of all your devices to people names? The living room lamp is Steve, the bedroom fan is Maryanne…
Still better than Siri …
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It’ll eventually be very affordable.
That’s already here. Anyone can run AI chatbots similar to, but not as intelligent as, Chatgpt or Bard.
Llama.cpp and koboldcpp allow anyone to run models locally, even with only a CPU if there’s no dedicated graphics card available (although more slowly). And there are numerous open source models available that can be trained for just about any task.
Hell, you can even run llama.cpp on Android phones.
This has all taken place in just the last year or so. In five to ten years, imo, AI will be everywhere and may even replace the need for mobile Internet connections in terms of looking up information.
Yes, and you can use run a language model like Pygmalion Al locally on koboldcpp and have a naughty AI chat as well. Or non sexual roleplay
Absolutely and there are many, many models that have iterated on and surpassed Pygmalion as well as loads of uncensored models specifically tuned for erotic chat. Steamy role play is one of the driving forces behind the rapid development of the technology on lower powered, local machines.
Never underestimate human ingenuity
When they’re horny
And where would one look for these sexy sexy AI models, so I can avoid them, of course…
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off… but noooooooooooo
I have that with just my phone, using Wiz lights and ITEEE. It’s the only home automation I even have because it’s the only one I found that doesn’t necessarily need a special base station like an Alexa or Google Home.
It’s the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I’m hopeful they’ll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you’re on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.
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AI is being touted as the solution to everything these days. It’s really not, and we are going to find that out the hard way.
I get what you’re saying, but voice assistants are one of the main places LLMs belong.
Yes, but so much more. An actually useful assistant that could draft emails, set reminders appropriately, create automations, etc. would be worth A LOT of money to me.
Hey that’s only because Amazon, Google and Microsoft (et al) just doesn’t have the Money to Make it good!!
So what about 9.99 a month?
4.99 if you pay up front for a year?
Euh, or how much can you cough up, like for a year or at least for Q4, I’m literally on a bad roll here.
I’m not going to buy into a subscription model for something I’ve already paid for. This subscription model crap is complete bullshit.
We even tried to do it with heated seats recently. Like install heated seats in your car, but disable them in software. It’s crazy that companies think they can get away with this.
I think there’s a massive difference between unlocking a feature that’s already there and requires no maintenance and a cloud-based service that demands 24/7 uptime and constant developer support, as well as ongoing feature development
While I agree with you, they are 💯 going to get away with it, because your average consumer just doesn’t care.
If IBM actually manages to convert COBOL into Java like they’re advertising, they’ll end up killing their own cash cow
So much still runs on COBOL
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
It’s like charging you for cable and then shoving ads down your throat.
It’s like charging you for Prime Video and then shoving ads down your throat.
That’s often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
I think the data is probably less valuable than people think, especially if the users expect an AI response whenever a data point can be collected from them.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you’re leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
Let me in your house and I’ll observe it for you for less money
Google did that with Nest Aware years ago as well. It’s super annoying.
Alexa isn’t nearly good enough to pay for. I basically use it for timers, math, weather, and conversions.
Yep, used to be much better. There was SO much potential with it too. I wish there was a Smart Speaker with integration into ChatGPT. Id love to stand in the shower and ask it shit
You can do this with a Siri shortcut.
It still falls short because LLMs aren’t smart, they’re just approximately not wrong most of the time. I thought it would be a lot cooler than it actually is.
Building your own dystopia I see…
Not following
Yeah, they’re all pretty disappointing. I’d love to have something that feels like how movies portray digital assistants. Movie assistants never misunderstand you or say “I’m sorry, I couldn’t recognize your voice”. I’ve mostly used the Google one and it’s so bad at doing what I feel like is feasible even with inaccuracy.
Eg, I’ve tried to tell my assistant to like a song that was currently playing on YTM but could not find a voice command that worked (and some commands backfired by making it skip to the next song). I’ve had very poor success with getting assistant to cast something to my Chromecast with my voice. It sometimes works, but it fails or gets it wrong so often that it’s not worth the time.
Sometimes I use it for rewinding (e.g., “ok google, rewind 30 seconds”) because many apps don’t have granular rewind buttons and tracking on the track bar is way too inaccurate. But lol, it’s so slow! It takes a few seconds to figure out what I said (so I have to ask it to rewind more than I wish) and it seems every app is unoptimized for rewinding, as it usually takes several seconds of loading.
It can’t really do any kind of research either. You basically can just ask it to google things and it sometimes is able to extract the meaningful part from simple questions. It’s a far way from how Hollywood thinks a digital assistant will work.
I already don’t use it, you don’t have to sell me on it.
…charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
Ok. I’ll be the weirdo. If it’s actually useful, I would pay for it.
Not if it’s just the parlor trick that it currently is.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I’m concerned. All of it lives squarely in “huh…neat” territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
This is why I’m so confused by Amazon’s approach. I know they’ve already sunk millions if not billions of dollars into this, so why has the user experience not improved in the last 8 years?
I’m not going to buy things with my voice when just getting the lights to turn off or music to play can be an infuriating endeavor. Speech recognition has stagnated.
The third party integrations are just so clunky too. They could have made money by selling licenses to businesses in order to access the service, but again, they haven’t improved that experience at all.
The “Alexa, let me talk to dominos.” or “Alexa, ask LG to turn off the TV” is just stupidly cumbersome. Why can’t you set up preferred providers? I don’t have to say “ask Spotify to play music” I just say “play music”, so we know it’s possible. It would be trivial to implement other preferred service providers compared to the overall scale of Alexa.
I don’t know if you’re in IT at all, but the really crazy thing is that as half baked as Alexa stuff feels…a ton of AWS’s offerings feel the exact same way. Their marketing material is great, and I do believe their engineers are passionate and have the right intentions. But none of it feels “finished”. It all feels like an elaborate beta test. Things don’t work, documentation is out of date or just plain wrong, it’s impossible to get actual expert support from Amazon directly.
AWS is their biggest money maker and even that is a cobbled together, confusing pile half the time. Sometimes feels like everything is a house of cards.
It’s weird to me that a company of this size is just that inept. It’s like once they have enough momentum, nothing can stop them.
The same goes for Google, and to some degree MS.
It’s really true. I’m actually annoyed that MS is starting to feel this way, particularly with some Azure related services. MS was always the one you could count on to at least be stable, well tested internally, and predictable. At least in comparison to Google and Amazon. But it feels like they have been leaving some of that behind with their cloud stuff as CI/CD becomes more prevalent.
I use Alexa as a way to use an old speaker system. I wouldn’t pay to use any “smart” speaker systems. They are pretty dumb and I’ve already paid once
I have doubts alexa is using AI, seen how dumb it is, but well
So they expect that people pay for being spied upon and seriously data mined?
Yes and people will pay for it.
Sometimes I can’t help thinking some people deserve to be taken advantage of.
How to make me go back to buying shit in person, by Amazon.com
Just FYI, Alexa records everything you speak into it, you can listen to it here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GHXNJNLTRWCTBBGW
Well so far my Google Smart speakers have two functions:
- Voice activated timer
- Wi-Fi speaker that I only ever cast to with my phone, never actually talk to them.
Don’t think I’ll miss that if they decide to charge for it.
My Google homes have gotten progressively worse over the years. Half the time it will say it’s setting a timer but nope, no timer. Recently I’ll tell it to play music and it will reply that I don’t have any devices with that feature… they’re all Google homes or Chromecast which absolutely play music. Really like the hardware but the software is utter shit
They also removed the ability to link third-party list applications so now saying “Add X to shopping list” just sends it into some nether realm where the item is never to be seen ever again.
I hate when it’s playing music and I tell it to shut the fuck up, then it decides to turn off every actively going alarm in the house instead of turning off the goddamn music playing on the one it literally responded in. This happens most mornings.
Mine also finds my phone, it’s primary use.
