I bought an Echo, one of the very first ones, as I was really excited to turn one of my rooms (all the wife would agree to) into one that was out of a sci-fi film and I could control everything via voice.
Until the lawsuits started coming in about how it listened to everything, which is obvious in hindsight but back then I hadn’t considered it. I never ever bothered moving up to the even more intrusive Alexa.
My inlaws have it, and I always enjoy telling it to say terrible jokes.
Thanks for posting this. It is what immediately came to mind as a response. (I’m sure I only remembered it from reading your original post).
Yep; the HAL9000 (and to a lesser extent, Electric Dreams, circa 1984 ) really did imprint negatively on me at an early age… so while I am not a complete luddite, neither do I ever want to depend on tech any more that I actually need to.
*edited for spelling
Yes, it is. Dan Bongino, a far right “pundit” owns an equity stake in it.
I’ve found that really, that’s all it’s good for. Sure, there’s some parlor tricks it can do (“Alexa, Trick or Treat”) but that’s about it.
One of my backburnered projects is to make an on-prem replacement for the dots so I can control my home automation system via voice, and then I can dump the ones I have (unless there’s a way to hack the gen 3 and gen 4 dots to talk to a private server, that is. That’s research for another day.) Convincing the roommate to dump hers might be more difficult, as she uses the streaming audio function of it pretty consistently.
AND METHODISTS!!!
Yeah I don’t actually need an alexa for this - an on prem device would be fine. I just don’t really know of one. I guess the other usage is that my wife has loaded a lot of pictures of our son and our dogs on it so every time I go in the kitchen I get a little nostalgia.
I guess there’s probably no commercial demand for an unconnected device like this - alexas are practically free and most people don’t really care if it phones home or not.
ETA: I think it would be a fun project, and my first thought was whether it was kickstartable but I think not.
I’m partially inoculated against these agents, as are deaf/hoh folk.
I hate hearing that voice jumping over whatever else I might be doing, as much as I hate other people talking to me when I’m trying to think. Even if I wanted to use that interface, it’s too painful for me.
And that’s not even taking into account that if it’s talking to you, then its primary interface is you talking to it. Which, if you have difficulties with speech, is just not going to happen.
Great only 999999 units of disinformation to go.
I’m using for a proof of concept test, a Pi4 with a speaker/mic “hat” for the hardware, and Rhasspy for the voice assistant code; there’s hooks to make it work with Home Assistant and Hubitat. Right now, I’m stuck on finding an pre-canned bundle of intents rather than taking a couple days worth of stumbling through it to add the ones I’m likely to use. There’s also the matter of getting streaming audio to function on it, but that’s a side-quest for me at the moment. 
And not just Bongino.
I’m not sure it stopped lying. I just asked alexa if the 2020 election was stolen. It said it couldn’t reply, then this popped up on the screen.
I wonder if it said anything about Dominion Voting Systems?
What happened to the depth in Art Damage about Fiction Damage (or Noncreative Fiction.) Kleptus Visual Reviews maybe, or Autotune Bassist, or Lapdanceerist? Lifehacks.{self}() maybe? Drop_sheets_trader_all_world[.|]? All efficiently subsumed by great effort by parts of the world with Ministry For The Propogation Of Virtue And Prevention Of Vice?
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