My Amazon Echo Dot (which really means “Alexa”) does the following two things for me:
Setting timers for unpredictable events (remind me in 20 minutes to let the dogs in; remind me in 2.5 hours to check blood glucose; remind me to pick up my wife at the end of her shift, etc.) But even so, it’s just an alarm with no context, so I still have to remember what each alarm means. I suspect there is a “skill” available to assign a message or meaning to each alarm, but I’ve not looked into it yet.
Turns on pedastal fan on the other side of the room, via Wink integration. Still can’t figure out how to turn the fan off… I have to grab a phone or tablet to use the Wink app.
To be honest, I’ve not spent more than 30 minutes tinkering with Alexa yet.
As for the Smalt… yeah, I thought I was watching an SNL commercial parody. And I happen to own a battery-powered pepper grinder with an LED light, no less! In my defense, I can’t often grip & twist a good pepper grinder (curse you, arthritis!), and it does a very good job of pepper grinding.
Even though they kind of don’t mention it (or suggest that it takes regular table salt) I predict a 100% chance that you will need to purchase individual packs of specially-packaged Smalt™ Brand salt packs, featuring a “freshness code” of some description that will ensure that you, the innocent customer, aren’t inconvenienced or put at harm’s risk by purchasing expired salt.
You win this comment thread - hands down. And the device? Annoying, as are the various things you talk to available from Amazon, or Alexa, or whatever it is. Just give me a device that makes my dumb plasma TV smart (the picture is too good to replace it …).
ive an android phone. even long before siri, etc. existed nothing was better than saying “set alarm 8am”.
and especially because my current android variant has a built in clock which uses an ios style spinner for selecting time. ( more proof that apple has zero clue about user interface other than looks? )
turn on the phone, find and open the clock app, click set alarm, spin ( painfully, slowly ) to a time, select okay… or just press the front button and speak aloud.
i also like that it has sound hound like functionality built in. “what song is playing?” rocks. ( no pun intended. )
I don’t much see people I know using it in private either. Voice commands have their use, and frankly out of all the gestural control, movement tracking, etc that have come up in the last decades. Its the most useful and the least gimmicky. And the voice assistants you have their least gimmicky application. But their popularity seems to be waning, and their moment as a massive cultural trend is certainly over.
If I ever saw that sitting on someone’s table while I was a dinner guest I would intentionally spill it so I could then toss it over my shoulder with gusto.
The privacy implications are enormous. Not as much as with a pepper mill but still huge. They are clearly going to sell my salt consumption behavior on the dark web to the folks who make tenapanor, to snack food advertisers, to Big Salt. Billboard will start publishing Top 10 Salty Songs list from the correlations between music choice and salt consumption. And Smalt isn’t even paying us for our information!
I own a very nice Breitling that was given me as a graduation present. It still does everything its 30-40 years younger brethren do, keeps superb time, and is probably worth a substantial fraction of the price of a new one.
Where will today’s Apple watches be in thirty years’ time? Leaching heavy metals into a landfill no doubt. And the really amusing part is that if you quiz Apple watch owners today, most all of them will tell you they are in favor of “sustainability”.
