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The era of open voice assistants

(www.home-assistant.io)
878 points _Microft | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.39s | source
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jfim ◴[] No.42468047[source]
That's a pretty timely release considering Alexa and the Google assistant devices seem to have plateaued or are on the decline.
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IgorPartola ◴[] No.42468486[source]
Curious what you mean by that.
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oaththrowaway ◴[] No.42468541[source]
For me the Alexa devices I own have gotten worse. Can't do simple things (setting a timer used to be instant, now it takes 10-15 seconds of thinking assuming it heard properly), playing music is a joke (will try to play through Deezer even though I disaled that integration months ago, and then will default to Amazon Music instead of Spotify which is set as the default).

And then even simple skills can't understand what I'm asking 60% of the time. The first maybe 2 years after launch it seemed like everything worked pretty good but since then it's been a frustrating decline.

Currently they are relagated to timers and music, and it can't even manage those half the time anymore.

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1. mrweasel ◴[] No.42471275[source]
Amazon also fired a large number of people from the Alexa team last year. I don't really think Alexa is a major priority for Amazon at this point.

I don't blame them, sure there are millions of devices out there, but some people might own five device. So there aren't as many users as there are devices and they aren't making them any money once bought, not like the Kindle.

Frankly I know shockingly few people who uses Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant/Bixby. It's not that voice assistants don't have a use, be it is a much much small use case than initially envisioned and there's no longer the money to found the development, the funds went into blockchain and LLMs. Partly the decline is because it's not as natural an interface as we expected, secondly: to be actually useful, the assistants need access to control things that we may not be comfortable with, or which may pose a liability to the manufacturers.