I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone.
EDIT: That's too mean spirited.
If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a position that captures a wide angle or buy a 360 degree camera as opposed to this which only seems to pick up video in the direction it's facing.
What person would ever want this "feature"? We have webcams for people who don't mind exhibiting themselves. People overwhelmingly prefer to text others rather than talk over the phone or facetime when given the chance. Even when you visit someone in person, you don't drop in, unannounced like a peeping tom. You knock on the door to announce your appearance, exactly analogous to ringing the telephone before listening in and watching.
I don't like it because the world's largest retailer has the marketing and advertising muscle to normalize this behavior by preying upon our fears, our irrational behavior, and our cognitive biases. Look at the social stigma one faces if you don't have a facebook account and you're under 35. Not just that, but you will get harassed by border and customs agents if they ask for your social media account and you don't have one, setting off red flags.
In the near future, I can see this feature becoming a requirement for remote workers with insecure managers.
EDIT: This will definitely become a feature on sites like Upwork so that buyers can make sure developers are billing them the correct hours, even though the prices are dirt cheap already.
My wife and I are about to be first-time parents and for us, this is a pretty exciting product for parents compared to the other devices out there in this space.
For the "drop in" feature specifically, my plan is to leave one Show in the nursery and one for my parents. They like to call us a lot, and with this device, I should be able to whitelist their device and let them "drop in" on the nursery and whatever we're doing at the time. I think a lot of people have a problem with the privacy aspect, but for us, I don't see why we would have a problem with my parents seeing the nursery at any given time, esp with the 10sec window to decline. And then once the baby is older, we'd move the Show to the kitchen for music, looking up recipes, etc.
I think there's going to be a lot of parents looking hard at this device. The intro video Amazon made is mostly for this use case as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqxCeHhmeU
As someone who is 16 months into being a first-year parent, I'm going to say that if you are about to be first time parents, you are about to discover the answer to a whole lot of "I don't see see why" questions, and "why we wouldn't want to have to actively refuse rather than actively allow anyone, even our parents, to see what is going on in the nursery at will" is pretty likely to feature prominently on that list.
In terms of using it when your child is older, I'm not sure you'll be using the same device 3+ years from now.
The disabled come to mind, for starters. The elderly, assisted living, I can think of a few use cases.
Do you remember the Nextel phones? (push to talk) They were annoying as all hell in a corporate setting, but had some very valid use cases in a lot of industries, to the point of being the #1 feature of a Nextel.
Look up research on "media spaces" if you're interested in the practical applications of this kind of feature. Just one example paper, but there are many more: https://www.billbuxton.com/DGPmediaspace.pdf
Digitally creating a "portal" like this can be considered roughly analogous to connected spaces in real life. So, for example, two break rooms across different campuses of the same company, or a couple in a long-distance relationship that would ordinarily live together if not for whatever was keeping them in LDR mode stand to benefit from this sort of continuous video communication.
I'd like to have offices in a ring around the globe, maybe one in every other time-zone, each with an open floor plan and two opposite walls set up as full video walls with cameras and two-way connections so that it supports the illusion of looking into the neighboring offices through windows. There would be sound if you're standing close enough, and several scanner/printers (FAX machines lol!) connected so that you could feed a hard-copy to someone on the "other side" of the "window".
It would be so cool to look "across" the distributed meta-office and SEE the day/night cycle all at once though the real windows in the offices.
I once suggested that to a company which had two locations that weren't getting along. Put up a teleconferencing link in their break room and leave it up. Unfortunately, this was before bandwidth was cheap enough this was a no-brainer.
Is this necessary?
If this were bi-directional, that along with a loss of privacy came blanket transparency into how they're using the data they record, shared their data sets and open sourced their algorithms, I may not feel comfortable with it, but I wouldn't feel this existential dread that my greatest value comes from being a data point.
When my friends and I got married and started having kids, contact fell off a lot -- we just didn't call as much, you get busy and you assume the others are busy putting kids to bed, etc. etc.
What I wanted was a way to say "we're available to chat right now" for a handful of people I know and trust. My idea was to create a webcam into our kitchen with a limited view, turn it on when we were interested in chatting with friends, and when on it would be displayed on a dedicated tablet in our friends' kitchen, showing them that we were around and available to chat.
It seems Alexa Drop-in is getting pretty close to this idea.
(I think chat/messaging systems are still missing this explicit "I'm available for a synchronous chat right now" flag. Being "online" in Skype is just not quite the same thing.)
Seems identical to the long-established distinction between "online" and "away" status.
I don't think the spying concerns are reasonable. If somebody wants to spy on somebody, there are already plenty of ways to do it. Why require that developers buy an expensive Amazon widget when you could require that they buy a $40 webcam, or better yet just say "if you don't answer the phone whenever I call you during working hours, you'd better be dead or in jail, or else you're fired."
It may become the norm that even though it's still optional, society moves in a direction where people have it on by default, and you are met with confused/dissapointed faces when you explain it is uncomfortable. Or it simply becomes a cultural norm in the professional world
Upwork already does this; clients can watch your screen or your webcam whenever they want, if you sign up for a job that requires such. The Hansonian-em dystopia of barely-positive-utility working-to-live doesn't need Amazon's help to make its way into existence. It's already here; just unevenly distributed.
I've been waiting for years for a feature like this. Seriously. My wife let our son play with her phone, so when I call her on my way home, she never picks it up.
It got to a point that sometimes I have to log in into her account and activate "Lost my iPhone", so it rings at full volume. More recently I bought an Yi camera that has an intercom functionality by default, but it's clunky, app is not very friendly, I need to scream for people to hear me, etc.
Having a decent intercom functionality (and bonus points for having with video too) would be a dream come true in our household.
Just wondering on the interoperability with other regular Android and iOS devices...
I just don't wanna get caught watching porn.
We received one as a gift this past Christmas, and I'm now a full believer in this tech after being a very big skeptic during the first couple years of Alexa's existence. Add to the fact, that we primarily use it as a smart connected radio, and the benefits are still beyond clear to me.
Essentially, you've now opened up the possibility of exposing a lot of the latest tech to a new demographic of people that probably were 'too old' to 'get it', or not tech savvy enough to use it. The combination of a voice interface (not perfect, but improving) with access to all the latest web services spanning music, telephony, email, todo lists, home automation, etc is huge. I can now actually envision my parents, or even grandparents using services like Spotify, Podcasts, Connected Calendars, VOIP, and any number of things that the tech savvy take for granted through their phones or other devices.
Circling back to my first statement about Apple; the quintessential consumer oriented tech company. The company that's supposed to make all things nasty and complicated into things that are simple and accessible. How did Apple who already had Apple TV (home box), Siri (voice interface), Itunes (music and app ecosystem), Icloud( ugh.. but still integrated personal mgmt) and FaceTime (VOIP) not come up with this sooner. Or at least, once they saw Alexa gaining popularity not just bundle up their services and release it. Apple typically is late to the party with a more refined product, but Amazon is executing at an impressive rate these days and it's getting harder to see how Apple can close the gap.
Amazon spends years and billions of dollars trying to compete in the hardware space with Apple, unsuccessfully releasing a phone and several very average tablet devices, none of which really gain much traction.
Then they release a device that can respond only to voice "pretty well" which can now handle VOIP calls only with other Amazon devices and we are ceding this battle to Amazon?
I think Amazon has to greatly improve the user experience before the Echo moves past a cool novelty item for me. I own one, and I can honestly say I feel no desire to purchase any more.
My Nest cam on the other hand I use all day to monitor my dog (using my iPhone) and often consider switching to Google Home and buying more Nest products because I feel invested in that ecosystem.
To me, the tablet/smart phone experience is just more efficient and easier than dealing with voice. That's just my own experience though, and time may prove me very wrong.
Echo/Alexa is the first step to that ubiquitous IoT future, where computing is sort of removed from the terminology and services are just available on demand in the most natural of human interfaces -- voice.
Similar to that first moment of watching a 5 year old ( or 60 year old ) accessing YouTube on an Ipad ( simplified touch interface ) when the first i-devices came out. The voice interface will be just as transformative, if not more so.
The moment for me was when my 2 year old niece screamed, "Alexa, play the gummy bear song"... and it started playing, and she started dancing. That was a game changing moment for me, to realize that this device opens the doors for the young, the old, the impaired, and even the tech averse to access all kinds of cool tech that we take for granted. Hell even for me, "Alexa, play the latest 'how I built this' podcast"
Don't get me wrong, typing and touch is infinitely more efficient and powerful, but voice will be infinitely more accessible. Touch devices, as simple as they are, still require a mental model of which icons provide which services, clicking through and typing out requests and looking at results, versus what my 2 year old niece was able to do with Alexa.
How did you come up with this claim? It's certainly not true for myself, my household, most of my relatives and most of my friends and coworkers.
They are catching up very quickly, since like Apple, they are in a much better position to create this technology as they have most of the ingredients already. Google Home has managed to mostly catch up in 6 months to a product that's been out for over 2 years. 3rd party support is growing very fast, the new SDK opens many doors, the IFTTT/Actions support allows tinkerers to hack up cool new features, and when it comes to conversational AI, most agree that Google is far ahead.
That being said, the competition is still fierce and I'm loving the innovations each side brings.
I have a couple of friends who still have one in a drawer somewhere and it was just poor execution all around. They could have been way ahead of the curve but now they're playing catchup. They're definitely still very well positioned and catching up fast though. Google's AI capability and straightfoward integration with exclusive market-leading products (Google Now, Google Maps, etc.) will likely make them a leader eventually unless they drop the ball again.
a) having the ingredients way before Amazon
b) knowing the market for such a product was viable(people were ready) and desirable($$ could be huge)
c) and having made failed attempts at it
Apple and Google both tried to attack it through the SmartTV effort, which came and went and didn't amount to much. People didn't want to spend upwards of $1K for such a thing, whoops. Then Google purchased Nest, thinking that would be a nice backdoor into the Home automated system -- I have a Nest also, good product, but again, not the right entry way for this product category.
Than along comes Amazon and creates essentially a wireless smart speaker, that you can talk to, at a $100 price tag. Boom.
Don't get me wrong, Google Home is catching up fast and I had a heavy debate/research session when we got Alexa on whether I should exchange it for Home. But in the end, it just didn't matter, Alexa did things well enough at this point. Google may have the better, more widely adopted ecosystem (Gmail, Calendar, etc), the Voice assistant is likely better from what I've read, and I have no doubt Google can do the SDK/app ecosystem in a great way. But really, I feel like Alexa is doing things just well enough to keep the competition at bay, and with their head start, they're owning the consumer mindshare. And the combination of those 2 things might be enough to fend off any newcomers now.... though let the competition and innovation continue -- on that I agree!
And it fits with :
>> we primarily use it as a smart connected radio,
Does anybody see a solution to that problem ?
I'm under the impression that Alexa works much better at understanding than Siri? Is that true?
What would be great is if all these things could work together. Amazons smartphones are not compelling and they don't have laptops/desktops. It sounds like they do IoT well, while Apple does the later.
The tech matters in that it must work, but what they've really been lacking is a cohesive story around how all of this stuff works together and what it enables people to do. Right now, my biggest interaction with iCloud is constantly being reminded that I'm out of storage on it, randomly, sometimes via CarPlay while driving.
Apple is a hardware company. Their software forays have been mixed. They do some awesome stuff and some terrible stuff. Many great iOS features were lifted from some combination of the jailbreak community + android. The App Store on Mac has some dumb limitations which have driven away some big and many small publishers. It's still hard to explain what iCloud does exactly and why storage on it costs $10/month for 1TB in 2017. The Photos app, which forcibly replaced the sometimes-liked iPhoto, regularly crashes / hangs for me when trying to import more than a couple hundred photos. It's awful and slow on a brand new top of the line maxed out rMBP when opening my library with ~20k photos. I don't really believe that I'm an outlier in how many photos I take, but the experience is awful, I can't enable any type of debug status / anything to tell me what it's actually doing, can't go back to iPhoto, Aperture is discontinued, and the storage format for the Photos library is not just flat files of the original sources, so it's basically impossible to switch to any other management software for this task (plus the iPhone won't sync with many other pieces of software). iTunes is and has been garbage for a decade and a half at this point, and again it's forced upon you if you use an iPhone. Have a problem with your phone? Forget fixing the configuration despite it all being there (I used to be into jailbreak and you can basically fix anything if you want to badly enough), it's time for a hard reset. Enjoy spending the whole day resetting your 2FA tokens. Look also at what they've done with Final Cut Pro. Combine this with how it's impossible to upgrade the GPU in the current Mac Pro to anything resembling current best-in-class pro performance levels, and it's easy to make the argument that Apple doesn't care about pro users as of about 5 years ago. Ooh yeah, and about Apple Maps, HomeKit, discontinuing wifi routers, the Apple TV, watchOS...
Above all, to me, this represents an internal issue with their leadership. Very few people there seem to know how to manage a software product. Granted it's a difficult thing to do well, but honestly, to me, their losses far outweigh their wins in this space in the past decade. They've had some big missed opportunities and while I don't have insight into their leadership, I don't see that changing any time soon.
Despite all of this, they continue to print money and move tons of product, so I guess from a purely capitalistic standpoint, who cares...but I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts.
* Alexa, call my phone (because I can't find it)
* Alexa, call for Chinese food (okay everyone call out what you want)
* Alexa, send a message to my son -- "I've fallen and I can't get up"
Once it is set up, you can say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to find my phone", which will tell you the address your phone was last seen. You can also say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to ring my phone", which will make your phone ding even if it is on silent.
The "Help! I've fallen and can't get up!" functionality can be had by installing the "Ask My Buddy" skill, which will let you designate emergency contacts which you can notify by voice.
It's not chinese food, but both Dominos and Pizza Hut now have Alexa skills available which will let you order by voice, as well.
In the UK, Just Eat has an Alexa skill - they're one of two major "takeaway aggregators" here.
* Alexa, call the living room: hey everybody, dinner's getting cold!
Allow drop in between your devices in your home, and you can call one from another. Maybe they'll allow call groups and you can call to every room at once.
Third idea is really interesting though, maybe calling the emergency services could be good in that situation too
I tinkered a little bit with this idea when the Echo Dot came out, but these limitations more or less killed my interest in exploring the concept further.
But in general the product has been around in some (generally expensive) form since the '70s.
Alexa Calling will compete with FaceTime, Google Duo, and Skype (amongst others). Do you feel the same way about those other services or is your concern specifically related to the Echo platform?
Google / Skype are both assumed to be MitM'd; Microsoft in fact purposely re-did things to centralize Skype. If I recall correctly, Google Voice was pretty clearly used for training data.
I was thinking about this today, and figured this is the epitome of a dystopian society. We've readily given up our freedoms and privacy in lieu of technology that is able to gather data on us and shared with entities we probably don't approve of, blinded by the "cool" things this technology can do.
Every time I see something like this I get nauseated because people are willing to hand over all their personal data for some shiny new technology that really doesn't do anything really amazing at all. I must be getting old, because it felt like not too long ago, technology was developed to help humans, not to gather data on them and subvert their privacy and treat them like dollar signs.
No. The same Faustian bargain applies to these other services as well. I just think it's worth pointing out that this is not free. You're paying with your data.
I should also point out that the situation has evolved. Back when Skype was new, it was clear they were providing a service in exchange for ad revenue, but not so clear how much conversation data they were retaining if any. As the ad economy evolved perpetual [meta]data retention has become the norm - effectively increasing the cost of using these services.
Do you have a facebook account? LinkedIn? Gmail? All of your points apply there as well.
How is this controversial?
Alexa Calling and Messaging Schedule
... the ability to send and receive messages and calls with other users (collectively, "Alexa Calling and Messaging") ...
1.1 General. Your messages, communications requests (e.g., "Alexa, call Mom"), and related interactions are "Alexa Interactions," ... Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions and related information in the cloud in order to ... improve our services.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
1.3 Alexa Interactions. You control Alexa with your voice. Alexa streams audio to the cloud when you interact with Alexa. Alexa processes and retains your Alexa Interactions, such as your voice inputs, music playlists and your Alexa to-do and shopping lists, in the cloud to provide and improve our services. Learn more about these voice services including how to delete voice recordings associated with your account.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
I personally take "improve" in this context to mean: iteratively analyze and change our services to maximize profits
Would love to see a hack for Google home / Amazon echo that just turns them into dumb SIP devices. :-)
Didn't know GV integrated w/ it though, cool.
Just to be clear for others that can't/didn't read the full article, you can't make full calls to anyone, they have to have at minimum the amazon alexa app.
If anything Android might be worse off, if it's like Prime Video the app won't be available on the Google Play Store and you'll have to install Amazon Underground or w/e they call their app store now manually then download Amazon Prime Video for your device.
I wonder if this is opt-in or opt-out. Honestly if it's opt-out I think Amazon could have a huge backlash on its hands. Not from privacy-minded folks, but from ordinary people who suddenly have people listening to them/viewing them when they don't expect (unless Amazon really makes an effort to make that the expectation).
Alas, this is not being positioned as something mildly intrusive, nor as a creepy big brother-style service (which is the worst case scenario and one that Amazon has been taking pains to avoid in all of its Echo and Alexa products). Rather, Amazon emphasizes that it is opt-in, and a way to communicate with only the very closest members of your family.
