The Ars article on Alexa's financial crash-and-burn inside Amazon missed a lot of the reason people aren't willing to engage with Alexa as much as they could or would, if things were different. First, the privacy aspects are significant. Secondly, the value proposition is just not there - worse, Amazon has deliberately broken one of the most useful things you could do with Echo products: using them for distributed networked audio, a la Sonos: The new generation Echo Show products ELIMINATED the audio output jack, so you can't even plug the output into a stereo or speaker now!

On top of that, the Echo products are just not well built, not well thought out, and have NOT been upgraded to make them better: They update, but with NO visible benefit to the owner. One example: The Echo Show 8 Cannot and will not keep its display off all night, even if you explicitly command "display off" before going to bed (yes, it does understand and temporarily obey this command!) But sometime during the night, something will wake it up, and the damn thing turns into a lighthouse in your bedroom, waking one of us up.

I'd really like to find Alexa more useful, but like most folks I know with one, it's mostly just useful as a glorified voice-controlled radio - I'd use it more to control lights and such, if I could get the damn thing to actually realize waht lights are in what rooms, and that dimmer switches and smart lights can indeed share a location that should be controlled together. (Yes, this is supposed to work, but it doesn't...)

I would pay $500 to outfit the house with a central voice recognition processor that would be capable of supporting a dozen or so very secure listeners on the local LAN. Mycroft isn't that solution.

> The problems with Alexa of suggesting by the way ("Alexa, stop by the way" - give it a try and yes, it is routineable) are tolerable for how much I'm paying for them and the functionality that I use it for.

So cold comfort since it’s annoying as hell, but it slowly learns you don’t like it and will back off its frequency. Amazon unsurprisingly tracks “dissatisfaction” responses and adapts rate of things (globally and individually) so you do actually have to cuss out Alexa to change it. It’s slow because obviously it’s profitable but it does happen.