Alexa users who are Amazon Prime members are reportedly being automatically upgraded to Alexa Plus. Users who have been upgraded can revert to the old Alexa by saying, “Alexa, exit Alexa Plus.” One user claims that they were “flooded with ads” after downgrading back to Alexa.
Maybe I’m now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.
My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I’m probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.
Yeah - do you have a tv? It is a smart one right? With the wiretap built in?
No. I haven’t had a TV since around 2000. I use monitors, and always have an extra laying around if needed.
My "smart"TV is not online at all but I still see ads that seem targeted for the most part. OTA is a dying platform I think, though
I have two smart TVs in the house, but they don’t have access to my network. I don’t use the smart features.
Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump’s inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.
They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”
It worked for Microsoft. The month after they started to force install Teams in windows they published user numbers showing how teams had sprinted ahead of Slack by that metric, and the tech press mostly ate it up.
Maybe, but how do they respond to the followup “Nice! How?”
That’s probably not a question that’ll get asked, unfortunately. What will get asked is why those numbers dropped off abruptly the next quarter.
Why would it not get asked? It’s the most obvious, logical followup
As a shareholder, you are financially incentivised to not question narratives the company presents if they supposedly present the company in a good light.
Suppose you do ask, the narrative unravels and the share price tanks. Congrats, you’ve just lost a buttload of money. Why would you do that?
No, best option is to applaud loudly, tout it in the press and watch useful idiots buy your shares at inflated prices.
The people who do ask the questions are the people the company doesn’t feel obliged to answer.
Large Shareholders some care about how the line goes up, just that it does. Constantly. Every quarter.
Then they wouldn’t even be the people getting told this information about subscription numbers, so I’m still not sure how it’s supposed to work
Subscription info is definitely part of the information provided to investors. The raw numbers may not be in the financial documents, but revenue from subscriptions most definitely is and will give a general idea of changes even if the company doesn’t give the numbers directly.
Right, but again, if they’re that birds-eye-view, then the bump in subs in one spot is negated by the drop in the other and the net result they’re looking at is what they care about.
Not usually. These people tend to be really stupid. There’s a reason why businesses degrees are made fun of so much.
I mean, do you have any examples of companies trying to pull this? Where they automigrate one base of users to another tier of whatever it may be, and then successfully pretend it was organic growth?
You’re talking internal accountability. That doesn’t apply at this scale.
The accountability here is to shareholders. And they don’t care about why, just quarterly profits and growth.
This is a good one: https://lemmy.world/post/41564641
Amazon also got in trouble for auto enrolling people in prime.
This is a good one: https://lemmy.world/post/41564641
Did you link the wrong post?
Amazon also got in trouble for auto enrolling people in prime.
In trouble with investors for tricking them?
Microslop and automigration to the copilot containing 365 sub rather than the default lower priced sub.
They automatically moved customers to a tier that cost them more money than it did for them previously?
Yes, at least in Europe they did. Went from 59€/y to 99€/y
When was that? I can’t find anything about it in a search.
Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are “copilot” users.
Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!
Enshitification is running its natural course. The best opt-out is removing the subscription. Why pay for tv.
Likely only ever happens if a critical number of people stop being customers there.
I have the original Echo, and it still works. For some reason I had it running and it had an alert recently. So I asked what it was, and Alexa promoted being able to upgrade and told me how it’s so much better and stuff. And told me I just had to give it the go to upgrade.
So I did. And then AND THEN it told me my device is too old.
Fucking POS. I unplugged it again. I use it as a stand for my HomePod Mini.
I have a HomePod household and I’m getting ready to kill that off honestly. Apple using Gemini for Siri later this year has me finally pull them out and doing locally hosted assistant stuff.
Call me old, but save for my phone, I don’t have any ‘smart’ anything. My desktop is running linux mint and my webcam is more than 12 or 13 years old and it is unplugged when not in use. I am doing just fine, thank you. My phone is probably listening to me, but all it hears is youtube political commentary videos against Trump.
The ads I get are super generic and talking about shit I REALLY don’t care about or apply to me, so I think that I am doing fine when it comes to ad avoidance.
Wtf is alexa? Voice bot? Why do people need that
Its a CIA-style listening device that people pay for and proudly install and display in their home, gathering data on them, sharing it with Amazon and anyone they care to sell or make that data available to - including police.
Ostensibly all to provide short voice answers and actions they could do privately with their phone in seconds.
Gotta begin to question the utility of a device that exists to antagonize you, even after I’ve explicitly gone through the options menu and disabled all the “Would you like us to continue antagonizing you?” toggles.
I dumped Amazon ten years ago, when I got scammed by a third party seller and Amazon did fuck-all to help. Amazon doesn’t extend the same protections to third party sellers, I suppose that’s in the TOS, which I’m sure everyone has read carefully.
I could go into detail how the scam worked, and probably still does work. The jist is, shippers don’t provide full addresses to Amazon, only the zip code. So, if the scammer shows that they have a shipping receipt for a zip code, Amazon just trusts that the box was shipped to the correct address. Turns out they shipped an empty box to a local restaurant–it took a lot of calls to find that out.
AND there are many “free” tracking apps where people are tricked to give their valid tracking codes to see the shipment status. The owner then resells those valid tracking codes in bulk to scammers
I convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.
No way my wife ever drops prime.
Curious if you don’t mind explaining why? I can completely understamd not wanting Amazon Spyware in your home, but if you already have it and use it, what about this upgrade becomes a turnoff? Alexa was always a frustratingly dumb hands free AI. The upgrade seems like it should have happened a long time ago and at least brings a little bit more intelligence to the conversation and better natural language processing. I’m curious why people wouldn’t want that?
It being dumb was a selling point. I’ve wanted to dump it for ages but my wife used it (mainly for timers and unit conversions) somewhat frequently. But as someone who spends most of her day dealing with problems caused by LLM slop, she refuses to ever use them herself.
I also promised I’d do my best to get Home Assistant Voice set up so it can do math and unit conversions (sans Truthiness engine).
Do you have a plan? I have a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and it’s great but I don’t think it can do unit conversions without connecting it to an LLM. Timers work locally.
I guess if it’s an equation you could add automation to pick up on the phrase and reply with the conversion, but that would need each unit to be manually done and wouldn’t work for things like currency conversion that needs live data.
Also arbitrary things would be challenging, like converting tablespoons of butter into grams or grams of rice into cups.
My hope is that I can use custom sentences to send values to a script or service that, in-turn, will trigger an appdaemon app where I can do all the work in python. I’m not sure about returning the calculated value as a response though.
That’s how I built my harmony hub replacement.
Home assistant has an automation event that lets you set the conversation result, but you’ve already passed my ability haha so I can’t tell you how to pull the result in from an external service.
It may well be worth building it as a home assistant integration rather than just custom sentence triggered automations.
Yeah, I hadn’t really considered writing an integration but this is more general purpose than my universal remote.
Well if you do, contribute it to home assistant and I’ll install it 😆, it’s actually a little surprising conversions aren’t supported natively but I guess there is a lot to cover and they will get there eventually.
Yo, they charge the non-Prime people fucking $10 a month for it. Is that just the “ad-free tier” now?
With Alexa, there will never be an ad-free tier. You’re just paying to have the ads be less obvious/disruptive.
I disconnected my Echo devices when Amazon Sidewalk was rolling out. I’m not even sure what Alexa Plus even is. I was back at my parent’s house for the holidays and they still have Echo devices. Mine never just randomly started announcing stuff but oh man they do now. Like I’m just sitting there reading a book in a dead silent room and it scares the crap out of me just prattling on.
Don’t they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?
Speaking of which, is there a good open source alternative?
To the Alexa interface?
Closest I found is home assistant voice. This is a link to the hardware but it links the software too Home Assistant Voice
Worth noting you need both the speaker part and the server part. Home assistant sells both as out of the box ready to go but you do need both parts.
It’s also worth noting it’s a Preview Edition, as in not yet consumer ready.
It works but you will find quirks, and will find things it can’t do that you’d expect it to, and things it can do that others can’t.
It’s also very customisable, if you’re a bit technical (honestly you don’t need to be that technical these days, it has come a long way).
My god. Duckduckgo “open doorbell”… uh, no, not “the best video doorbells” or “wireless open doorbell chimes”.
Fine “foss doorbel” it is.
Foss TREND Drklokke DESIGN
U what??
Foss Europe Elektrogeräte
Foss Europe Trend Wireless Doorbell
yeah fuck you.
Alternative question: any search engine or ddg/google hack to strictly keep shopping to the feckin shopping category?!
Do you need the doorbell hardware itself to be open source? Or just compatible with self hosted open source software?
If just the latter take a look at Reolink products. You can block their internet access and they still work great locally with Home Assistant and whatever NVR you want. DoorBird and a few others have HA support as well.
