Amazon is considering shoving ads into Alexa+ conversations

Make the bad even worse. Is there a word for this?

Enshitification

I bought an Alexa echo long before I actually cared about privacy and I regret it a lot. It's been a pricey paper weight since then. I wish I could flash some kind of OS and use it as a sound bar or something. I can't even use the Bluetooth without signing in with amazon account, which requires a lot of data including phone number.

Do you have a shotgun? Makes a respectable flying target.
- Once….which is probably the point.

What the fuck is Alexa+ 🤣🤣🤣

After AI became a thing, Amazon decided you needed to pay a subscribtion to use Alexa with an LLM instead of the basic keyword recognition model
- Well someone's gotta pay for that small country's worth of wasted electricity
- Sounds like another case of Amazon trying to out-Amazon itself

Now I'm going to refuse to purchase one even harder!

Not only that, I wouldn't even use one if they paid me. How did they convince people to pay to be spied on and advertised to?
I honestly forgot people even buy these
I was saving up for one. Nvm lol

Like always, Black Mirror has an episode on this.

Easy fix:

Follow-up fix: get home assistant and recreate this yourself with a $15 device
https://esphome.io/projects/index.html
- I started making my own several years ago but got sidelined by health issues and haven't gone back to it. :(
  My end goal is I have a lot of comic books. I want a voice assistant that can query a database and then turn on smart lights to show box locations.
  I got the database done, I got the queries working, then had a heart attack and never got the voice input or smart light output working. :(
- Can I replace AppleHome with this stuff?
- If you can find a hass replacement for the Echo Flex, I will name my firstborn after you.

Their users will accept this.

Not this one. I've been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I'm done.
Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
Ads in Prime Video
Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
Now this, and I don't even own an Alexa device
I'm done. Subscription is cancelled (has been for some time now, but unfortunately it was reupped annual). I've found alternative sources for several things I need to buy monthly/regularly that I previously would purchase on Amazon. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. I've jailbroken my Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader on them. Wasn't a hard transition since I've had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I've started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.
Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It'll be less convenient, and I'll still buy from Amazon in the event I absolutely have to, but I'd like to minimize that now.
- How do you jailbreak your Kindle?
- I have a prime subscription, simply for the delivery and grocery discounts, but the ads on their streaming service have convinced me to stop using it entirely and just pirate all their shows / movies.
- Never had issues sideloading epubs with Calibre on my PW.

I’m amazed it didn't already as someone who has never used or heard one being used. What’s the business model? Just the data harvesting for purpose of their other businesses?

Alexa already periodically makes "suggestions" that are annoying to disable if you misspeak.

Counting down until it starts demanding credit cards in order to function. Maybe as a form of "identity check", as that's been a popular excuse to collect payment information.

Pretty much why we unplugged all of ours. I just need to set a timer, don't tell me extra shit!
To disable suggestions:
"Alexa, stop By The Way"

As if I was ever stupid enough to use Alexa.

Alexa has ads since the beginning and I can’t imagine that would change just because they are replacing the backend with AI. The first time Echo wasted my time trying to selling me something in my own home was also the last time. I don’t understand how anyone can be okay with that.

Fuck, the Echo Show series is basically just a glorified ad machine with a clock feature.

I’m pretty sure Amazon got this idea from Black Mirror’s latest season

Got 8 Google Minis around the house, mostly ceiling mount. First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I'm taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.

You sir, and I say this with no hyperbole; are a hero.
- 🎵I got a shotgun, and here's the plot,
  Takin' Minis out with a flurry of buck shot,
  Boom, boom, boom! Yeah, I was gunnin',
  And then you look, all you see is Googles runnin',
  And fallin' and yellin' and pushin' and screamin',
  And cussin', I stepped back and I kept bustin'🎶
Im sure they'll try to get you to order ammo as they explode.
- pump-action sound>
  "How's your supply of shells? Winchester is having a blowout sale on 00-buck. To learn more..."
First ad that comes out that bitches mouth, I’m taking a 12-gauge to every motherfucking one of them, patch the roof later.
"Further work from our user experience team has resulted in several recommendations, including revising the Google Mini for the North American market to add a Kevlar layer to the case and using data from the accelerometer to treat an abrupt, rapid acceleration with a threshold above a certain level as "undesirable behavior/behavior needs improvement" user feedback to Alexa+'s prior prompt response."

*Amazon testing public backlash before shoving ads into your conversations with Alexa+

FTFY

Calling out Companies is not beneficial to the "Journalists"

Duh. This is the AI wet dream. Ads won't have discrete patterns that can be filtered. The LLM will deliver content specific garbage as if it were a genuine answer to a query. It will just bias towards ads and deliver the ad Ina different personalized manner each time. For as much as everyone likes to bitch about AI. This may be the golden age. It probably just gets worse from here.

Musk on the other hand already experiments on adding ideology and use such bots (makes as regular users) on social media.

Anyone see the newest Black Mirror season?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_%28Black_Mirror%29

That one was hard to watch. It just kept getting worse and worse.
Fuck I was just thinking about "common people" when I saw this. Definitely the best episode of that season
I didn't realize they were still producing episodes. Are they as good as S1-3?
- Some of them are, but a few others feel like rehashing old themes without adding much. Still mostly worth watching imo

I can't even stand when my Google assistant says more than three words to respond 😂 if I start hearing ads out of that thing I will get rid of it faster than anything I've ever done

It won’t be long until the LLMs are trained with for ad-RAG

While each conversation happens a second model will scan it, send the contents to a vector search, return as embedding and a score, then give those outputs silently to the conversing model.

You do need to train/fine tune the model to not mention that it received the ad and subtly push it.

Actually, now that I think about it, you don’t even need to tell the model about the ad, you just weight some of the input tokens with the ad embedding and it naturally biases towards talking about that brand.

"brought to you by Carls Jr."

Fuck you! I'm eating!!

Now introducing Alexa Luxe

Now introducing Alexa Luxe + Pro Max Premium

So, South park?

They already do…

And yet people will buy it, like they did with Nintendo switch 2! See you when it really happens.

Good, make it as terrible as possible.

I'm sorry, people still have or use these things?

Who is this stupid or lazy?

You’re still using Alexa? Unplugged our listening er pod device about a week after we got it.

Same, I got Alexa (the first one with a good speaker) when attended a sales event of another company. I set it up, but after seeing its network activity even when no one was home I shut it down and didn't use it again.
I don't understand why people don't feel weirded out by having an always on listening device.
- Yup, scares the heck out of me. Guess other don’t agree. I am getting downvoted.
Just the messenger, dude.

All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of mount Nicaragua !

They're already making suggestions. Got one this morning telling me I can ask it for updates on Amazon packages.

Speaking of which, anyone have any suggestions for better smart speakers?

I’m not really a smart speaker kind of guy but HomePods are nice, sound quality is pretty good
- Mine isn’t. Do you use the full size, or the mini?