Posted on 11/24/2022 8:54:22 AM PST by Salman
Black Friday is nearly upon us, but the annual online price-drop frenzy seems to be losing its shine. Numerous reports highlight that discounting may not be all it seems, and buyers would be best to shop around.
But behind the scenes, the industry is also seeing the demise of another popular craze Amazon was trying so hard to make a thing. With its voice-interface device, Alexa, the global ecommerce and tech behemoth in 2014 set in train a fashion for speech interfaces in the home, which had keen households around the world demanding their AI house guests to tell them jokes and answer trivia questions.
But why? That's just what Amazon may be wondering. According to reports, its Worldwide Digital unit, which Echo smart speakers and Alexa voice technology fall under, hit an operating loss of over $3 billion. Business Insider also claimed the vast majority of the losses were tied to Amazon's Alexa and other devices.
When asked by The Register, Amazon did not respond to this. Instead, in a statement, Amazon's senior vice president for devices and services David Limp said: "We are as committed as ever to Echo and Alexa, and will continue to invest heavily in them."
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(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
I gave her a sexy Australian accent. My wife hates it.
Well, then I hope they enjoy listening to me running to the bathroom, and swearing profusely.
We have Alexa in a room where we can be heard training our dog.
We also registered our dog with Alexa.
If the Deep State can feed us disinformation we can give it right back to them!
Yes but google is especially evil.
Thanks for the link.
I have a google phone. A pixel 6. I runs Graphene OS, a google free android OS. They may still get my data, but at least they have to work for it.
Just address Alexa in someone else’s house.
Or on a phone call, if they are using speaker?
Don’t really know whether the disablers work. Do yo?
I guess I’ll be unpopular. I like my echo assistant. I have three of them. Great for music, recipes, weather, shopping , calendar and traffic. I don’t mind that they’re listening in. I’m already on the list. Bite me Joe.
We do use Alexa for math and unit conversions—you can get spoiled with that.
Alexa, turn yourself off…
“Three billion loss but still committed to it? “
they gonna make it up in volume ...
What browser do you use on your computer?
On the phone and computer, I Usually Firefox with ublock origin extension. Lots of people like brave and that is good as well. I always have a vpn on as well. Again,not unbeatable, I offer them nothing of my data. It just makes it harder for them to steal.
Avoid chrome like the plague, it is the greatest surveillance tool ever made.
Thanks l use Brave, it’s Chrome based but supposedly without the snooping. That’s what they claim at least.
Brave is built off the Chromium open source project. Creepy google’s version “chrome” is also built from it but adds all the google apps and surveillance.
Chromium ( the open source version) is a great browser if you harden it with ublock, etc.
Yes you’re correct. I should have been more specific. It’s sort of like the Linux distros. There’s a lot of variation.
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