Amazon is forcibly upgrading Prime members to Alexa Plus, and users are not happy

Comments

• Veedem@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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!”

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  • Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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  • null@piefed.nullspace.lol ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Maybe, but how do they respond to the followup “Nice! How?”

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    • PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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    • LodeMike@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Not usually. These people tend to be really stupid. There’s a reason why businesses degrees are made fun of so much.

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• paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• UnspecificGravity@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are “copilot” users.

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• mr_might44@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Likely only ever happens if a critical number of people stop being customers there.

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• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  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.

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• hansolo@lemmy.today ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Yo, they charge the non-Prime purple fucking $10 a month for it. Is that just the “ad-free tier” now?

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  • Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    With Alexa, there will never be an ad-free tier. You’re just paying to have the ads be less obvious/disruptive.

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• b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Serves you right, Amazon victims. I hope your lords and masters at Amazon will spray you orange and force you eat lukewarm oysters in public by the dozen for only $999/month. And you’ll be grateful, because you love to be fleeced. Also, it’s basically a bargain and your neighbours don’t have it!

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• Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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?

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    • Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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).

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• Ch3rry314@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Speaking of which, is there a good open source alternative?

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  • NinjaTurtle@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    To the Alexa interface?

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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?!

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• scops@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I let my Prime expire three days ago, yet they still upgraded me last night. I’ve already downgraded. We’ll see if it continues to badger me to upgrade like it has the past couple months.

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