Submitted 2 weeks ago by throws_lemy@reddthat.com to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.androidauthority.com/alexa-plus-upgrade-for-prime-members-3631851/
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.
Forced upgrades (or downgrades) really are the worst. Same for opt-out services instead of opt-in. Give choice back to the customer goddammit!
Likely only ever happens if a critical number of people stop being customers there.
Enshitification is running its natural course. The best opt-out is removing the subscription. Why pay for tv.
Its the same model as microsoft claiming that all Office users are “copilot” users.
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.
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?
You allow your TV to access to the internet?
I have two smart TVs in the house, but they don’t have access to my network. I don’t use the smart features.
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
Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump’s inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.
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.
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.
Yo, they charge the non-Prime purple 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 convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.
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).
No way my wife ever drops prime.
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.
This is not at all surprising. We got rid of prime about a year ago and generally have avoided buying through Amazon, but on a few occasions, it’s been the only option so we bit the bullet. It was awful.
Prices and shipping listed were for prime members (autoselected of course) with small print nonprime member prices selectable. Their once famously easy purchase process was multiple screens full of “don’t you want to rejoin prime??” pages with the option “join” already checked. Even after selecting the nonmember price and saying no to prime, going to the checkout page revealed an option auto checked for ‘faster shipping’ that was actually an option for rejoining prime. In buying multiple items this was autoselected on each of them separately, so you’re agreeing to prime if you miss changing one.
Even if I have to order from them periodically (which I avoid like the plague), I have no intention of paying for prime again. The whole purchase process is an indicator that dropping prime is making an impact and I want that message to sink in.
For those who have Alexa, downgrading the plan, or even better-- finding an alternative home assistant, will send an equally powerful message, even if Amazon isn’t ready to hear it.
Not surprising. I had to remove my credit card information from Amazon because I kept getting automatically signed up for Prime without my consent.
There a class action lawsuit with a payout. Should be automatic, I hope.
Don’t they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?
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!
Speaking of which, is there a good open source alternative?
To the Alexa interface?
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).
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.
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
Glad I dropped prime when I did then. The videos should be sectorized so as to be available on a non-prime account though
It’s u believable for me, that users all around the world, just ignores the companies litterally forcing their “AI” down your throat. People just see AI as some sort of funny tool, like: “Who cares it’s just ai.” while the whole private ai wave is the easiest way ever, to cellect ALL of your data, since it is fucking hard for regulators, to actually figure out where this huge piles of data gets stored on the endless datacentres all around the globe. It’s like, the whole selling of everybodys data is suddenly ok, as long as its just another ai who does it? We should fucking reject this shit, leave those platforms for good, once they start forcing Copilot and what not, into your lives, just to suck all of your data (including login info, etc).
Cancelling my Prime subscription has saved me so much money, especially since it’s not like you even get the cheapest prices anyways. And of course, I feel more ease knowing I’m not giving my money to Amazon.
My Amazon Fire that I’ve had for ten years finally bricked itself. I’m positive they did it on purpose. I only paid $100 for it, so I guess I still got my money’s worth out of it.
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.
Veedem@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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!”
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks 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.
null@piefed.nullspace.lol 2 weeks ago
Maybe, but how do they respond to the followup “Nice! How?”
PabloSexcrowbar@piefed.social 2 weeks 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.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Not usually. These people tend to be really stupid. There’s a reason why businesses degrees are made fun of so much.