Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
Running AI is so expensive that Amazon will probably charge you to use Alexa in future, says outgoing exec::In an interview with Bloomberg, Dave Limp said that he “absolutely” believes that Amazon will soon start charging a subscription fee for Alexa
We need to move AI from the cloud to our own hardware running in our homes. Free, open source, privacy focused hardware. It’ll eventually be very affordable.
That’s already here. Anyone can run AI chatbots similar too, but not as intelligent, Chatgpt or Bard.
Llama.cpp and koboldcpp allow anyone to run models locally, even with only a CPU if there’s no dedicated graphics card available. And there are numerous open source models available.
Hell, you can even run llama.cpp on Android phones.
This has all taken place in just the last year or so. In five to ten years, imo, AI will be everywhere and may even replace the need for mobile Internet connections in terms of looking up information.
Yes, and you can use run a language model like Pygmalion Al locally on koboldcpp and have a naughty AI chat as well. Or non sexual roleplay
In five to ten years, imo, AI will be everywhere and may even replace the need for mobile Internet connections in terms of looking up information.
You’re probably right, but I kinda hope you’re wrong.
Don’t these models require rather a lot of storage?
God I wish, I would just love local voice control to turn my lights and such on and off… but noooooooooooo
I have that using Wiz lights and ITEEE
It’s the year of the voice for Home Assistant. Given their current trajectory, I’m hopeful they’ll have a pretty darn good replacement for the most common use cases of Google Home/Alexa/Siri in another year. Setting timers, shopping list management, music streaming, doorbell/intercom management. If you’re on the fence about a Nabu Casa subscription, pull the trigger as it helps them stay independent and not get bought out or destroyed by commercial interests.
Thumbs up for Nabu Casa and Home Assistant!
I haven’t yet played with the local voice stuff but have been following it with interest. Actually, now that Taspberry Piis are starting to become available again, I’m on the fence between buying a few more, vs finding something with a little more power, specifically for voice processing
I do wonder how much of those voice assistants could run on-device. Most of what I use Bixby for (I know. I KNOW.) is setting timers. I think simple things like that can run entirely on the phone. It’s got a shocking amount of processing in it.
While you may have points against Apple and how effective Siri may be, with this latest version kind of products, even the watch has enough processing power to do voice processing on device. No ads. No cloud services
Pretty much. If you want a voice assistant right now, Siri is probably the best in terms of privacy. I bought a bunch of echos early, then they got a little shitty but I was in, and now I just want them out of my house except for one thing - music. Spotify integration makes for easy multi-room audio in a way that doesn’t really work as well on the other platform that I’ll consider (Apple/Siri) and basically adds sonos-like functionality for a tiny fraction of the price. The Siri balls and airplay are just not as good, and of course, don’t work as well with Spotify.
But alexa is so fucking annoying that at this point I mostly just carry my phone (iPhone) and talk to that even though it’s a little less convenient because I’m really goddamned tired of hearing “by the way…”
Alexa is more like a telemarketer disguised as an assistant. Every interaction is followed by a “by the way . Its a shit experience so I stopped using mine.
Alexa was designed explicitly for that purpose. They lose money on every Echo sold, the whole idea was they would make money selling you stuff. Turns out people would rather use their Echo to check the weather, get recipes, etc. rather than voice shop.
I just can’t see a use case for voice shopping. There are almost zero instances where I want to buy something without having a visual of that thing in front of me at time of purchase.
I could possibly see something like “buy another stick of deodorant”, but even then I want to see if there are deals or some other options and would want to check the price at a minimum.
Seems like yet another MBA idea.
Ha, I use mine almost exclusively as a light switch. I don’t have to get out of bed to turn off my lights or turn on my fan. I’m sure they’re losing a bunch of money on me
I use mine to stream spotify.
It’s also good for setting a timer. But yeah, I’m not buying shit from it.
Setting all my Alexa’s to UK English got rid of all marketing “by the ways.” I still regret going with the Alexa ecosystem but at least for now there is a workaround for the most rage inducing part of it.
By the way, did you know that you can find out more about telemarketing with an audio book from audible on the subject. Would you like to hear a preview of that now?
So they expect that people pay for being spied upon and seriously data mined?
Yes and people will pay for it.
Sometimes I can’t help thinking some people deserve to be taken advantage of.
I don’t know about that. They never delivered on Smart Home promises and the only truly useful thing my Google AI does is to give me the forecast. Otherwise it’s just a wifi speaker.
If they finally integrate Bard, I would actually consider paying for the service.
We have a Google mini. They listen to my six year old request the song Poopy Bum Bum all day. The ads get interesting.
So they get massive amounts of free data for Machine Learning, but want to charge users for supplying it?
That’s often the case. They can have their cake and eat it too. Shareholders would expect nothing less.
I wake my echo and then grind coffee beans.
I think the data is probably less valuable than people think, especially if the users expect an AI response whenever a data point can be collected from them.
Alexa isn’t nearly good enough to pay for. I basically use it for timers, math, weather, and conversions.
Yep, used to be much better. There was SO much potential with it too. I wish there was a Smart Speaker with integration into ChatGPT. Id love to stand in the shower and ask it shit
You can do this with a Siri shortcut.
It still falls short because LLMs aren’t smart, they’re just approximately not wrong most of the time.
Yeah, they’re all pretty disappointing. I’d love to have something that feels like how movies portray digital assistants. Movie assistants never misunderstand you or say “I’m sorry, I couldn’t recognize your voice”. I’ve mostly used the Google one and it’s so bad at doing what I feel like is feasible even with inaccuracy.
Eg, I’ve tried to tell my assistant to like a song that was currently playing on YTM but could not find a voice command that worked (and some commands backfired by making it skip to the next song). I’ve had very poor success with getting assistant to cast something to my Chromecast with my voice. It sometimes works, but it fails or gets it wrong so often that it’s not worth the time.
Sometimes I use it for rewinding (e.g., “ok google, rewind 30 seconds”) because many apps don’t have granular rewind buttons and tracking on the track bar is way too inaccurate. But lol, it’s so slow! It takes a few seconds to figure out what I said (so I have to ask it to rewind more than I wish) and it seems every app is unoptimized for rewinding, as it usually takes several seconds of loading.
It can’t really do any kind of research either. You basically can just ask it to google things and it sometimes is able to extract the meaningful part from simple questions. It’s a far way from how Hollywood thinks a digital assistant will work.
Just FYI, Alexa records everything you speak into it, you can listen to it here:
And much of it can be listened to by staff that are hired to label it to train the model.
I already don’t use it, you don’t have to sell me on it.
I never got the appeal of those things even ignoring how their design is the antithesis of privacy. It just seems dumb to talk to the computer box, like it’s a thing to talk to when it’s just a microphone and software. I simply prefer direct, precise, and silent control of devices
It’s good for hands/device free control. Setting timers while cooking by simply saying “set a timer” or controlling lights from across the room without fiddling with a phone or remote.
It’s very sci fi. Star Trek amongst many others from the 80s. If you are old enough then you would remember that this was the stuff of fantasy. I can see why it appeals to people with disabilities and possibly kids for homework or something. But I am 1000 percent with you on the privacy part. No thanks.
Alexa has a feature where you tell it you’re leaving the house and it will listen for smoke detectors or breaking glass, alerting you through your phone if it detects something. Amazon is putting that behind a paywall next year.
Let me in your house and I’ll observe it for you for less money
I have doubts alexa is using AI, seen how dumb it is, but well
From the article:
Amazon has bet big on AI, with the company unveiling a new, AI-powered version of Alexa alongside updated versions of its Echo Frames and Carrera smart glasses last week.
…charge me to use Alexa?
I already avoid it like the plague.
Good luck, I guess? Got the first Google home, at first it was great, I was asking it tons of questions. Then the questions stopped, used it for turning on the lights and other automations. Then I installed Home Assistant and the only command Google Home got was to set a timer to know when to pull things out of the oven. Eventually I stopped doing that.
At the moment all Google/Nest Homes are on mute, I only use them to stream music in my house from my NAS via Plex. So yeah…
I still use mine for voice commands with home assistant. Works great.
All mine to is turn lights on and off… very occasionally they might be used to find a phone, or set a reminder, but I wouldn’t miss it if that went.
I wondered if I was unusual in not using the voice features much, but according to this thread it seems I’m not.
Something tells me that they’ll still listen to you for free.
Ok. I’ll be the weirdo. If it’s actually useful, I would pay for it.
Not if it’s just the parlor trick that it currently is.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I’m concerned. All of it lives squarely in “huh…neat” territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
This is why I’m so confused by Amazon’s approach. I know they’ve already sunk millions if not billions of dollars into this, so why has the user experience not improved in the last 8 years?
I’m not going to buy things with my voice when just getting the lights to turn off or music to play can be an infuriating endeavor. Speech recognition has stagnated.
The third party integrations are just so clunky too. They could have made money by selling licenses to businesses in order to access the service, but again, they haven’t improved that experience at all.
The “Alexa, let me talk to dominos.” or “Alexa, ask LG to turn off the TV” is just stupidly cumbersome. Why can’t you set up preferred providers? I don’t have to say “ask Spotify to play music” I just say “play music”, so we know it’s possible. It would be trivial to implement other preferred service providers compared to the overall scale of Alexa.
They thought people would be like “Alexa, but me a ton of shit on Amazon” but people just use it for timers and the weather
“Alexa, release the Roombas”
30 roombas make their way out from under my bed
Yeah, can you imagine trusting that thing to buy stuff for you? Bit scary, actually.
They had those “re-order product” physical buttons for a while which you were supposed to glue to your washing machine so you could reorder when your detergent ran out.
Besides legal issues (at least over here all they could do is put things in your shopping cart) apparently the primary customers of those buttons were hardware hackers, turning them into all kinds of stuff.
Their using the public to train AI. Then charging the public for the AI it trained.
Oh no!
I’ll just have to install a weather app and use the timer on my stove instead of using Alexa.
I use Alexa as a way to use an old speaker system. I wouldn’t pay to use any “smart” speaker systems. They are pretty dumb and I’ve already paid once
We upgraded our technologies so much that it’a becoming unsustainable for us, so we are increasing prices.
They’re never going to be satisfied with the amount of money that have.
All I want alexa to do is turn my lights on and off, set timers, and show me my own pictures. And it can BARELY do that without fucking it up. Everyone I know wants the same, they expect nothing more from it. “AI” features of Alexa aren’t t needed or wanted by anyone I’ve talked to about it.
My Home Assistant Voice is getting really close to displacing Alexa.
Has Amazon considered making a stationary AI?
Running AI may be currently expensive, but the hardware will continue to improve and get cheaper. If they institute a subscription fee and people actually pay for it, they’ll never remove that fee even after it becomes super cheap to run.
They won’t be charging me, because I don’t buy shit from Amazon, and don’t use their spy platform.
I don’t understand this. Hasn’t Intel or Nvidia (or someone else) been making claims about their next CPUs having AI functionality built-in?
Well so far my Google Smart speakers have two functions:
Voice activated timer Wi-Fi speaker that I only ever cast to with my phone, never actually talk to them.
Don’t think I’ll miss that if they decide to charge for it.
As someone at a company still using free AI credits in their commercial products and hasn’t figured out how he’s going to price the shit when the credits are up… this AI market looks a lot like Uber subsidies…
We’re seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can’t grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.
My guess, if you want to have decent services we’re going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the “free” stuff that is/will get enshittified.
Kalkaline@leminal.space 1 year ago
Alexa is so bad though. Who’s going to pay for that?
LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 1 year ago
“By the way, you can now pay for Alexa AI option if you want me to reply in a slightly smarter way, but I will still cut you off with ads and other useless things. To activate AlexaAI say activate”
db2@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
“Welcome to the PiHole, Alexa.”
JonEFive@midwest.social 1 year ago
“No”
“I heard ‘activate’. Thank you! Your credit card will be charged $129 annually. To cancel, please log on to the website because there’s no way we’re letting you get out of this mess the same way we got you into it.”
FireTower@lemmy.world 1 year ago
*to the same degree of intelligence as you’ve previously experienced. (Ps if you don’t we’re making Alexa have a room temp IQ)
tdawg@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Guess we’ll find out when they finally pull the trigger
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Still better than Siri …
glimpseintotheshit@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Siri was always shit but somehow managed to devolve even further lately. I never trusted her to do more than than turning lights on or off but now this shit happens:
Me: Siri, turn off the lights in the living room
Siri: OKAY, WHICH ROOM? BATHROOM, BEDROOM, KITCHEN, HALLWAY, LIVING ROOM?
Imagine living in a mansion with this cunt
pyldriver@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Mine can’t ever seem to tell the difference between on and off if there is any sound in my house
atx_aquarian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I use “turn on ___” and “kill ___”. Much more reliable matches.
scarabic@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I get tired of the outrage-headline game.