I was going to say that I couldn't even imagine the selling point of this to the average consumer, but I'm not someone who uses my Echo for social uses (i.e. calling, or sending/receiving messages). For the FB/Instagram-addicted crowd, I guess I could see the appeal of being able to do voice-activated messaging, and to look at photo albums. And it's not something FB should want to give API access for to Alexa/Google/Siri.
That said, I think as popular as Echo devices are, people already have a bit of paranoia about them, and that's before considering the controversy FB is now undergoing. Unless the hardware is best-in-class, hard to see how this will fare any better than Facebook's failed attempt at its own phone with HTC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First
> people already have a bit of paranoia about them
I was given one as a gift, and found it useful enough after a few days that I was willing to trust that it wasn't recording unless it detected the activation word locally.
And then I walked into the room while it was carrying on a conversation with my 2 year old, asking his name, etc. Unplugged it and plan to destroy it.
I wonder if the disembodied voice projection via Non-Lethal Laser Induced Plasma Effects discussed the other day[1] could be used to trip Alexa and such into recording --but at that point, maybe just putting a surreptitious piggybacking bug into Alexa might be a better alternative.
I woke up at 2AM to my 3-year-old nephew asking for it to tell him bedtime stories. Though to be fair, I taught him how to invoke that skill from Alexa.
That's an interesting use case! Where does Alexa gets its bedtime stories? Does it read from public domain storybooks or must you purchase them like audio books?
It's an official-branded skill, "Amazon STorytime" that is a built-in for Alexa, e.g. you can invoke it by saying something informal, such as "Tell me a bedtime story" or "Tell me a story", rather than the way other skills are more narrowly namespaced.
It says the app "contains curated stories from the Amazon Rapids app library as well as a selection of Audible short stories". It's pretty good, as it features actors and sound effects. Can't say any of the stories were interesting to me (was hoping for Aesop Fables type stories, which is about all I remember growing up myself).
I couldn't care less about the downvotes - I'm wondering if it's ability to start a multi-question conversation with someone who can't pronounce "Alexa" properly is not worth being paranoid about, at what point would you become concerned?
Not remotely an expert on how those algorithms work - but that's kinda what I'm talking about. If I can be confident it won't activate until someone clearly says, "Alexa", then I'm not too worried because the older kids understand they're not supposed to mess with it in ways we haven't taught them. If my 2-year-old can activate it when he doesn't remotely say it properly, I'm worried about what he can accidentally do on it, what else activates it accidentally, etc.
That said, I think as popular as Echo devices are, people already have a bit of paranoia about them, and that's before considering the controversy FB is now undergoing. Unless the hardware is best-in-class, hard to see how this will fare any better than Facebook's failed attempt at its own phone with HTC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_First