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Amazon is forcibly upgrading Prime members to Alexa Plus, and users are not happy (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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  • 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.
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[–] 12 points 10 months ago (8 children)

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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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    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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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    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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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Do you have a plan? I have a Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition and it's great but I don't think it can do unit conversions without connecting it to an LLM. Timers work locally.

    I guess if it's an equation you could add automation to pick up on the phrase and reply with the conversion, but that would need each unit to be manually done and wouldn't work for things like currency conversion that needs live data.

    Also arbitrary things would be challenging, like converting tablespoons of butter into grams or grams of rice into cups.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    My hope is that I can use custom sentences to send values to a script or service that, in-turn, will trigger an appdaemon app where I can do all the work in python. I'm not sure about returning the calculated value as a response though.

    That's how I built my harmony hub replacement.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Home assistant has an automation event that lets you set the conversation result, but you've already passed my ability haha so I can't tell you how to pull the result in from an external service.

    It may well be worth building it as a home assistant integration rather than just custom sentence triggered automations.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I hadn't really considered writing an integration but this is more general purpose than my universal remote.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    Well if you do, contribute it to home assistant and I'll install it 😆, it's actually a little surprising conversions aren't supported natively but I guess there is a lot to cover and they will get there eventually.

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