https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64371426
'To begin with, Abigail Barnes loved her voice assistant. Now it lives in the
drawer.
"I used [my Amazon Alexa] to turn on the lights or set a timer, and as a
speaker for books and podcasts," says the 43-year-old Londoner. "She turned my
fan on and off during the heatwave and played me Christmas music in the
winter."
Ms Barnes would ask her device to set alarms, tell her the time or for the
weather forecast.
"I kept my first Alexa in the kitchen and, a few months later, I got a second
Alexa and set it up in my bedroom."
However, Ms Barnes fell out of love with her voice assistants when they began
giving her frequent delivery notifications, asking her to review purchases or
prompting her to reorder items.
"It started giving me random updates or asking me to rate a product I'd bought
last month," she says, "which I found really irritating."
She became concerned about conversation data "being stored in a cloud
somewhere". Then she found the voice commands became unreliable.
"I stopped asking her to turn off the lights when I went to bed, as I'd ask a
number of times and then manually turn them off anyway."
What started out saving her time, she says, quickly became something that cost
time.'
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
