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Amazon Unveils New Echo Speakers with Alexa+ AI and Omnisense Technology
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I got 4 and the connection with Spotify Connect is getting worse and worse like they just refuse to play music together and my basic Echo Show shouldn't have ever been released, it's been slow AF from day one and ironically bad at simply showing the time + weather?
I am pretty much using them as a Bark alert of my dog when I am out at this point
I am pretty much using them as a Bark alert of my dog when I am out at this point
Nice to know about the new devices. Not going to get one. Have an older model of Echo device and I hardly use it.
They offer their services for free because they harvest our information, and people can't resist free. Perhaps if they start charging subscriptions in lieu of data harvesting, there would be an exodus? I wouldn't miss them. We've lived without them all before.
Uhm so this thing is constantly listening? Is it processing all that data locally? I highly doubt it. That seems to be quite some invasive data scraping...
PASS
PASS
I don't have any shows, but I do have four dots, one of them is pretty old and one Echo 4th gen.
No adverts on them, they work with my smart home stuff and good for a bit of music or radio. The 4th gen echo sound quality is Okay.
I thought the Alexa+ was going to be available to everyone, even with older units, have a faster smart speaker is not going to make a lot of difference as all the processing is done by Amazon. No doubt, this will take a while to reach the UK.
I doubt will bother to buy any more units, I have enough, not sure about this Alexa+, I know it is early days, but been reading that a few people have problems with it
No adverts on them, they work with my smart home stuff and good for a bit of music or radio. The 4th gen echo sound quality is Okay.
I thought the Alexa+ was going to be available to everyone, even with older units, have a faster smart speaker is not going to make a lot of difference as all the processing is done by Amazon. No doubt, this will take a while to reach the UK.
I doubt will bother to buy any more units, I have enough, not sure about this Alexa+, I know it is early days, but been reading that a few people have problems with it
And you think your Apple stuff is not doing the same thing?
Sadly, it is happening everywhere and if you believe that Apple don't data scrape, then I have a bridge to sell you
This is just my opinion but I could care less that they have ads. I have a bunch of echo show and speakers around the house and they sound decent enough for the price (they are almost always on sale) and I find them helpful, and Alexa is my go to for home automation, I gave up on HomeKit long ago. So they have ads? So it may be listening and watching? I have nothing to hide let them watch and listen. I could care less. My echo show 15 has a full fire tv UI and it’s very useful to me in my kitchen. I respect that people may be bothered by this but I don’t mind it. As for these devices I think they’re a bit overpriced and again, wait for the inevitable sale.
The killer feature has to be home cinema. 5 echo dots, 3 at the front and two for rears. This is the one thing i really want from the homepods. Two at the front, mini for the centre and two minis for the rears. Come on Apple make it happen 
Have you actually used it? A product that hasn’t even been released (at least in the UK). Even if it’s only half as good as ChatGPT5, that’s still a massive upgrade and lightyears better than Siri pretending to be useful.
And yes, even if they paid me to put a billboard with a speaker in my living room just to nag me with ads, I’d still say no.
Well, sell me that bridge then. Apple does not listen in on my house, as confirmed by my firewall.
It's amazing what some people will overlook with their Apple colored glasses on lolllllllll
The killer feature has to be home cinema. 5 echo dots, 3 at the front and two for rears. This is the one thing i really want from the homepods. Two at the front, mini for the centre and two minis for the rears. Come on Apple make it happen
This is a new feature that is exclusive to the new dots just being released. So just for the 5 dots you are paying 500 dollars, if you want better sound use the amazon studio dot and that’s another 220 dollars each. So one needs to spend around 500 (dot) to 1000+ (studio) dollars for a subpar sound system instead of just going out and buying a decent one? It feels like a solution in search of a problem. This is not a killer feature, the only thing it’s killing is your wallet.
If you happen to have an Echo with a screen, set it to do not disturb between 12:00 am and 11:59 pm, and it will become a clock that turns your lights on and off if you ask it.
To be clear, these do have some great use cases.
I think it’s why so many of us are frustrated that Apple has been so impotent in this category.
A more privacy focused option would be very welcome by many.
Of course Apple does it too. All the big tech companies do. But I’ve had way more instances of talking about something and then getting ads for it when I had an echo than when I got rid of it and replaced it with a HomePod. Between Amazon and Apple, I don’t trust either, but I distrust Amazon more.
We had an early Echo dot I got for free as a tech conference giveaway. We used it in our kitchen to play the radio and Spotify, and via IFTTT to add items to our iCloud shopping list. Ditched it when it became pretty unreliable at music, I assume because it was several years old and couldn't keep up with API updates.
We replaced it with a HomePod mini, thinking it would be even more seamless in our 100% Apple household and boy oh boy what a piece of crap it is. We got it a couple of years ago and it still can't recognize my wife's voice about 75% of the time ("who's speaking?" "you'll need to authenticate on your iPhone first") even though it's setup through her account. Siri gets dictation wrong far more often than it gets it right, it's sluggish as hell, playing music through it is cumbersome, it randomly starts (or stops) audio playback, the Home app tells you it's playing when it's not and vice versa, and it otherwise enrages us almost every time we use it.
Do I trust Apple with privacy far more than Amazon? Absolutely. But the HomePod mini is so incredibly horrible, and the Echo Dot I got my parents several months ago has worked so flawlessly, that I'm likely to put a Bezos surveillance bot (Dot or Dot Max, not Show) back in my kitchen.
We replaced it with a HomePod mini, thinking it would be even more seamless in our 100% Apple household and boy oh boy what a piece of crap it is. We got it a couple of years ago and it still can't recognize my wife's voice about 75% of the time ("who's speaking?" "you'll need to authenticate on your iPhone first") even though it's setup through her account. Siri gets dictation wrong far more often than it gets it right, it's sluggish as hell, playing music through it is cumbersome, it randomly starts (or stops) audio playback, the Home app tells you it's playing when it's not and vice versa, and it otherwise enrages us almost every time we use it.
Do I trust Apple with privacy far more than Amazon? Absolutely. But the HomePod mini is so incredibly horrible, and the Echo Dot I got my parents several months ago has worked so flawlessly, that I'm likely to put a Bezos surveillance bot (Dot or Dot Max, not Show) back in my kitchen.
Think about what you're saying here, in reality.
The implications of this are pretty dark.
It's essentially "make a product that works great and I don't really care what you do to my privacy, with my data or even with my rights (eventually it gets to this)".
The "system" we have here necessitates sending a signal with your wallet. If people won't even do that, we are really headed to dark places.