Oh, Noes! My Wife Ordered an Amazon Echo! [View all]

[MineralMan]

Just joking. She did order one, after we visited some good friends who has one. They used it to play some music while we were there, and we all played with asking Alexa stupid questions.

So, there's one arriving at our door today, thanks to Amazon Prime.

Since it only responds when you say, "Alexa," it has to be listening all the time for that keyword. And, since there's no artificial intelligence in the actual $100 device, that means that everything goes somewhere in the cloud to be interpreted and whatever action taken is taken.

A lot of people fret over Amazon listening and saving what it hears. Not me. I don't care. Amazon's interested in selling stuff, and we're not averse to ordering stuff through Amazon. So, whatever it's listening to is in response to that urge on the company's part to sell some more junk to us.

Amazon isn't interested in our mundane conversations about the news on TV, or our admonitions to the cat to "Get Down From There, Dammit!" Nope. All that stuff ends up in the bit bucket for disposal. If my wife says, "Fuck you, Trump" while we're watching MSNBC in the afternoon, it's not going to surprise Alexa, I'm sure. She hears that all the time. Alexa wants to stream an Eagle's album to us, or tell us what the weather is like in the 93015 zip code area.

Well, Alexa doesn't really want those things, because Alexa is a computer voice, which feeds speech recognition to algorithms that break down what we ask Alexa to do and has her say the answer or play the music. There is no Alexa - only a huge database and some AI software that is getting better all the time.

I'll bet Alexa speaks several languages, too. I'm going to test that with the languages I can speak, but I'm sure she'll understand, as long as I'm not speaking in Urdu or something.

Alexa would like us to order stuff through her, too, I'm sure, and would gladly put it on my wife's Amazon credit card, but we're not that stupid. We'll go to Amazon.com and do our usual careful shopping, instead.

So, the Echo is coming, and I just can't wait to see what silly things I can get Alexa to respond to. I'm funny like that.