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263

Amazon Mulls $5 to $10 monthly price tag for unprofitable Alexa service, AI revamp (www.reuters.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Amazon (AMZN.O) is planning a major revamp of its decade-old money-losing Alexa service to include a conversational generative AI with two tiers of service and has considered a monthly fee of around $5 to access the superior version, according to people with direct knowledge of the company's plans.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How long till there's a solid project to gut Alexa devices and run them from pis arduinos and pico's?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've been wondering this. I have multiple of the older (non-Dot, the tall, cylindrical ones) Echoes. I hate using them. But I do like the form factor and sound quality.

It probably can't be too hard to gut everything but the speakers, microphone and DC port, then wire in a Pi / Pi Zero, right...?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I assume their motherboard is a write-off. The form factor in speaker are probably all we have to start with. For a few bucks you could turn it into a decent Bluetooth speaker. Want to get a little more intense if you want to do anything interesting like voice control.

I'd really like to find a way to drive the display and touch screen on the shows

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

There's projects that fully replace the Google Home Mini mobo. No reason you couldn't do that with Alexa

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah that's kind of the direction I was thinking. I really want to have access to the screen and the touch controls on the shows though. It'll all come in time.

There's another really wicked side project I saw running on pis. You put a Bluetooth enabled device in every room and it tracks where your items are. So you could ask where your keys aren't to triangulate which room in your house they were in.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I am quite interested in what Google and Apple will do about their voice assistant devices. The New Siri appears to be quite useful, if it can actually do what we saw in WWDC. But Apple hasn't mentioned anything about the HomePods.

Google Home/Nest has been stuck with the dumb version of Google Assistant, and has been getting worse. It has no integration with any other Google services, and there was no mention of Home/Nest in Google I/O.

If either HomePod or Nest gets released without requiring subscriptions, I might move away from Alexa devices.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (17 children)

I'd pay $20 or $30 a year, especially if it meant they'd actually, like, improve the service (which has been almost 100% the same for me for the last 4 years or so).

But $60 to $120 would make me move elsewhere

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