Thread by @QuinnyPig

And now, a thread on my @alexa99 experiences.

I begin by asking you to please miss me with "don't put surveillance devices in your home" style takes. We all decide our own level of risk.

Let's start by counting how many I have in my home. One misheard me and opened some sort of app a week ago, refused to "stop" "be quiet," or "STFU" so it's now unplugged.

Not including that one, I have ~6 dedicated devices or so scattered throughout my home.

I use them for music, controlling lights, white noise to help the kids sleep, and a few other odds and ends.

The lights periodically decide to stop working with these things, leading to delightful reset experiences.

At one point I tried to put all the IoT devices on a dedicated wifi network; the Show devices made me retype my Amazon password by hand. This is monstrous.

When it works, you don't really notice it. When it doesn't work you feel like a fool.

I got a free @ring Wifi light bulb with my last Echo Show, and after half an hour trying to get it to pair with the Echo I laughed and threw it in the e-waste bin.

In the early days I wrote a custom Alexa skill to respond to "ask MUNI when the next bus is." That apparently stopped working during the pandemic and I haven't been bothered enough to fix it yet.

"What's the temperature right now" is the magic incantation to get @alexa99 to just tell me the current temp without reading me 'War and Peace' until recently, when it started following up with "...by the way" and launching into a monologue again.

The sound quality has improved. The latency on music is lower. And the microphones hear me better. Other than that, my @alexa99 experience is worse along every axis than it was when I started using these things years ago.

What are all of the new hires doing over there?

I like tech toys. I'm kinda your perfect audience for this stuff. But the fact that I see no quality of life enhancements day to day in the experience of using these devices means that there's something that's missing from the customer perspective.