|
It'll be half-finished with promises to be updated later before being largely forgotten about after the interesting parts are done and it's just bug-fixes and background work that no one wants to do.
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 16:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 07:34 |
|
|
bobfather posted:On the contrary. I'm sure it will be cheap and good, like all Google services, but will persistently listen to everything you say and have a 30 page privacy policy which lets Google profile your voice data on everything from the products you talk about to the moans you make during intercourse. Spoken like somebody who doesn't remember Google Wave . More to the point, somebody who doesn't remember Google TV, Google Power Meter, Google Glasses, that ball-shaped thing that they cancelled before release , ... Google isn't great at consumer electronics, phones notwithstanding.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 18:46
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Spoken like somebody who doesn't remember Google Wave . More to the point, somebody who doesn't remember Google TV, Google Power Meter, Google Glasses, that ball-shaped thing that they cancelled before release , ... Google isn't great at consumer electronics, phones notwithstanding. Except that the only part of this technology that matters - the voice detection and natural language processing systems - are already up and running and arguably some of the best in the business. Certainly better than Siri. All they need is to build an enclosure for some microphones and a speaker. You really think they can't do that?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 18:55
|
|
|
A Google Home overview Lowlights: quote:There is one area where Home might not be as capable as the Echo, however, and that's when it comes to extensibility and compatibility with other devices and services. Google has chosen not to open up a developer API for its assistant or for this device just yet. Instead, Google wants to take some time to build out the ways that its assistant can act as the interpreter between your natural way of speaking and the way that bots need to be spoken to. Also, Twitter is having fun mocking the shape. (Alexa wins here by being generic High Tech Black.) http://thenextweb.com/google/2016/05/18/google-home-freshener/
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Also, Twitter is having fun mocking the shape. (Alexa wins here by being generic High Tech Black.) Theres a really big market of people who probably won't get an Echo simply because it's a black monolith of technology that would never fit in their home.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 21:38
|
|
|
MrYenko posted:Theres a really big market of people who probably won't get an Echo simply because it's a black monolith of technology that would never fit in their home. Eh, I don't know. Black cylinder fits my kitchen better than weird half melted candle.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 22:07
|
|
|
MrYenko posted:Theres a really big market of people who probably won't get an Echo simply because it's a black monolith of technology that would never fit in their home. I think that's the kind of person who says they don't have a TV "on principle" and not really the target market for a smart home appliance, though. Also probably not "a really big market" or, if they are, they're not getting converted by that Google thing either (a white and translucent monolith of technology?). Seriously, the Echo is remarkably unobtrusive and if someone had a huge issue with it, they can hide a Dot behind a vase of flowers or something.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 22:13
|
|
|
MrYenko posted:Theres a really big market of people who probably won't get an Echo simply because it's a black monolith of technology that would never fit in their home. Honey I didn't know you posted here. Want me to pick up dinner on the way home?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
sellouts posted:Honey I didn't know you posted here. Want me to pick up dinner on the way home?   Smilies aside, my wife hates technology for the most part and yet she loves having the Echo around since you interact with it in such a natural way and it doesn't "feel" like technology (even if it is).
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2016 22:53
|
|
|
Well, I've already got an Echo, so I'm not terribly worried about rushing out to get the Google Home, but I would appreciate if there was more natural-speech integration of apps into Echo. "Ask [app] what [information I want]" or whatever is clumsy. If google adds a way to make custom commands that do this stuff for you, awesome. If this drives Amazon to implementing something similar, even better.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2016 01:52
|
|
|
Bobulus posted:Well, I've already got an Echo, so I'm not terribly worried about rushing out to get the Google Home, but I would appreciate if there was more natural-speech integration of apps into Echo. "Ask [app] what [information I want]" or whatever is clumsy. If google adds a way to make custom commands that do this stuff for you, awesome. If this drives Amazon to implementing something similar, even better. I completely agree, competition keeps companies honest. Look at how browsers utterly stagnated between the triumph of Explorer and the introduction of Chrome.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2016 02:13
|
|
|
Apparently you can get it working with Sonos if you're willing to have a server running (god knows how well/badly this works though): https://github.com/rgraciano/echo-sonosMagnus Praeda posted:I think that's the kind of person who says they don't have a TV "on principle" and not really the target market for a smart home appliance, though. Also probably not "a really big market" or, if they are, they're not getting converted by that Google thing either (a white and translucent monolith of technology?).
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2016 19:27
|
|
|
To be honest, I don't really have any loyalty per se to Echo, besides the fact that we already have an Echo. Like the Amazon integrations aren't my main use. Google Music instead of Amazon Prime Music would be fine. So if Google's is cheaper and works about as well, and I wanted to buy one for someone else., I would consider it.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2016 13:18
|
|
|
My concern would be how they charge for music. I don't subscribe to Google Music and have no intentions of doing so, being primarily an Apple user, however, I have a Prime account, anyway, so taking advantage of their service isn't a big deal. There's some rumors swirling of Apple making a Siri-enabled device, though (along with finally opening up the Siri API), and I would probably get rid of my Echos for one of those. For someone else, it would still matter how the music part works.
|
|
#
?
May 26, 2016 15:36
|
|
|
Amazon knows a lot less about me than Google does. If I'm picking which all-powerful corporation listens to my conversation all the time, I'm going to go with Amazon because at least that distributes my secrets.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 03:30
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Amazon knows a lot less about me than Google does. If I'm picking which all-powerful corporation listens to my conversation all the time, I'm going to go with Amazon because at least that distributes my secrets. "Alexa: Order more horseporn."
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 04:23
|
|
|
No one pays for porn anymore.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 04:56
|
|
|
Yeah, it's more like "Alexa: Order me another gallon of lube"
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 07:00
|
|
|
Fwiw, I've used both Alexa and Google's speech recognition a bunch, and google's fucks up way less.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 12:15
|
|
|
LODGE NORTH posted:No one pays for porn anymore. Tell it to Chuck Tingle.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 15:35
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:Tell it to Chuck Tingle. That's not porn, that's literature.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 16:20
|
|
|
Endless Mike posted:My concern would be how they charge for music. I don't subscribe to Google Music and have no intentions of doing so, being primarily an Apple user, however, I have a Prime account, anyway, so taking advantage of their service isn't a big deal. There's some rumors swirling of Apple making a Siri-enabled device, though (along with finally opening up the Siri API), and I would probably get rid of my Echos for one of those. See, I have the exact opposite problem. I own almost no music, and subscribe to Google Music as well as Prime Music. Amazon's streaming selection is pretty poo poo compared to Google's. I love my Echo, but after talking to Google's engineers last week at I/O about Home, I'm much more excited about it. One really neat feature is Home's ability to connect to my Chromecast and Chromecast Audio to automatically start up movies, tv shows, and music. Also, Google's natural language processing is quite a bit better than Alexa.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 22:21
|
|
|
Part of the reason Alexa works for me is that 99% of the music I've bought in the last twenty years came from Amazon. That means that (subject to streaming rights) everything I own is already pre-ripped.
|
|
#
?
May 27, 2016 22:30
|
|
|
I never used Prime music prior to owning this Echo, so I'm a little unclear on some of finer points of how it works. For the Amazon-curated Prime Playlists, there's a button that says "add Playlist to Library." If I add the Playlist to my library, does that mean all the songs on that playlist count towards my 250 song limit? Or does it just "favorite" that playlist for me? What I really want is a way to have a quick list of my favorite playlists.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
Mnemosyne posted:I never used Prime music prior to owning this Echo, so I'm a little unclear on some of finer points of how it works. For the Amazon-curated Prime Playlists, there's a button that says "add Playlist to Library." If I add the Playlist to my library, does that mean all the songs on that playlist count towards my 250 song limit? Or does it just "favorite" that playlist for me? (I believe) It adds it to your library but it doesn't count against your limit. Same way purchases from Amazon MP3 don't count against your 250 upload limit. You can also expand it for $25 a year if you want to put all of your music in Amazon's cloud.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 19:58
|
|
|
Hey so they are adding Alexa to the new Pebble line and I am pumped but never used Alexa before. Could some of you share stuff you use her for and what her strengths and weaknesses are? On the Pebble Kickstarter they posed a clip of them interacting with her and it was pretty crazy. I am surprised with what she is able to parse together ("how many followers does the pebble kickstarter have?")
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 22:05
|
|
|
"Alexa, add milk to the shopping list." If you use If This Then That, you can copy the Alexa event to other shopping lists; mine go to Remember The Milk. "Alexa, set a timer for twenty minutes." "Alexa, wake me up at ten." The last two of those you could do with your Pebble easily; I like doing them with Alexa because I often have my hands occupied when I need to do any of those things.
|
|
#
?
Jun 2, 2016 22:33
|
|
|
rear end Catchcum posted:Hey so they are adding Alexa to the new Pebble line and I am pumped but never used Alexa before. Could some of you share stuff you use her for and what her strengths and weaknesses are? On the Pebble Kickstarter they posed a clip of them interacting with her and it was pretty crazy. I am surprised with what she is able to parse together ("how many followers does the pebble kickstarter have?") I use my Echo Dot for: 1) Playing and controlling Spotify through my speaker system (Prime music is pretty poo poo imo) 2) Controlling Hue lights 3) News briefs in the morning 4) Alarms 5) Weather updates 6) Sports updates That's probably about it, but it's awesome.
|
|
#
?
Jun 3, 2016 17:44
|
|
|
Taima posted:1) Playing and controlling Spotify through my speaker system (Prime music is pretty poo poo imo) Funny you should mention that because everybody's saying that Amazon's going to launch their Spotify competitor soon. Which sucks if it's actually $9.99 a month. But would rule if it's an additional $3.99 a month for Echo owners (like rumored when the information first leaked)
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2016 22:37
|
|
|
They're going to have a real issue getting agreements done with content owners at that price point unless they're subsidizing the cost and turning it into a loss leader (which makes little sense). Also $10/month for basically all of the music if you actually care about music is insane to me. If someone doesn't care about music I get it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2016 23:13
|
|
|
sellouts posted:They're going to have a real issue getting agreements done with content owners at that price point unless they're subsidizing the cost and turning it into a loss leader (which makes little sense). The idea was to subsidize the cost of the service to drive the sale of Echos. More Echos sold = more marketshare = (in theory) more money made. Similar to how they subsidize the cost of Prime and Prime members spend double what non-Prime members spend on Amazon yearly. $10 a month isn't appealing to me since I already have my music collection in their cloud for $25 a year. There's not much in new releases I'm interested in and I already use the free tier of Spotify on my Fire TV.
|
|
#
?
Jun 11, 2016 23:21
|
|
|
Yeah, I get it. I don't see $72/year in subsidies to move the Echo to be a smart business plan and I doubt the rights holders are coming down from that price. The appearance to the consumer that streaming is only worth $3.99/mo is a bad look as well.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2016 00:34
|
|
|
sellouts posted:Yeah, I get it. I don't see $72/year in subsidies to move the Echo to be a smart business plan and I doubt the rights holders are coming down from that price. The appearance to the consumer that streaming is only worth $3.99/mo is a bad look as well. You have to remember that they use to lose something like $3.99 per ebook sold to maintain their $9.99 price point. That price point took ebooks from extreme niche to mainstream. Same with straight up paying for eink Kindle 3G use. They're willing to lose money to grow a market. They also don't have to profit like a standalone music service and the Echo userbase isn't gigantic (estimated 3-4 million). Remove the $3 of profit that Spotify makes and add the $4 they'd charge and Amazon would only have to subsidize $2.99 a month per subscriber/echo owner. Not a bad investment if they can significantly grow the Echo userbase or entice people to spend more elsewhere on their site. Especially when they can raise the price (but still come in way under their competitors) some time in the future. Call Me Charlie fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Jun 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2016 01:08
|
|
|
My biggest complaint currently is that you have to individually enable skills. I just want to try and see if one I read about is neat, I don't want to have to clunkily open settings, do a search, find the one I want to try, enable it, close settings, try it on echo, find it sucks, open and move to the next one.
|
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2016 02:56
|
|
|
You're not understanding the point. Call Me Charlie posted:You have to remember that they use to lose something like $3.99 per ebook sold to maintain their $9.99 price point. That price point took ebooks from extreme niche to mainstream. Same with straight up paying for eink Kindle 3G use. They're willing to lose money to grow a market. Your numbers are off on the Spotify profit (you're referencing iTunes) and there are a TON more things to consider when doing these deals such as breakage/minimum guarantees and advances paid to right holders. Not to mention the absolute arms race for exclusive or windowed releases that is happening right now. The other consideration is a free tier, how they handle that and if their accounting systems allow for that type of reporting which is not a small investment to do accurately. They may have this with prime music already. I am not sure. Pricing perception amongst consumers is a problem with streaming as a whole. Reinforcing a 3.99 model makes the critical mass needed for streaming to be profitable that much higher. And hey, maybe they will launch a Spotify competitor. But it's sure as hell not going to have anything to do with boosting echo adoption. The investment will be far too high. sellouts fucked around with this message at 08:15 on Jun 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2016 08:09
|
|
|
sellouts posted:You're not understanding the point. This could be wrong because it's hard to find solid numbers regarding Spotify Premium but You seem to be missing that the $3.99 price would only be for Echo owners. As in, they could launch a $9.99 general price point but still offer a massive discount to Echo owners. That's the idea Amazon was kicking around in January when the news of this first broke. They'd lose money by paying the $x per subscriber a month but they could potentially massively grow the Echo market. Same reason they subsidized book prices. Same reason they include a free 6 month subscription to The Washington Post for Fire tablet owners and subsidize further subscriptions. Same reason they use to offer insane discounts with special offers. Same reason they spend billions of dollars on Prime Video and Amazon Studios. The examples could go on and on but it's all about growth. Jeff Bezos just did an interview where he said that if one of the original Amazon programs wins a Golden Globe, they end up selling more shoes. That's the type of business moves they make. All they would have to do is go 'we offer 97% of what Spotify/Apple Music/Pandora/Tidal offers plus there's radio stations with unlimited skips plus it's significantly cheaper per month if you buy an Echo' and they'd have a massive advantage without getting into the arms race the other streaming services are getting into. Plus they'd sell more Echos. Plus they'd get people invested into their ecosystem. I'm sure music publishers wouldn't like that idea but, if Amazon pays them the full price regardless, there's not much they can say about it. And again, they could always change their minds in the future. Would anybody really throw a fit if in two years they go 'oh hey, the price is going to $7.99 a month for echo owners'? It'd still be cheaper than their competitors. (also this is all speculation so who knows what they're going to do. in january when this news broke, spotify wasn't on the echo yet. so maybe amazon will play nice now that they got other people on board. it's possible the rumor of a subsidized price was the stick of the negotiations) Call Me Charlie fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jun 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 12, 2016 22:12
|
|
|
Dude. I work in music. You have absolutely no loving idea what you're talking about. And this proves it: Call Me Charlie posted:I'm sure music publishers wouldn't like that idea but, if Amazon pays them the full price regardless, there's not much they can say about it. And again, they could always change their minds in the future. Would anybody really throw a fit if in two years they go 'oh hey, the price is going to $7.99 a month for echo owners'? It'd still be cheaper than their competitors.) Call Me Charlie posted:This could be wrong because it's hard to find solid numbers regarding Spotify Premium but It is wrong. I'm not revealing the financials of our privately held company but it ignores many things and isn't accurate. Enjoy your echo sellouts fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Jun 13, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2016 01:19
|
|
|
gently caress off with that bullshit. I linked to multiple articles as the source for my speculation (which I said was speculation) while you just  I work in music.sellouts posted:It is wrong. I'm not revealing the financials of our privately held company but it ignores many things and isn't accurate. lol. Good luck with your dying business.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2016 01:32
|
|
|
Call Me Charlie posted:gently caress off with that bullshit. I linked to multiple articles as the source for my speculation (which I said was speculation) while you just lol so he actually has experience in it while you're some jackass who thinks he knows poo poo because he read it on the internet.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2016 01:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 07:34 |
|
|
jabro posted:lol so he actually has experience in it while you're some jackass who thinks he knows poo poo because he read it on the internet. I work for Amazon so I know what I'm talking about. (wait a second, I'm just some jackass on the internet that can make up whatever lie I want. maybe that's why i tried to link to sources instead of just talking out of my rear end. but let's just take some random at his word)
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2016 01:42
|
|