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posted by mrpg on Saturday April 21 2018, @07:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the till-alexa-says-"no" dept.

Submitted via IRC for fyngyrz

Amazon this morning is introducing "Alexa Blueprints," a new way for any Alexa owner to create their own customized Alexa skills or responses, without needing to know how to code. The idea is to allow Alexa owners to create their own voice apps, like a trivia game or bedtime stories, or teach Alexa to respond to questions with answers they design – like "Who's the best mom in the world?," for example.

[...] "Alexa Skill Blueprints is an entirely new way for you to teach Alexa personalized skills just for you and your family," explained Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa, in a statement about the launch. "You don't need experience building skills or coding to get started—my family created our own jokes skill in a matter of minutes, and it's been a blast to interact with Alexa in a totally new and personal way."

[...] The feature could give Amazon an edge in selling its Echo speakers to consumers, as it's now the only platform offering this level of customization – Apple's HomePod is really designed for music lovers, and doesn't support third-party apps. Google Home also doesn't offer this type of customization.

All three are competing to be the voice assistant people use in their home, but Alexa so far is leading by a wide margin – it still has roughly 70 percent of the smart speaker market.

Source: Amazon's new 'Alexa Blueprints' lets anyone create custom Alexa skills and responses


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:44PM (#670525)

    These devices are not "gigantic surveillance apparatuses", they are cheap-as-dirt, can-throw-in-trash-on-any-whim devices. And as for "lost", no. These devices are enabling at this point in time. No loss. Should that change, throw away.

    It is difficult for the vast majority of people to throw away all these little devices they let into their personal lives and become dependent upon. Maybe it is easy for you, but I'm thinking in general and in the long-term. You might quickly rid yourself of the devices when any further abuses become known, but most people will not do that, and so the harm remains.

    That's right. And as I have said repeatedly, right now is what matters for deciding how to treat the device right now.

    I guess there's nothing to be done if you just disregard societal impacts out of hand and only think in the short-term.

    There's nothing new about it being rational to behave well in public and in another person's home. It's not about being a hermit; it's about not being a jerk.

    This does not make sense. A mass surveillance society is dangerous to everyone, and you are short-sighted to just dismiss the topic so quickly. I don't see what this has to do with "being a jerk". It seems you don't take the dangers of mass surveillance (corporate or governmental, since they are both related) seriously at all.

    If they want to give the government info about how often we turn our lights on and off, ask for the weather, etc., hair on 'em. These devices have no critical information at all.

    They are ultimately listening devices, so there is no reason they would be limited to just that if they were to turn more abusive. Not only that, but companies and governments spend massive amounts of money trying to figure out how to use seemingly innocuous data to identify, profit from, and abuse people, and it's entirely possible they could think of things that you would never fathom.

    You're sitting in front of a computer that is connected to the network. I suspect Stallman does this from time to time as well. You have no place to stand as your platform is "this hardware could be used against us." None at all. The legitimate concern is when the hardware is being used against us. If we succumb to what-if fears of technological misuse, we're going to do some serious damage to progress for no actual concrete reason. I think that would be one of the worst outcomes imaginable.

    I do have a place to stand, because I only use devices that fully respect my freedoms (of which there are several), thereby minimizing the dangers to some small extent. There is only so much a single individual can do when the entire system is unjust and compromised, so this is better than handing everything over on a golden platter, and it does not require one to become a hermit. However, even were that not the case, that would not make any of my arguments wrong. It is possible for people living within a system to recognize the injustice perpetuated by the system, and their arguments stand on their own merits. I believe we need to fix the system so that all devices respect users' freedoms and do not abuse them.

    Your argument strongly reminds me of the 'love it or leave it' argument, where you tell dissidents to leave if they are unsatisfied with the state of things. No positive change could occur if people followed that advice.

    If you truly want progress, then advocate for the fix: Free Software, and devices fully controlled by users instead of corporations.

    Proprietary software != abusive.

    it's clear we have a difference of values here. To me, denying users their freedoms [gnu.org] is, in and of itself, inherently abusive, and trivially opens the door up for further abuses in the future.

    The entire meme of proprietary software being bad only arises as an abject failure of critical thinking.

    Nope. It arises from the idea that users have certain freedoms that should not be denied to them.

    You can have open software that is abusive

    I'm a proponent of Free Software, not open source. Proponents of "open source" usually make no mention of ethics, and therefore do not question the fundamental underpinnings of our current unjust system. This may be why the corporate media loves that term so much, because it doesn't rock the boat.

    In any case, that is true. However, it is far less likely that Free Software will abuse users, and any abusive anti-features could be removed by anyone if it did. Not only that, but the software would still grant users their freedoms, so it would have to be a different kind of abuse (such as privacy violations) than denying those to users. With proprietary software, you have to stop using the software entirely if it is abusive (besides denying users their freedoms), which is often difficult because it attempts (either intentionally or not) to make users dependent upon it, which means that the injustices continue for a long while.

    I do not think that proprietary software is justified even if you can make more money developing it.