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I think they are going all in on Alexa+ and cutting many other teams (speaking fully as an outsider). The new Echo Dot Max makes controlling your TV/Browsing youtube with natural language really nice (same for exploring Amazon Music - Spotify needs to catch up with this fast). Subscriptions for AI in the living room is what they are first movers of at the moment.

discuss

Bluecobra|1 month ago

How does that compare with Google? I tried updating my Google Mini smart speakers to have Gemini and it still seems dumb as a box of rocks.

arjie|1 month ago

This has been the worst downgrade for me. Response times have skyrocketed. The minimum time to response is now a few seconds slower and the responses continue to be low quality. The speaker seems to have even lost some functionality where it says "I can't do that yet" for a thing it mostly could already do previously. If I could tell anyone with Google Home devices one thing, it would be to not 'upgrade' to Gemini.

nickorlow|1 month ago

Google update sucks. Not only is it slower + generally dumber, but their AI alignment has made it refuse to answer very normal questions (I got scolded by my speaker for asking about the hours of the nearest liquor store)

radicalethics|1 month ago

No experience with Google yet. Amazon still has more work to do with making their tool-use calls bullet proof, but I've been able to search Youtube naturally and "open the first video" (this is still rudimentary, it's not perfect yet). Pretty good success moving around the Fire TV app with voice (open, exit), reasonably good at switching Live channels. Really fun with Amazon music, "pull up a Taylor Swift album, but acoustic only, from 2010s ...", stuff like that. It's great, and I expect it to become rather ... perfect in time.

Other things:

- Great for todo/reminders with timers

- "Hey Alexa, turn my lights on at 5 everyday, close them at 12"

- Not great at controlling Prime Video yet, can search it, but not great yet at all. Expecting this to be perfect at some point as well.

It's almost like a ... voice operating system.