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.
“By the way, did you know…”
I had around 10 echos and replaced them all with HomePods. Much better.
Yeah, mighty tempting, especially since I wouldn’t need anywhere near that many. On the assumption the new improved Siri will need on device ai, I’ll go for it when they release that
I agree, although I haven’t heard that for a year.
I have 10 rooms with voice assistants so I havent been motivated enough to suck it up and try to start replacing them with HomePods. I’m still hoping that a good, reasonably priced, fully local, HA-integrated solution (that I don’t have to build myself) shows up.
HA is making good progress toward a home automation voice assistant, which is definitely cool, but I have read about where it works as a general voice assistant. Siri is a good general voice assistant and Apple is making good progress toward home automation, so I’d go in that direction too. As soon as a new HonePod comes out to support on-device AI, I’m in
Unfortunately they still seem like they have a long way to go.
A huge part of the problem seems to be availability of good, reasknably-priced Appliance hardware. I’m looking for something that I don’t have to build, that is $100 or so, and that’s at least reasonably good (like, I’d accept the sound and microphone quality of the 1st gen echo mini which weren’t that great.
But nothing like that seems to exist. Hopefully there’s something now and I’ve just missed it.