Slashdot Mirror
More Than 8M People Own an Amazon Echo As Customer Awareness Increases 'Dramatically' (geekwire.com)
Amazon continues to see more and more traction with its voice-enabled speaker. An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) estimates that there are now 8.2 million customers who own an Amazon Echo device, which first went on sale in late 2014 to Prime members and became generally available in June 2015. That's up 60 percent from the 5.1 million Echo users that CIRP cited in November 2016; the big increase likely resulted from a busy holiday season that saw Echo sales spike 9X from the year prior, according to Amazon. The 8.2 million number is also up nearly 3X from this time last year, CIRP said.
Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Google Assistant. All of them. There have already been articles out that say usage is dropping after the "new" factor wears off.
They will go the way of 3D TV within five years.
Honestly... I still don't see the allure of having a device like this in my home.
Just weird that people would pay to have these in their home. I'd think Amazon would have had to pay people on the order of a hundred bucks or so a month to get some creepy microphone next to their couches.
Most of the people that I know (including myself) who use the Echo a lot have it connected to their music profile on Amazon, Spotify, IheartRadio, or Pandora. The Dot has an audio output that will work with most people's stereo system, or Bluetooth to newer audio equipment like Sonos sound systems. I've found checking bus schedules, weather forecasts and traffic to be much more convenient that getting out a laptop/tablet/phone. Alarms and timers are more convenient than messing with clocks, and you can have multiple levels of them from multiple devices. My niece has tied hers to Wikipedia, so her kids use it for homework. We haven't gotten to playing around controlling other devices yet, but our friends say they can't even find their WeMo controller as they haven't had to touch it since configuring them on the Echo.
Sure, some people will try it and say, "Meh". I expect to see a few of them on Craigs List in another month or two. By and large though, once you start using it you tend to use it a lot. Besides, Alexa is the only one in my house that actually does what I tell her to.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Don't these people realize that they are opening up their private lives to companies in wholly new ways?
Before you say "The FBI can already listen in on your phone anyway", please understand that this is very different:
- This device has way better microphones, and can listen well across the room.
- With FBI surveillance, if your phone starts listening in it's a rare occasion that you had no choice in. With Alexa it's assumed and accepted that a microphone is always on, and you conciously accept it.
- You are conciouslymaking your visitors susceptible to surveillance.
- It might not store your voice, but they probably store a hashed voice print. This makes you easily recognisable by other Alexa's. It's like Google technically not reading your mail, but finding out lots about you anyway.
- Visitors of your home will now also get a voice hash.
- You are implicitly saying you are ok with a culture where companies have these devices in the home. While that may be ok with you, this culture in the end will create social pressure for others to accept this too.
- It doesn't record everything now to make it more socially acceptible. But it might become a 'feature' later. A beach head like this is asking for feature creep.
- Check out Hellen Nissenbaum's concept of privacy as 'Contextual Integrity' to better understand how this is, in fact, a sufficiently new situation.
- Check outthe book "Black Box Society" to better understand how privacy is about the right to avoid social pressure. Or watch this short interview:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/...
We all understand the old punitive system where a crime leads to a punishment. It's the one lots of people claim they have nothing to hide from..
We are now building a much more subtle system next to that in the form of the reputation economy, where deviant behavior is corrected through social pressure.
Is there some payola going on? Google was actually first to implement a voice assistant. Nearly a year before Siri, I was using it on my Android phone to send texts, initiate map navigation, make appointments and to-do lists, make general web queries, as well as make phone calls like most phones have been able to do since the early 2000s. It's just that most people never knew about it because Google never thought to give it a catchy anthropomorphized name like Siri or Alexa.
Approximately 81% of the Android devices out there can use OK Google (Android 4.4 or newer). With 1.4 billion Android devices, that's 1.1 billion devices with access to Android's voice assistant. iOS has about a half billion users, the vast majority of whom can use Siri. Yet the press is saturated with stories about a mere 8.2 million people with an Amazon Echo?
Only in the US could Amazon be lighting it up with privacy-destroying devices like Echo while "1984" tops their book sales.
Amazon confirms Americans are incredibly lazy and don't give a shit about privacy.
Is this really a shock to anyone?
This may be enshrined as one of the greatest events in the entire fucking history of irony, as sales of Orwell's 1984 and the Echo top Amazon sales charts.