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South Park's Season Premier Sets Off Everyone's Amazon Echo (maxim.com)
SonicSpike writes: It's hard to believe that Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn't know exactly what they were doing with Wednesday night's season premiere of South Park. This episode marked the beginning of the show's 21st season and as usual, South Park took on current issues like tiki torch-wielding white supremacists and... home digital assistants. The latter meant lots of gags in which Cartman and other characters addressed Amazon Echo's Alexa and Google Home as well. And that ended up being a problem for viewers who own those devices. (Editor's note: example 1, 2) South Park writers absolutely knew their lines would do this and probably had a hilarious time coming up with funny commands for the home assistants.
See this is the real application for these devices. Mechanics, cooks, people with mobility issues, seniors, etc.
However, they are never sold as such. They've been made as an alternative to thinking, and that is not good in the long run since it reduces our collective memory and deduction skills.
I think the idiot is the closed-minded person who doesn't understand or respect that other people's use cases do not always look like their own. I'm not the OP, but I have these devices too. All of the things he calls out work great. Other things you can do (I use the Google Home devices instead). "Hey Google Play The Key of Awesome A Tribute to Ridiculous Voices from YouTube on Family Room TV". The TV turns on and the built in Chromecast starts playing the video from Youtube. Works from NetFlix too. I'm not sure why you think others are idiots. Maybe try the mirror?
Not that impressive, but you can think of it as a $50 voice-controlled alarm clock/timer/stereo
/always on microphone hooked up to the internet that you have no real control over.
And *that* is why it is an idiotic device. I can't imagine a how anyone thinks 'voice controlled alarm clock' is worth installing a 'microphone connected to amazon' into your room.