> Most people only use the voice assistants for a few simple tasks, which is perfect for an open source project like mycroft.
I'll certainly grant that... but the price point where Mycroft is, is certainly not near what I'd pay for doing those few simple tasks.
Apple is at the upper end of what I'd spend for such a device (the HomePod mini is $99) - and that's because I'm fairly invested into the Apple ecosystem and thus it can make use of the iTunes library, home automation, calendar items, etc...
If I wasn't invested in Apple, then none of the home assistants other than Amazon (because of the price point for the echo) would be particularly interesting.
I've got a echo show - because its a very nice simple clock/weather interface (that's got Alexa behind it) too (I really liked the Ambient 7 day weather clock when it was available). I've got an echo wall clock that is paired with the echo in the kitchen - it makes timers nicely visible (a sibling of mine has an echo wall clock because its an analog dial that doesn't have any sound with it).
The problems with Alexa of suggesting by the way ("Alexa, stop by the way" - give it a try and yes, it is routineable) are tolerable for how much I'm paying for them and the functionality that I use it for.
The Ars article on Alexa's financial crash-and-burn inside Amazon missed a lot of the reason people aren't willing to engage with Alexa as much as they could or would, if things were different. First, the privacy aspects are significant. Secondly, the value proposition is just not there - worse, Amazon has deliberately broken one of the most useful things you could do with Echo products: using them for distributed networked audio, a la Sonos: The new generation Echo Show products ELIMINATED the audio output jack, so you can't even plug the output into a stereo or speaker now!
On top of that, the Echo products are just not well built, not well thought out, and have NOT been upgraded to make them better: They update, but with NO visible benefit to the owner. One example: The Echo Show 8 Cannot and will not keep its display off all night, even if you explicitly command "display off" before going to bed (yes, it does understand and temporarily obey this command!) But sometime during the night, something will wake it up, and the damn thing turns into a lighthouse in your bedroom, waking one of us up.
I'd really like to find Alexa more useful, but like most folks I know with one, it's mostly just useful as a glorified voice-controlled radio - I'd use it more to control lights and such, if I could get the damn thing to actually realize waht lights are in what rooms, and that dimmer switches and smart lights can indeed share a location that should be controlled together. (Yes, this is supposed to work, but it doesn't...)
I would pay $500 to outfit the house with a central voice recognition processor that would be capable of supporting a dozen or so very secure listeners on the local LAN. Mycroft isn't that solution.
> The problems with Alexa of suggesting by the way ("Alexa, stop by the way" - give it a try and yes, it is routineable) are tolerable for how much I'm paying for them and the functionality that I use it for.
So cold comfort since it’s annoying as hell, but it slowly learns you don’t like it and will back off its frequency. Amazon unsurprisingly tracks “dissatisfaction” responses and adapts rate of things (globally and individually) so you do actually have to cuss out Alexa to change it. It’s slow because obviously it’s profitable but it does happen.
I'll certainly grant that... but the price point where Mycroft is, is certainly not near what I'd pay for doing those few simple tasks.
Apple is at the upper end of what I'd spend for such a device (the HomePod mini is $99) - and that's because I'm fairly invested into the Apple ecosystem and thus it can make use of the iTunes library, home automation, calendar items, etc...
If I wasn't invested in Apple, then none of the home assistants other than Amazon (because of the price point for the echo) would be particularly interesting.
I've got a echo show - because its a very nice simple clock/weather interface (that's got Alexa behind it) too (I really liked the Ambient 7 day weather clock when it was available). I've got an echo wall clock that is paired with the echo in the kitchen - it makes timers nicely visible (a sibling of mine has an echo wall clock because its an analog dial that doesn't have any sound with it).
The problems with Alexa of suggesting by the way ("Alexa, stop by the way" - give it a try and yes, it is routineable) are tolerable for how much I'm paying for them and the functionality that I use it for.