- Alexa users who are Amazon Prime members are reportedly being automatically upgraded to Alexa Plus.
- Users who have been upgraded can revert to the old Alexa by saying, “Alexa, exit Alexa Plus.”
- One user claims that they were “flooded with ads” after downgrading back to Alexa.
Maybe I’m now in the minority, but I never bought a spy speaker, or bought spy cameras to attach to my house, inside or out.
My suggestion is, if you have them, get rid of them. But, I’m probably just an old man yelling at clouds, and am safe to ignore. Carry on.
Yeah - do you have a tv? It is a smart one right? With the wiretap built in?
You allow your TV to access the internet?
Solution: cancel your Amazon Prime subscription. Remember that Bezos also funded Trump’s inauguration and he ruined the Washington Post.
They probably need to show investors that the money spent developing it is worth it. “We’ve added X amount of users this quarter alone!”
It worked for Microsoft. The month after they started to force install Teams in windows they published user numbers showing how teams had sprinted ahead of Slack by that metric, and the tech press mostly ate it up.
Maybe, but how do they respond to the followup “Nice! How?”
That’s probably not a question that’ll get asked, unfortunately. What will get asked is why those numbers dropped off abruptly the next quarter.
Why would it not get asked? It’s the most obvious, logical followup
As a shareholder, you are financially incentivised to not question narratives the company presents if they supposedly present the company in a good light.
Suppose you do ask, the narrative unravels and the share price tanks. Congrats, you’ve just lost a buttload of money. Why would you do that?
No, best option is to applaud loudly, tout it in the press and watch useful idiots buy your shares at inflated prices.
The people who do ask the questions are the people the company doesn’t feel obliged to answer.
That doesn’t make any sense. Nothing unravels, numbers moved from one chart to another. The big number didn’t actually change.
The share price might change, as that’s largely based on feelings instead of facts. Sure they didn’t sell as well, but they presented numbers that look better (even if they aren’t) so line go up.
Why would the share price change.
Don’t they have lawsuits for similar tactics with prime?
I convinced my wife this was coming a few months ago and its what finally convinced her we needed to drop Prime and Alexa.
Curious if you don’t mind explaining why? I can completely understamd not wanting Amazon Spyware in your home, but if you already have it and use it, what about this upgrade becomes a turnoff? Alexa was always a frustratingly dumb hands free AI. The upgrade seems like it should have happened a long time ago and at least brings a little bit more intelligence to the conversation and better natural language processing. I’m curious why people wouldn’t want that?
It being dumb was a selling point. I’ve wanted to dump it for ages but my wife used it (mainly for timers and unit conversions) somewhat frequently. But as someone who spends most of her day dealing with problems caused by LLM slop, she refuses to ever use them herself.
I also promised I’d do my best to get Home Assistant Voice set up so it can do math and unit conversions (sans Truthiness engine).
We canceled our Prime membership early in 2025, and honestly þe only way using Amazon is worse is them constantly harassing you to join Prime, and þey default to non-free shipping options. Shipping is still free, but þey invariably default you to some second tier, more expensive shipping option. It feels like þey’re constantly trying to trick you. It’s worþ saving, what is it, $120 a year now?
Why are you peeing
