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llbbddtoday at 5:13 AM1 replyview on HN

I upgraded to Alexa+ and initially hated it but I've kept it because it's sooo much better at some things. This last December I bought a handful of smart plugs for my Christmas lights all around the house, and I did almost all the setup trivially over voice, e.g. fuzzy run-on stuff like this just worked on the first try:

- "Alexa, name the new unnamed outlet 'Living Room Lights', and the other unnamed one 'Stair Lights', then add them to a new group called 'Christmas Lights', and add the other three outlets as well"

- "Alexa, create a routine to turn off all the Christmas lights if there's nobody in the room and it's after 11pm"

- "Alexa, turn off all the Christmas lights except the tree in this room and the mantle"

That same fuzziness has definitely fucked up things that used to work more reliably like music playback though. Sometimes it works when I fall back to giving it more "robotic" commands in those cases but not always. They've also gone completely overboard with the cutesy responses because it's so trivial to do now ("I've set your spaghetti sauce timer for ten minutes. Happy to help with getting this evening's Italian-inspired dinner ready!")


Replies

stavrostoday at 10:30 AM

Hm yeah, that's helpful. For me it'll randomly stop or stutter when playing Spotify, it'll randomly not answer commands, it'll refuse to listen and let some other Alexa in another room reply, it's super janky.

I only use it for music, and use two commands, but apparently having this work correctly is too much to ask for these days.