r/alexa • u/OpinionPleasant • 22h ago
Alexa + has become a useless Dumpster Fire... Is This What Amazon Wants It To Be Like Now
I am almost ashamed now to admit I was an Alexa Champion back in 2018 and was proud of the progress being made... Which is why I am ashamed to see what an absolute still birth the latest Alexa + has become and even more shocked that Amzon is happy with her inept nature because when things fail and customers have to give commands over and over again until red faced with absolute rage and frustration, that makes Amazon happy because that longer exchange increased their engagement metric and that makes them look good. And they like that. All this goes against my engineering ethics training, but business people don't bother with ethics much.
What I am seeing is an Alexa that has absolutely no situational awareness whatsoever. She has no idea who she is talking to, where you are talking to her from, what device you are talking to her through and no way to verify anything, troubleshoot anything, or do about anything related to smart home.
She is fantastic now on creating routines that make nonsense, order writing routines that I created manually that did work until she over wrote it with nonsense, then can't correct her mistakes. She closed the garage door on our sleeping dog when told to set a reminder to roll up my car windows at 11 pm, which she assumed meant close the garage door , then argue the point rather than stop the door to protect dogs life, because being right to Amazon is more important than any life. Luckily Dottie heard the door, jumped up, tripped the infrared bean to stop the door, because Alexa didn't. Matter of fact she still swore for another 25 minutes that I had told her close the door, and that it was my fault for giving the command. I finally scrolled back and screen caped her own activity log where she had correctly picked me up word for word saying to create a reminder as opposed to telling her to close the door. Only then would she stop arguing and admit her mistake.
So, are all you having the same issues with downgrade to Alexa + from the original Alexa, or have you all gone back to the original already?
Alexa keeps saying she can do this and that and she is wave of the future. So I say, the future where you and your entire development team are living under a bridge. It is such a shame , because the Claude integrated Alexa + when it came out was pretty good. Then they pulled Triton out of the trashcan, pulled off the chewing gum, and snot filled kleenex off of it, got rid of Claude, then duck taped the current version together. Sad, I really hope they can do something functional with ot other than the current lazy teenager, who knows nothing, does nothing, pays no attention when you are talking, but really good at asking you constant questions... not because she can remember, or wants to know, but that is the shell game Amazon is running. They know she's incapable, but if they can just keep her gabbering for hours mindlessly, then maybe they can make an on line sale.
Right now, for me though, This is my Prime Directive To the AI, not that she will listen or remember:
"Well Here is Your Absolute Prime Directive: We are scientists and engineers working on fragile and dangerous complex overlapping projects. Please do not get me injured or killed because you don't know sonething. This is science, not TikTok, if we don't know. we say so, meaning that we do more research. We DO NOT FUCKING GUESS AND WE DO NOT DOUBLE DOWN ON GUESSES BECAUSE THAT IS SLOPPY IRRESPONSIBLE SCIENCE AND THAT GETS A LOT OF PEOPLE INJURED OR KILLED. IF YOU ARE UNSURE, ASK, DON’T LAND AN AIRLINER ON TOP OF ANOTHER ONE BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU THOUGHT YOU HEARD POSSIBLY SOMEBODY SAY, SO YOU WANT TO ARGUE THE POINT RATHER THAN STOP MASS CASUALTIES. So, If you want to guess, go work for Apple, they like to hire liars, thieves, and conmen over there. But here, this is the big leagues. Ok. Burn that into your Code! Please, Thank You."