And ?
I gave up with the internet of shit pretty much before it started. Episodes like this, and expensive kit becoming useless overnight.
It's why I won't invest in this shit unless I can keep control forever.
Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned
Plex is pulling the plug on its Alexa integration, leaving anyone who relied on voice commands to wrangle their media library out of luck. Debian Debian's FreedomBox Blend promises an easier home cloud READ MORE For those not living in it daily, Plex is a media server platform that lets users stream their own collections of …
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Saturday 18th April 2026 06:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: And ?
This is why I've invested time in HomeAssistant, local LLM and one of these
https://futureproofhomes.net/products/satellite1-smart-speaker-enclosure-kit
You can even download the enclosure and just buy the guts:
https://makerworld.com/en/models/2195101-futureproofhomes-oem-satellite1-smart-speaker#profileId-2383758
The big challenge is getting a reliable low power LLM 24/7 setup, keeping it updated and of course backing everything up. It's not cheap but feels worth it in the face of corporate spying and personal security.
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Friday 17th April 2026 11:24 GMT may_i
Open Source!
It's funny, but the instance of Kodi that I have running on an old RPi still works perfectly and streams to my devices just as well as it always has. If I really wanted voice recognition, I guess I could drive it with my completely offline Home Assistant system.
Buy products where someone else owns the software and service, expect enshittification and obsolescence. Don't expect pity.
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Friday 17th April 2026 12:40 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Talking to a pair of speakers…
or any piece of hardware is the bridge to insanity I will not cross even if it is paved with good intentions…hang on that a different path albeit with the same destination I suspect.
If you talk to your plants you are only off your rocker if they talk back. The same wiith toasters.
Talking to living people is hardly more sanity preserving in most cases. Best avoided too.
Paraphrasing Robert Owen: “All the world is insane save thee and me, and even thou art a little lacking.” (Owen's sense of queer not the current one.)
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Friday 17th April 2026 13:11 GMT Aladdin Sane
Re: Talking to a pair of speakers…
Would you like some toast? Some nice hot crisp brown buttered toast. No? How about a muffin then? Nothing? You know the last time you had toast. 18 days ago, 11.36, Tuesday 3rd, two rounds. I mean, what's the point in buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don't like toast. I mean, this is my job. This is cruel, just cruel.
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Friday 17th April 2026 17:10 GMT doublelayer
Re: Talking to a pair of speakers…
If you don't like the idea, fair enough, but is there a reason you consider voice interfaces specifically so over the line? There are valid problems with some implementations of them, but the concept has plenty of reasons for some people to like it some of the time and a smaller set to use it very often.
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Friday 17th April 2026 12:55 GMT Lee D
"Smart"
Being the most techy person in my family, I still find it amazing that my parents, brother, etc. have filled their house with this junk and I'm the only one who hasn't.
I have any amount of devices that I COULD tie into Alexa, etc. And I don't. Ever. None of them are reliant on it, but I don't even do it "just for a laugh".
I have heatpumps. But they are not only "smart" controllable from an app, and thus Alexa-integratable along with half a dozen other such services, including HomeAssistant, they are also remote controlled (with an IR remote) and they have buttons. So even if EVERYTHING goes off... I can just... take them off the wifi and use them like an appliance.
Same for an electric towel rail. Same for my CCTV cameras. Same for all kinds of stuff.
It's the same with AI nonsense. Everyone who doesn't work in tech is all over it, spending stupid money on ridiculous shite to save them having to press one button. And I'm in IT and I have absolutely no interest in it.
My phone does not accept voice control. NFC Is off by default (and it's in an NFC-protected case). Fingerprints and facial recognition won't help you get into it. And so on.
If I was to look around and see all the car mechanics avoiding a particular technology like the plague, I'd pay attention. If all the doctors were ignoring some fancy home-resuscitation device, I would too. If the locksmiths were telling me not to use a particular kind of lock, then I'd take notice.
But this obsession with voice, AI, always-listening devices, etc. is just scary. I'm by no means an apocalypse prepper type, but... no... I'll just have my media. And I'll press a button to play it. It's really not adding ANYTHING for me to have to say things out loud. It's actually slower and FAR less reliable. As I proved to a group of people once in a car with voice recognition. We needed to go somewhere, urgently. They said that they'd sort out the satnav. I knew the general direction so started driving that way. And then they spent SO LONG trying to get the car to recognise the town, street-name, etc. that eventually I had to force them to give up, and actually type on the satnav screen. They tried every intonation, several people's voices, wording it differently, nearby streets, etc. and in the end, I'd driven half way there already, was not familar with the area and suddenly NEEDED THE DAMN DIRECTIONS. Which we then got in about 30 seconds once we stopped playing games.
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Saturday 18th April 2026 19:03 GMT martinusher
Re: "Smart"
I actually like voice control What. I don't like is the cloud connection, especially the corporate cloud. Its too intrusive and has too many places it can fail, (I'm used to industrial automation so the idea of sending messages half way around the world just to adjust a thermostat that's almost within reach seems a bit dumb.)
Managing music has always been a problem for me because the apparently simple process of scanning a set of FLACs, identifying a file and transmitting that file to a device has been made progressively more complicated as everyone plus dog seeks to monetize it. But the files that I listen to are of recordings I've purchased and all I'm doing by using digitized versions is making cataloging and accessing them easier. At least it would be really easy if there was a decent interface. I ended up defaulting to Logitech's Media Server because it was about as bare bones as you could get (and it was needed for my Squeezeboxes). Even so its still a nuisance having to bring up a web browser just to play a file. (But at least everything is local.)
I didn't know Plex had Alexa integration but I suppose it doesn't matter now. If Plex doesn't want to support this feature why not open source it?
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Friday 17th April 2026 12:57 GMT heyrick
we made the difficult decision to remove
Oh, drop the bullshit.
They didn't want to pay the Alexa tax or they didn't want to pay to keep maintaining it or...
...somewhere along the way a bean counter or manager saw that this was costing currency units and not "delivering tangible value", therefore it got taken out back and shot in the head.
Now they're blathering about difficult decisions, like we're supposed to feel sorry for them for removing a feature that some people may have depended upon.
[disclaimer: I don't have Plex and hell will freeze over before I have Alexa, I'm just annoyed at the tone of the response]
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Friday 17th April 2026 14:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
OurJukebox still working nicely
We have the OurJukebox skill to stream from a home music server and it works great. The exact phrases you have to use to play specific m3u playlists can be a bit fiddly, so we've set up Alexa "routines" to alias what we actually say to what we're supposed to say. And if it stops working we'll just go back to pressing buttons.
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Sunday 19th April 2026 23:10 GMT MachDiamond
"Installed a cheap NAS, loaded with all my ripped media"
I've got an older cheese grater MacPro that's my media server. Voice control? Not required. The computer runs headless nearly all of the time unless it's easier to do upgrades and maintenance directly. I'm not going to buy a dedicated bit of specialist hardware to do such a simple task. The computer was just sitting around gathering dust.
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Friday 17th April 2026 14:55 GMT running with nukes
WWA <Works With Alexa> testing cost
"The costs associated with WWA certification testing varies based on scope assigned by Amazon, determined by the device under test capabilities."
Certification price range estimation chart
Device type Range (USD)
Camera $1500 - $3000
Lighting $1500 - $4000
Plugs / Outlets / Switch $1200 - $4000
Video Door Bell $1500 - $3000
Door Lock $2000 - $2700
Vacuum $1100 - $2000
Thermostat $1800 - $3200
AC / Air Purifier / Fan $2000 - $3500
Security Panel $1500 - $2300
EXTERNAL WEBPAGE
https://www.ul.com/ul-solutions-interoperability-testing-and-works-alexa
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Friday 17th April 2026 17:16 GMT doublelayer
That's one problem with Alexa and many other voice interfaces. They're advertised as getting conversational instructions, but they're basically command lines. You only get anything by knowing the specific functions and preset phrases that launch them. I kind of thought LLMs would get integrated with these things eventually to bridge that gap, but instead of connecting a tiny model to a list of functions for intent recognition, the companies seem to have decided that what they really need is a chatbot for conversations which nobody wants. I don't use these myself, but I've watched many people get frustrated at the lack of natural language capability the manufacturers sell these as having.
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Saturday 18th April 2026 00:20 GMT David 132
When it comes to asking inept voice interfaces to play classic prog-rock - "don't ask, don't Tull".
Returning to topic after that stinker of an attempt at humour, I battled with Siri earlier today; no matter how carefully I enunciated, I could not get her to stop transcribing my spoken word "neighbour" as "Neighborhood", complete with misplaced capital N. Similarly, "foreigner" was transcribed with grim determination as "for foreigner"; I'm certain I don't have a stutter, but clearly Siri does.
And we're supposed to offload our lives to these infernal algorithms??
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Monday 20th April 2026 10:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Alexa, add song to playlist smeg"
"I'm sorry, you don't have a playlists called smeg. Do you want to create it?"
"yes"
"sorry, that playlist already exists"
"Alexa, add song to playlist smeg"
"I'm sorry, you don't have a playlists called smeg. Do you want to create it?"
"yes"
"sorry, that playlist already exists"
"add to playlist smeg123"
"do you want to create new playlist "smeg123"
"yes"
adding "the birdie song to your playlist smeg123
play playlist smeg123
I'm sorry, you don't have a playlists called smeg123. Do you want to create it?"
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Saturday 18th April 2026 06:43 GMT Blue Screen of Bleurgh
If we allow ourselves to become too deeply engrossed/dependent on the Internet of Toys, all it takes is an operator such as Plex to announce "we made the difficult decision... <to remove whatever loss-making app in our toolbox>, and therefore you're on your own, but please keep on paying your monthly subs...) ", then we have to find workarounds/alternatives, which means configuration/pairing and whatnot.
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Sunday 19th April 2026 23:16 GMT MachDiamond
"Retired my Alexa ten years ago."
I see the units all the time at estate sales. I picked up a few, but they aren't any use as a parts donor for anything. Older kit can be good for controls and other bits that are hard to find or one has to buy a large bag of to get one to fix something. It won't be long before my storage rack system beats out Adam Savage's. I don't need to keep adding parts to my inventory.
