ian 28 • User • The Register Forums

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

Tuesday 18th March 2025 12:36 GMT ian 28

Glad this is happening

I’m glad this is happening to be honest, assuming only messages that begin with the attention word “Alexa” are getting sent.

Might be my Glaswegian accent but it gets so many things wrong. It’s not actually as when I check the voice history it seems to have interpreted me just fine, yet has chosen to do something completely random. And any question outwith their extremely limited list just gets it to perform a Google search which generally isn’t very helpful.

The routines you can program are great though. When it hears my dog barking it turns on all the lights and sends me a message. Quite handy

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Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Monday 6th January 2025 03:23 GMT ian 28

Re: Age verification mandates work like chocolate teapots.

I think you’d be surprised. The number of people I see on twitter everyday using their real name is absolutely astonishing. It’s like 90% of people.

Kids today have no clue

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Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Thursday 12th December 2024 15:23 GMT ian 28

Commander Fravor - the fighter pilot that filmed the tictac ufo video - told a similar story. He said they used to fly with infrared googles and could see heat sources miles away. One time over the desert he could see a campfire 10mi away so he killed the engines and turned off all the lights and just glided in until he was 100yds directly above the campsite and made the plane point straight up. He’d then start the engines and put on full afterburners and fly away vertically.

Seems completely made up now I’m thinking about it.

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Phones' facial recog tech 'fooled' by low-res 2D photo

Saturday 20th May 2023 11:37 GMT ian 28

Need LIDAR

If a photo is capable of fooling them then they’re not using LIDAR which, as Steve Jobs once said about phones that needed a stylus, “You’ve already lost”

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It's this easy to seize control of someone's Nexx 'smart' home plugs, garage doors

Monday 10th April 2023 14:53 GMT ian 28

Re: Elementary, Watson!

I’ve worked in several places where the deadlines are dictated by management and not how long myself and fellow devs say how long things will take. In these cases we’re forced to do bodge jobs and take shortcuts. They often don’t care if it’s a complete bodge job under the hood as long as it looks ok on the surface.

I’m always sure to use a CYA Note though (an email explaining I’m being forced to do something improperly and explaining the consequences)

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Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Wednesday 14th December 2022 08:55 GMT ian 28

Lights, FireTV and heating

Ours are used almost exclusively to turn on plugs (Alexa, turn on the living room lights) or to ask to rewind the firestick by 30 seconds because the wife talked through an important bit, or to ask her (Alexa) to turn on the heating. Oh and the drop in feature is handy for asking the kids to come down for dinner.

For this, we find it very useful. Maybe we’ve got lazy but it would be pain not to have it nowadays and have to manually turn on a switch!

Can see how this is of zero benefit to Amazon though

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UK bans Chinese CCTV cameras on 'sensitive' government sites

Sunday 27th November 2022 00:26 GMT ian 28

Re: Good idea anyways

I’d agree with most of that. The software is terrible and obviously ran through a translation service but Hikvision is certainly not cheap. It’s amongst the most expensive kit out there.

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