Amazon Echo Club

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Whenever I have an issue with Amazon, I always call CS directly. Other methods have proven to be a waste of time for me.

Amazon = 1-888-280-3321

Thanks for the number, I couldn't find it. I’ll program this into my phone.

Amazon makes it nearly impossible to contact their CS.

I wonder if the CS center in India supports multiple companies? Perhaps that is why the same phone number was being used for both Amazon CS and Med Alert CTR CS. I assume that number was a BS number though.

ETA on 21 Dec 2021: Today I realized that Amazon CS merely cancelled my Amazon Music Unlimited subscription yesterday, something I was going to do anyway and I knew the CS rep said he would do it. He also said he would refund the erroneous charge, but he didn't. I used the number TM gave me and called them today to demand they refund the erroneous charge. It is only $8.65, but it is the principle of the thing, that is, being misled into believing I was being given a 3-month free trial. No where in the email offer, not even the fine, microscopic text, did it give qualifications. I will call this a bait and switch, misleading offer. The CS rep from today supposedly talked directly to the Amazon Music people who told her I was not eligible since I had used a similar offer 3 years earlier. WTF! Why wasn't that made clear during the transaction? So bottom line is they won't refund it, even though they should have been much more clear about it.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, I decided that the Echo Studio fails to work properly as a home theater when paired to Fire TVs, and the research indicates this is a wide spread issue and has been for 2 years now. The speaker by itself (unpaired) is pretty good for a HiFi speaker, but it totally screws up the use of the Fire TV when paired, causing Wi-Fi shutdowns, stuttering while watching video on a Fire TV, and über sound issues requiring daily reboots of the Studio and the Fire TV. Since I don't seem to be using it as much unpaired (standalone) as I thought I would, I decided to return it, and have now done so.

I still recommend it as a good replacement for a lesser Echo speaker if you want to use it quite often unpaired and standalone. My usage simply isn't high enough to warrant $200 + tax though.

[tubemonkey]

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny

what the...!

Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do".

"Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said.

Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.

She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."

[cc_in_oh]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny

what the...!

And so it begins...

[OtinG]

That sounds like questionable news reporting. I would verify it through multiple sources. Hopefully Amazon isn’t that careless. If true, I wonder if a disgruntled employee is to blame. On the other hand, Amazon has a long history of terrible programming of FW for devices…

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

Alexa tells 10-year-old girl to touch live plug with penny

what the...!

Current UK plugs have the live and neutral half wrapped in plastic precisely so that this is impossible. By the time the pins make contact inside the socket, no live bare metal is outside the socket.




But back on topic, it seems that Alexa's web scraping routines picked up something dangerous. It's hard/impossible to do such stuff safely at scale.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

But back on topic, it seems that Alexa's web scraping routines picked up something dangerous. It's hard/impossible to do such stuff safely at scale.

Indeed, my wife found something that said this was a recitation of a TikTok challenge.

Which is a whole other kettle of stupidity fish.

I think Amazon, and everyone else in the universe, should completely ignore TikTok challenges at this point.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by ApK

Which is a whole other kettle of stupidity fish.

For sure! It does seem quite idiotic to ask idiots for advice…

[WT Sharpe]

Rather than an employee that is disgruntled or malicious, couldn't Alexa herself—or rather, shortsighted programmers—be to blame for the penny/plug fiasco? I could well envision this episode beginning with, "Here's something I found on the web that may help."

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Rather than an employee that is disgruntled or malicious, couldn't Alexa herself—or rather, shortsighted programmers—be to blame for the penny/plug fiasco? I could well envision this episode beginning with, "Here's something I found on the web that may help."

Amazon needs to limit where Alexa is allowed to crawl through the web. Alexa's still a child and doesn't the maturity to weed out the bad and dangerous.

[OtinG]

It doesn't seem to be a good idea to let her roam the internet on her own. She needs to be kept out of certain places, like Tik Tok, Youtube, and a gillion others. Asking Alexa to seek out information like that is like asking a 5 year old to search the internet for same. Neither has the ability to properly filter the information. This was another Prime example (pun intended) of so-called AI proving it is not really Artificial Intelligence at all, but is rather poorly thought through and poorly designed code written by the professional equivalent of a 5 year old. In order to properly handle inquiries of this kind, Amazon needs to have multiple human eyes looking at ideas and filtering them, only adding the ones that are safe and meet certain standards into their databases. They shouldn't depend on AI to do this kind of task. Ai is, and will remain, mindless code incapable of being trusted with tasks of this type.

[ApK]

OMFG, has Alexa lost her bloody mind today for anyone else today??? Despite having no network/internet problems in the house, all our Echo devices have been intermittently complaining about the internet not being accessible today, and not just complaining, but INCESSANTLY yammering about it, telling me to reboot stuff, and will NOT shut up during the spiel. And thanks to her inability to discriminate between devices when (she thinks) the net is down, ALL of them within earshot in my house yammer at the same time. I've nearly smashed them several times today.

[tubemonkey]

I haven't had any issues with Alexa lately.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by tubemonkey

I haven't had any issues with Alexa lately.

The problem tracker doesn't show a spike, so it's likely local to me, or maybe my area. It seems to have resolved now, a few reboots later.

[CRussel]

If you're using a router (either your own or one from your ISP), rebooting the router is the first defense. Nearly all of them leak a little memory over time, and a reboot clears that up.

[cc_in_oh]

My stuff has been working reasonably well lately except lights occasionally don't turn on or off. But considering my conglomeration of Amazon, Ring, Ecobee, Blink, Sengled, Kasa, Smart Life and Govee devices I'm surprised there aren't more glitches.

Edit> I'm disappointed that there isn't a skill yet to link Alexa with Sleep Number's SleepIQ app.