New AI-based Alexa set to launch in October, possibly as a $10 subscription:

The revamp of the voice assistant, which documents say will include a daily AI-generated news summary, would come just weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

I think this price will be a tough sell, but running AI does cost money. It’s just that Alexa is not a productivity tool in the way ChatGPT Plus can be.

@manton I’m disinclined to give them any money since I’m annoyed they made a deliberate choice to make the service less useful to me earlier this year.

Most of the reason we have these things in the house is to easily add to shopping lists. They changed the integrations so now it’s much harder to use AnyList, clearly to force us into using the build-in lists in the Alexa app, complete with ads and a push to Whole Foods.

Why would I trust them to not do more hobbling?

@donw Interesting. Alexa had such a strong start years before anyone else… Wonder if they’ve lost the plot slightly.

@manton Well the news came out a year or so ago that it’s been a huge money loser at every stage so I’m not too surprised they are angling for ways to turn that around. But when they take measures like this… my experience has been that once a company adds this sort of steering and degrades functionality to do it they’re not gonna later offer a paid way to avoid that. It just becomes the lay of the land.

@manton It is a tough sell. All I use Alexa for is a daily news briefing at mealtimes. I really like that one feature, and part of why I like it is I picked the news sources well. I would never trust some news summary generated by AI.