They delete the recording from your device....after it has been sent to Amazon to be stored and used limitless.

Everyone who didn’t get an echo as a gift, I’d imagine

Plenty of people I know have gotten the little echo dots or the bigger alternative with larger speakers for Christmas or birthdays. Technically they didn't spend money, but their friends and family did.

home assistant is amazing but it is not yet an alternative to Alexa, the assistant/voice is still in development and far from being usable. it’s impossible for me to remember the specific wording assist demands and voice to text is incorrect like nine out of ten times. And this includes giving up on terrible locally hosted models trying out their cloud which obviously is a huge privacy hole, but even then it was slow and inaccurate. It’s a mystery to me how the foss community is so behind on voice, Siri and Google Assistant started working offline years ago, and they work straight on a mobile device.

This is legal, even in the US?

If you do not want to set your voice recordings setting to 'Don't save recordings,' please follow these steps before March 28th:

Am I the only one curious to know what these steps are? The image cuts off the rest of the email.

How the fuck does anyone even buy one of these

I see. The initial purchase price is the “payment”. I thought the intimation was some sort of subscription to use Alexa. My bad.

Just sold my 3 devices and shut down Amazon account. It's very liberating and I don't miss it one bit. Have Home Assistant and a couple of really good 2nd hand Sonos speakers.

"Even in the US" seems to imply stronger customer and privacy protections on the US.

"This is legal, even there?" sounds pretty "legal bad there" to me.

The same people who buy mobile phones; despite those being bugs/spy-devices.

There's also this

"Leopards can eat people's faces, even in the US?"

At least, on mobile devices, it's typically easier to install a privacy-focused firmware (like LineageOS or GrapheneOS). Those AI assistants are completely locked down.

1. Unplug your amazon echo devices

2. Hit it with a hammer

3. Send it to an electronics recycler

Do the device you wrote this on have a microphone?

Phones are at least easier to justify since everyone kinda needs one now and there aren't many great private options, especially for the lay person

Which Echo devices ever supported local only processing? They cost about £30. There's no kit that can do decent voice commands for that money. You'd be lucky to have a device that processes claps to turn the lights on for that.

And for now it's voice assist is garbage in comparison. I have home assistant, and a few Alexa units, so I set up nabu and tried it, but it's slow and can maybe do 1 in 5 commands, while Alexa is much more reliable.