Dangerously close to throwing fucking Alexa out of the window. Assistance required.

[WinterRoad]

For the love of God will someone please help me speak to Alexa so that she doesn't give me garbage?
I wanted her to open bbc sounds and play me the titanic podcast from 15th April. I get " playing The Archers from 2007" FFS!!
I ask her (nicely) in a slightly different phrasing. I get "playing Elton John"
Is it just me? I am completely stupid? Alexa never plays what I want. Ever!

@FrenchLavendar
It works!!! A bit annoying having to go back through all the episodes, but it works all the same.
Thank you so much for your perseverance

Mine is useless too.

I use it to time my cooking.

”Alexa timer for 16 minutes”

”your timer is set for 16 minutes”

””Alexa, how much longer on my timer?”

”you have no timer”

I literally lose my mind over the stupid thing.

We were early adopters of Google Home but it is only good for telling us the time and whether it'll rain, or quantity conversions when you're following an American blog recipe and just need metric weight equivalents. Useless pile of crap, it never knows anything anymore. I think Google is trying to brick it and then bring out a Gemini version.

This is 99% of what I use my Alexa for.

I do ask for music as well but recently binned the bloody thing recently when it decided to stop playing a song I'd played zillions of time recently - claims it doesn't know it. So I go into the Amazon Music app to find it and successfully play it on Alexa. I then ask Alexa what song this is and it gives me the exact name of the song it allegedly couldn't find 30 seconds earlier. Jeff Bezos is laughing all the fucking way to the bank.

Oh, that's great! Glad to have been able to help. 👍😊

Thanks for bringing the podcast to my attention: it's now on my listening list.

DH invests in crypto currency including solana. He asks Alexa the value and often she gives it, but she also does daft stuff like tell him she has put salami in his Morrison's shopping basket. He doesn't even have a Morrison's shopping basket as far as either of us knows. 🤣🤣

Personally, she irritates the fuck out of me.

Why was my post hidden by MNHQ there? I only pointed out that Alexa sometimes offers my DH a salami in his Morrison's shopping basket when he asks for the value of some of his crypto investments. And that she irritates the fuck out of me!

What's wrong with that?

Thanks for putting my posts back!

It's worth going into settings and playing around with them when you have the time, but basically, she's an idiot and has no concept of anything that happened before about 2005.

@WinterRoad thank you for bringing the Titanic podcast to my attention. I've just finished listening to it and I must say I found it fascinating, informative and chilling in pretty much equal measures.

Just to add, I listened to most of it on my phone in the end, rather than faffing about with the f***g Alexa! Life's too short! 😅

@FrenchLavendar
I listened to it (eventually) and really enjoyed it.
You're right it was chilling the way some people behaved. I couldn't get over the captain of The California getting the sos but going back to bed and saying he'll deal with it in the morning. Quite rightly vilified.

Just do it yourself. I've never had alexa, honestly.

In the time you've taken to try and work alexa and post on here, you could have stood up, walked over to whatever sounds system you had and done it manually.

Yep, our Alexa is female voice but doesn't like the women in our house... I remember reading somewhere that it doesn't respond to female voice because it was designed by men, so along the lines of more male design that fails to factor in half the population, brilliant and likely accurate if that's true!! Maybe think Alexa should have a male voice as default.

It doesn't work like that. The speaker I wanted to use is only operated by verbal commands through alexa.

I’m enjoying reading all these! I never wanted a wretched Alexa, so now I’m even gladder that I saved my money.

My sister bought one for her son.

Told him to bin it and Google stuff if needs be.

Never had one and never will. Talking to a machine - weird to me.

I love my Alexa, so nice to be able to just tell her what to do instead of having to touch things if I've got dirty hands from cooking.

But she drives me crazy sometimes! Her most frequent one is when I ask her to play Heart Sussex and she starts telling me about sausages 😂

It's funny so I don't mind to much!

Does Alexa always remain silent if you demand this? I am extremely wary of such devices. In the same way that our computers keep bombarding us with advertising (until we pay to stop this happening), I am wary of Alexa speaking whether we want her to or not, and even paying extra cannot silence her, and next she’ll be relaying whatever nonsense King Farage wants the world to know, whether we want to hear it or not. There are parallels between Alexa and George Orwell’s telescreens.

I always said I would never get one, then my son bought me one for Christmas . I would hate to be without it now. I use it for alarms, timer, reminders, music, General knowledge questions, weather, jokes, radio, news. It’s a boon for anyone living on their own, and so versatile. It does say funny things sometimes, like suddenly coming up with a recipe for cooking a ham hock when I hadn’t asked. Sometimes she doesn’t know things. She’s just quirky!

When I ask mine to say my name it just plays random Pikachu noises. WTAF!!

Ours is packed away as we got fed up with her rubbish and to turn her on we had to talk like we were talking to a naughty toddler.

I won't have a "smart speaker" or Alexa in the house. They listen to you all the time, and record you.

Well you shouldn't have bought it. Everybody knows voice recognition technology isn't accurate.

Right. That's me told

😂😂😂