This is especially true for the Google and Amazon offerings. Having those things listening all the time is just not on. If you care about your personal security then just don't use these things. Do you really want a feed of your home conversations to the NSA, GCHQ and worse, the FSB? And one that you have to pay for out of your own money? Just go read/watch 1984 and see what Orwell wrote in 1948 and how close these things are to 'Big Brother'.
Sorry, no, just no.
Can you shut the fuck up with this ridiculous, myopic conspiracy theory. You have fucking microphones around you every day of your life, but because there's a device listening for the keyword "Alexa" you've jumped to the erroneous conclusion that it's not just listening for the keyword "Alexa" but also recording everything you're saying; yet you've completely ignored the glaring fact that your smartphone, tablet, PC, and many other devices have microphones and cameras built into them and you have no fucking idea if they're secretly recording what you're doing at any given time. And I bet you install 3rd-party apps on your devices without making sure that you've read and understood every line of the code to make sure that they aren't subverting the terms of use and gathering data about your usage patterns in ways you're not even aware. I fucking hate you tinfoil-hat idiots that can't see the forest for the trees.
Soli, I think you need to get your head out of the sand. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-echo-data-evidence-in-murder-case/ already shows the police force is going after any kind of information they can. They also went after a smart water thermometer. This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's already happening. Yes, we have all kinds of microphones and cameras around us but for the most part, Apple has tried to make sure these components don't work without the user knowing about it. As for Amazon and Google, their business is selling people's information to others. That's not Apple's business. If you don't believe the NSA is pushing for access to these network-based communication devices (or they already have it through "deals"), then you don't understand what the NSA is tasked to do.
As for the Echo only turning on when it's summoned, can you prove this? Are their any service words it uses other than having to start with Alexa? Can it be hacked, just like everything else. Where does the data go, how much of the conversations are saved by Amazon and is any of it encrypted? Does Amazon scan the conversations (like Google does on everything--no, I don't have proof of this) and use it for targeted marketing? These are all serious questions that need to be investigated and not some ramblings from another conspiracy theorist but from someone who spent their entire work life dealing with limiting access by others to information I was working on.
Of course they will go afte this stuff. Like they go after your smartphone and computer, before that your phone, before that your desk drawer.
Whats new or different about this? The only relevant question is how we regulate, legislate, and push back. The rest is, as Soli says, tinfoil hat crap.
This is especially true for the Google and Amazon offerings. Having those things listening all the time is just not on. If you care about your personal security then just don't use these things. Do you really want a feed of your home conversations to the NSA, GCHQ and worse, the FSB? And one that you have to pay for out of your own money? Just go read/watch 1984 and see what Orwell wrote in 1948 and how close these things are to 'Big Brother'.
Sorry, no, just no.
Can you shut the fuck up with this ridiculous, myopic conspiracy theory. You have fucking microphones around you every day of your life, but because there's a device listening for the keyword "Alexa" you've jumped to the erroneous conclusion that it's not just listening for the keyword "Alexa" but also recording everything you're saying; yet you've completely ignored the glaring fact that your smartphone, tablet, PC, and many other devices have microphones and cameras built into them and you have no fucking idea if they're secretly recording what you're doing at any given time. And I bet you install 3rd-party apps on your devices without making sure that you've read and understood every line of the code to make sure that they aren't subverting the terms of use and gathering data about your usage patterns in ways you're not even aware. I fucking hate you tinfoil-hat idiots that can't see the forest for the trees.
What's your point? That because the cops are clueless about technology and depress for a lead that it's proof that the Echo is always recording everything you say? Now that's a head in a sand assumption.
Unless the victim also had the name Alexa and the murder oddly screamed out, "Alexa, my name is James Bates and I'm going to strangle you" or unless Bates had previous put on his shopping list, "Alexa, order me piano wire, a shovel, and a bag of lye," there would be nothing on there to incriminate the accused.
As for the Echo only turning on when it's summoned, can you prove this?
Of course. You can do the same if you have any number of devices. I assume you have an iPhone that uses "Hey, Siri."
Are their any service words it uses other than having to start with Alexa?
Yes. You get to choose from 3 different words, but only one word works unless you change it in Settings. Early on they stated—at least that's how I read it—that you'd be able to program any keyword to wake the device, but I don't think that happened, or if it did it was short lived.
Can it be hacked, just like everything else. Where does the data go, how much of the conversations are saved by Amazon and is any of it encrypted? Does Amazon scan the conversations (like Google does on everything--no, I don't have proof of this) and use it for targeted marketing? These are all serious questions that need to be investigated and not some ramblings from another conspiracy theorist but from someone who spent their entire work life dealing with limiting access by others to information I was working on.
1) Of course it's possible to be hacked. Never assume something is unhackable. I made that point already about you not knowing what your cameras and microphones are recording, so it's foolish to be frightened because a device is designed to listen to a keyword it would somehow translate to it always recording everything you're saying.
2) Just like with Siri, the data is parsed on their servers. Unlike with Siri you can see every request you've made and then report on its accuracy, which is a great thing to help better the system quickly.
3) If these questions are so "serious" then why haven't you brought this up about Siri or about all the cameras and microphones in your home and on your person and nearly everywhere you go that could be hacked. And not just audio and video of your environment, but capturing data from your computers and routers, which we've recently seen is a real issue.
You people really need to stop with this erroneous notion that "always listening for a keyword" means it's always recording, and that without that feature it's not possible that a device can be both listening in real time and recording.
tl;dr: All your fears targeted only at Alexa and not technology in general are completely unfounded.
As an owner of both Echo and Google Home I'd say Amazon will be overtaken by Google within 2 years.
Amazon are in it for the long game. They want to be the retailer that most people turn to. Alexa is just a stepping stone towards that. They want to be the only retailer of substence left in the world. Ask yourself what they don't sell (yet).
Amazon isn't much of a factor. Over the holidays I did some seasonal work for a big box retailer and the GM told me Amazon price match doesn't affect them all. My experience bore that statement out. People by and large want to talk to a human about their needs. Amazon cannot provide that.
Siri, home kit and Apple TV are serious ball drops.
I'm getting a new TV. But I want it wall mounted and primarily I use the internet for TV these days. Without a lot of wiring added this excludes the Apple TV and so I will get a smart TV probably running Android.
That said I think home automation is a fad. It was wearables a few years ago right
No ..it's not. Wearables never delivered because marketing people told us there would be these amazing sensors to provide our quantified life and essentially the product delivered was a fancy pedometer. They're getting there but they haven't matched the hype.
What's driving Home Auto is security (doorbell and security cams) lighting and streaming (cord cutting). It's certainly not a fad.
Regardless of how the technologies affect the bottom lines of each company, Apple does have catching up to do with the quality of the Siri experience compared to both Google and Amazon. Siri feels very restrictive compared to competitors, requiring more precise phrasing to get an adequate answer. The other two feel more freeform and conversational, particularly Google Now.
One reason behind this is that Google/Amazon are not afraid to use customer data to bolster AI learning, which will potentially allow them to stay ahead of Apple. Apple has painted themselves into a corner a bit by being so loud and proud about customer privacy. While their stance on privacy is obviously highly respectable, the reality is that AI software needs real world input to improve and Google/Amazon (particularly Google) are in a position that may offer exponential rather than incremental improvements.
I'd also like to point out this bad assumption in your article: "In contrast, moving from iOS devices and the rest of Apple's platform to new hardware running a different ecosystem, just to access another voice assistant, is a much more difficult transition for users to make."
At least in the case of Alexa, nothing is further from the truth. I was given an Echo Dot as an unexpected Xmas present and found it delightfully easy to use. It has quickly replaced "Hey Siri" as my go-to for voice control of lights and common questions like weather. The fight here might not be about which technology makes the most money, but which voice service gets the most mind share first, becoming the "Google" or "Kleenex" of voice assistance.
Let us know when you buy an amazon phone and computer (or a droid and a pc), just to better utilize Alexa. That's what dan meant by moving away from apple's ecosystem. We have an Alexa and her recognition of my commands is about 15% better than Siri, meaning we have to try twice or more times to accomplish something multiple times a week, but just slightly less than with Siri, and that's with amazon having a big cylinder with many mics at its disposal.
I don't see a phone/computer switch happening anytime soon
Amazon is getting a lot more traction for it's AI than some here realize. It's not just for home. Alexa will come preinstalled on some Huawei smartphones and is also being integrated with some vehicles, with Ford announcing it this week.
People already have a better solution to Alexa on their phones. It's called Google Now.
I don't know what you guys aren't getting. Google has the best knowledgebase and dataset by far. Apple is ahead of Amazon. Amazon had to use Bing for their search.
Amazon doesn't have an answer for multi-room audio - Google does. Amazon just announced integration into crappy 3rd TV
Apple is still well positioned. HomeKit is still substantial. They have global coverage for Siri in 21 languages (Echo doesn't even cover 5 languages) . DED is spot on here Apple delivers globally and sells many more units.
Let's talk about Amazon Prime. I pay $99 a year for free 2-Day shipping that was great but now with multiple retailers I can ship to the store for free. I'll probably keep Prime for another year but I don't even know if I need it anymore.
I stand by my statement. In 3 years the AI and Voice will be owned by Google and Apple. Just like the Mobile sector is. There's just no room for Amazon...they will become Blackberry.
I was praying to the God in Hades that this was a DED article. Now I can sit down and have an enjoyable time reading it.
Because it will tell you what you want to hear? Even Ben Bajarin, normally very bullish on Apple was worried about the lack of Apple love at CES. Outside of iPhone cases/chargers the only real Apple presence was companies providing solutions for the ports Apple removed on the new Macs. Siri and HomeKit aren't dominating anything.
Remember when 3D tvs dominated CES? Now we all have 'em.
Holy shįî. I hope someone from the company is paying attention to this stunning conversation.
I think we may may be in the midst of a Trumpster-level mindshift in the Apple faithful. I am sensing a serious sentiment shift.
Whats so stunning about it when most of its true. Siri is lacking in a big way compared to the others. I never use Siri on my iPhone because she never gets anything right. My Google Home does all the while controlling my Smart home. My favorite is waking up in the day and asking what my day is like and it goes through everything I have.
I was praying to the God in Hades that this was a DED article. Now I can sit down and have an enjoyable time reading it.
Because it will tell you what you want to hear? Even Ben Bajarin, normally very bullish on Apple was worried about the lack of Apple love at CES. Outside of iPhone cases/chargers the only real Apple presence was companies providing solutions for the ports Apple removed on the new Macs. Siri and HomeKit aren't dominating anything.
Remember when 3D tvs dominated CES? Now we all have 'em.
LOL They took away the Funny button.
And remember when the rumours about Apple releasing an iTablet dominated the tech news in 2009 so by CES 2010 it was filled with $1000+ tablets all trying to beat Apple to the punch? Remember Balmer on stage holding and HP(?) windows-based tablet showing a copy of a Twilight book cover on it which had an Apple in the pic?
I'm curious what people actually ask Alexa to do. I just don't see the benefit or why I'd want one (or a bunch, actually) in my home.
What would be the Top 10 questions/commands you give Alexa that makes it worthwhile?
Top 10? I'm not sure I could tell you an accurate list.. Same for Siri, although my most common non-query to Siri is probably telling it to fuck off after it repeatedly fails on simple commands.
Some of the things I do is create multiple timers for cooking. I also ask it to music or news from any variety of sources, including my personal library. The weather forecast is another one. A nice feature with having an Echo is that you can practically mumble this from across the room while passing through the room right after waking up and it'll be spot on. Another nice feature of the Echo is being able to say "Alexa…" while music is playing fairly loudly and it'll be able to pause the music to listen to the rest of your command. If it's up too loud you may have to yell "Alexa." Speaking of volume, I like the 1 through 10 volume setting over Siri's percentage option, which I only learned about in the last week. The aforementioned alarms and asking for the time with remarkable ease is one. I can't come close to that with "Hey, Siri…" even though on paper it might look like the same thing. Flash briefings of news are nice while you're in the kitchen cooking, which you can personalize. Having stuff added to a to-do list, shopping list, and to your Amazon cart is convenient. I only use the latter for Echo as I still use Notes in my iPhone and Mac with manual entries. Trivia is great with Echo during a dinner conversation. And if you don't have a song in your library, it will look to play it for you from its collection, and if not it will at least play a sample from its Amazon page. Kind of fun to be talking about a movie and then play clips from the soundtrack from the Amazon website. If you want to play full songs you can just ask it to play a genre. If you have some other service added it will try that, otherwise it will try other options. Unlike with the Apple TV's TV app and with Amazon's Prime Video which lumps paid and free content together without a hierarchy, Alexa's algorithm looks to satisfy your requests with your personalized settings and services, and then works to other options if those don't pan out.
It's also now great for smart home integration, checking the status of a flight before you leave, ordering an Uber/Lyft, and my roommate used it to find her keys and iPhone as she was prone to misplacing the moment she put them down. There are simply too many features to list and I'm forgetting a million things I use it for without thinking twice. Your request is like asking me the top 10 things I talk about with someone I've lived with for 2 years. I'm not saying your question is unreasonable since we're talking about technology, but from my end that's what the question feels like since it does so much.
Sorry, but not one thing you listed is anything I'd ever see myself using. There's technology that actually improves your life and technology that's "cool". To me this seems more like the latter.
Holy shįî. I hope someone from the company is paying attention to this stunning conversation.
I think we may may be in the midst of a Trumpster-level mindshift in the Apple faithful. I am sensing a serious sentiment shift.
Whats so stunning about it when most of its true. Siri is lacking in a big way compared to the others. I never use Siri on my iPhone because she never gets anything right. My Google Home does all the while controlling my Smart home. My favorite is waking up in the day and asking what my day is like and it goes through everything I have.
And it's expanding with more manufacturers jumping on board. The Nvidia Spot is their version of Google Home, integrating the new Google Assistant. Better yet it will work with both last years Shield TV as well as the new one.
Siri has been very buggy for me lately. Takes too long to initiate on iOS 10 and has a few major bugs on macOS. Literally cuts me off mid-sentence and tells me she does not understand what that means. I don't understand sentences that are chopping off 2 seconds into them either. And I have't even paused my speech. This is with a service that launched almost 7 years ago. I wish Apple would get Siri-ous.
While I use Apple Music, I use a Sonos system to play the music, I use Fire TV instead of Apple TV for media and I use Waze rather than Apple Maps for navigation. As I have a car that has Android Auto as well as CarPlay I have started moving my SIM card over to a Galaxy S7 Edge for longer car trips to use Android Auto as I find, other than messaging, which is something I kind of avoid while driving anyway, CarPlay is useless and more often than not responds with 'I am sorry, I can't search the internet while you are driving' which makes the CarPlay experience useless and frustrating. I kind of thought that being able to use voice to do things like find a gas station or see if a store is open was kind of the idea.
Because of the sorry state of SIRI and APPLE MAPS I've stayed a way from CarPlay. Thanks for letting me know its not worth it.
And because of SIR and MAPS there is no way in hell that I would be interested in an Apple car. Maybe Car Play (or an Apple enhanced User Experience) might be good if Apple started providing "A" series chip call it the "C" series for traditional Auto makers. Apple has proven that they can design small powerful specialized chips.
Years after the Scott Forstall was pushed out for problems in iMaps I can't believe that Cue hasn't been either fired, Reassigned, or had these Responsibilities moved to a new executive. The executive level at Apple seems more like a "boys tree house club" - its just the friends who get along with Cook and Ive. They have only added one product (the watch) since Jobs died. and yet it seems like product development has slowed down all the last few years with updates taking years to iPads and computers. Because of this Cook should be replaced.
Blah blah blah rant. I remember when Jobs added products every day of the year.
Shit, he didn't. I guess you don't consider the AirPods a product. If development was so easy, everyone would be releasing new products daily.
I'm curious what people actually ask Alexa to do. I just don't see the benefit or why I'd want one (or a bunch, actually) in my home.
What would be the Top 10 questions/commands you give Alexa that makes it worthwhile?
Top 10? I'm not sure I could tell you an accurate list.. Same for Siri, although my most common non-query to Siri is probably telling it to fuck off after it repeatedly fails on simple commands.
Some of the things I do is create multiple timers for cooking. I also ask it to music or news from any variety of sources, including my personal library. The weather forecast is another one. A nice feature with having an Echo is that you can practically mumble this from across the room while passing through the room right after waking up and it'll be spot on. Another nice feature of the Echo is being able to say "Alexa…" while music is playing fairly loudly and it'll be able to pause the music to listen to the rest of your command. If it's up too loud you may have to yell "Alexa." Speaking of volume, I like the 1 through 10 volume setting over Siri's percentage option, which I only learned about in the last week. The aforementioned alarms and asking for the time with remarkable ease is one. I can't come close to that with "Hey, Siri…" even though on paper it might look like the same thing. Flash briefings of news are nice while you're in the kitchen cooking, which you can personalize. Having stuff added to a to-do list, shopping list, and to your Amazon cart is convenient. I only use the latter for Echo as I still use Notes in my iPhone and Mac with manual entries. Trivia is great with Echo during a dinner conversation. And if you don't have a song in your library, it will look to play it for you from its collection, and if not it will at least play a sample from its Amazon page. Kind of fun to be talking about a movie and then play clips from the soundtrack from the Amazon website. If you want to play full songs you can just ask it to play a genre. If you have some other service added it will try that, otherwise it will try other options. Unlike with the Apple TV's TV app and with Amazon's Prime Video which lumps paid and free content together without a hierarchy, Alexa's algorithm looks to satisfy your requests with your personalized settings and services, and then works to other options if those don't pan out.
It's also now great for smart home integration, checking the status of a flight before you leave, ordering an Uber/Lyft, and my roommate used it to find her keys and iPhone as she was prone to misplacing the moment she put them down. There are simply too many features to list and I'm forgetting a million things I use it for without thinking twice. Your request is like asking me the top 10 things I talk about with someone I've lived with for 2 years. I'm not saying your question is unreasonable since we're talking about technology, but from my end that's what the question feels like since it does so much.
Sorry, but not one thing you listed is anything I'd ever see myself using. There's technology that actually improves your life and technology that's "cool". To me this seems more like the latter.
1) That's perfectly fine if you have no use for a voice controlled system in your home, but I guess that means you don't cook at home so you have no need for timers, an eidetic memory so you have no need for converting measurements, and so great at math that you'd have no need to figure out portions that aren't part of a recipe all while your hands are too dirty to use your iPhone or another device.
2) I find it hard to believe that you looked through all 10,000 Skills and saw not a single thing that could be useful to you, but let's assume that you did look through every possible feature that the Alexa service offers and found none that suits your needs; what does that have to do with the technology improving the lives of others? Just because it's not for you doesn't mean you should write it off as being beneficial to others. The iPad is not the ideal computing device for my needs, but I'd never say that the iPad is a pointless gadget that can't possibly "improve your life."
It's easy to criticize such complex and difficult technique as AI and voice recognition but Siri has some worrisome characteristics. One is that it can easily get off track and for example insists on calling someone (completely out of context and certainly not the one you would want to call at all), it's even a major joke in a recent movie (and spot on, because it actually works like that in real life); another one is that it's implementation is haphazard and for example asking for directions ends up with an awful sounding completely different voice and a completely different service without comparable voice interface (maps).
One thing that Amazon is far behind is that all this Echo stuff is US centric only. If you live in the US bubble it maybe good, but there's a whole world out here and Amazon means alot less than it does for you.
One thing that Amazon is far behind is that all this Echo stuff is US centric only. If you live in the US bubble it maybe good, but there's a whole world out here and Amazon means alot less than it does for you.
It was released here in the UK back in September and has been very well regionalised for news headlines, radio stations etc. It was a very popular gift over Xmas amongst people I know.
I was praying to the God in Hades that this was a DED article. Now I can sit down and have an enjoyable time reading it.
Because it will tell you what you want to hear? Even Ben Bajarin, normally very bullish on Apple was worried about the lack of Apple love at CES. Outside of iPhone cases/chargers the only real Apple presence was companies providing solutions for the ports Apple removed on the new Macs. Siri and HomeKit aren't dominating anything.
CES 2017 has been a dumpster fire. The only thing i've been wowed by have been paper thin 65" OLED screens. Home Automation crapped the bed. Nest hasn't made a significant advance in two years. Netgear delivered a baby monitor (????) . Samsung wanted to flog overpriced Fridges with embedded TV more than SmartThings.
Basically people have screamed "I work with Alexa" because nothing of note came out that pushed us forward. The think CES is rapidly becoming irrelevant to many companies who don't need it to create buzz.
Clearly Alexa is just the latest thing the tech community has decided to hype. Last year it was bots and any tech company not all in on bots was doomed. BUT when someone like Ben Bajarin expresses concerns about HomeKit and Apple's presence in general at CES I get worried. He's typical bullish on Apple and if he's hearing concerns from 3rd party vendors that's a problem. One of Apple's strengths is it's ecosystem. If there are cracks in the ecosystem that's not good.
Apple has been coasting on the lead that the A series chips and the original iOS operating system gave them with the early phones.
Just look at the Cameras in the phone. The dual camera in the 7+ is innovative, but the camera in the regular 7 is an also ran behind Galaxy S7 and Pixel. Can you image how bad this last quarter would have been if the Note 7 wasn't exploding. Otherwise nothing special (other than taking away the headphone jack)..
That's the thing. Apple makes smart phones. Go buy a pixel if you love the camera. The rest of the phone has older tech. Lots of analysts have said the note explosion had an immaterial effect on the iPhone. So the quarter would be still gangbusters like every holiday quarter. Your concern is misplaced.
Comments
Whats new or different about this? The only relevant question is how we regulate, legislate, and push back. The rest is, as Soli says, tinfoil hat crap.
I think we may may be in the midst of a Trumpster-level mindshift in the Apple faithful. I am sensing a serious sentiment shift.
Unless the victim also had the name Alexa and the murder oddly screamed out, "Alexa, my name is James Bates and I'm going to strangle you" or unless Bates had previous put on his shopping list, "Alexa, order me piano wire, a shovel, and a bag of lye," there would be nothing on there to incriminate the accused.
Of course. You can do the same if you have any number of devices. I assume you have an iPhone that uses "Hey, Siri."
Yes. You get to choose from 3 different words, but only one word works unless you change it in Settings. Early on they stated—at least that's how I read it—that you'd be able to program any keyword to wake the device, but I don't think that happened, or if it did it was short lived.
1) Of course it's possible to be hacked. Never assume something is unhackable. I made that point already about you not knowing what your cameras and microphones are recording, so it's foolish to be frightened because a device is designed to listen to a keyword it would somehow translate to it always recording everything you're saying.
2) Just like with Siri, the data is parsed on their servers. Unlike with Siri you can see every request you've made and then report on its accuracy, which is a great thing to help better the system quickly.
3) If these questions are so "serious" then why haven't you brought this up about Siri or about all the cameras and microphones in your home and on your person and nearly everywhere you go that could be hacked. And not just audio and video of your environment, but capturing data from your computers and routers, which we've recently seen is a real issue.
You people really need to stop with this erroneous notion that "always listening for a keyword" means it's always recording, and that without that feature it's not possible that a device can be both listening in real time and recording.
tl;dr: All your fears targeted only at Alexa and not technology in general are completely unfounded.
What's driving Home Auto is security (doorbell and security cams) lighting and streaming (cord cutting). It's certainly not a fad.
People already have a better solution to Alexa on their phones. It's called Google Now.
I don't know what you guys aren't getting. Google has the best knowledgebase and dataset by far. Apple is ahead of Amazon. Amazon had to use Bing for their search.
Amazon doesn't have an answer for multi-room audio - Google does.
Amazon just announced integration into crappy 3rd TV
Apple is still well positioned. HomeKit is still substantial. They have global coverage for Siri in 21 languages (Echo doesn't even cover 5 languages) . DED is spot on here Apple delivers globally and sells many more units.
Let's talk about Amazon Prime. I pay $99 a year for free 2-Day shipping that was great but now with multiple retailers I can ship to the store for free. I'll probably keep Prime for another year but I don't even know if I need it anymore.
I stand by my statement. In 3 years the AI and Voice will be owned by Google and Apple. Just like the Mobile sector is. There's just no room for Amazon...they will become Blackberry.
And remember when the rumours about Apple releasing an iTablet dominated the tech news in 2009 so by CES 2010 it was filled with $1000+ tablets all trying to beat Apple to the punch? Remember Balmer on stage holding and HP(?) windows-based tablet showing a copy of a Twilight book cover on it which had an Apple in the pic?
Sorry, but not one thing you listed is anything I'd ever see myself using. There's technology that actually improves your life and technology that's "cool". To me this seems more like the latter.
Shit, he didn't. I guess you don't consider the AirPods a product. If development was so easy, everyone would be releasing new products daily.
Maps works for me.
2) I find it hard to believe that you looked through all 10,000 Skills and saw not a single thing that could be useful to you, but let's assume that you did look through every possible feature that the Alexa service offers and found none that suits your needs; what does that have to do with the technology improving the lives of others? Just because it's not for you doesn't mean you should write it off as being beneficial to others. The iPad is not the ideal computing device for my needs, but I'd never say that the iPad is a pointless gadget that can't possibly "improve your life."
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/amazons-alexa-powered-echo-and-echo-dot-coming-to-uk-and-germany/
EDIT: I'm wrong. It's for sale in the UK. Didn't check Germany.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=echo
That's the thing. Apple makes smart phones. Go buy a pixel if you love the camera. The rest of the phone has older tech. Lots of analysts have said the note explosion had an immaterial effect on the iPhone. So the quarter would be still gangbusters like every holiday quarter. Your concern is misplaced.