the domestic intercom industry
Man, that's another thousand-dollar industry that Google is destroying.
Vision of a connected speaker in every room to save shouting at the kids when dinner hits the table Google has taken on the might of the intercom industry with a device that makes shouting at your kids to get them to come to the dinner table redundant – for perhaps a couple of hundred dollars. The company did so on Tuesday …
Have both an Echo since it came out in late 2014 and now several Google Homes. The two are actually very different and hard to see why people would still buy the Echo.
The big difference is the Google Home supports natural language. So you can just talk naturally like you would talk to your wife. The Echo uses basically commands. So I was motivated to memorize the commands but my family was not. So our Echo my family referred to by my family as "my toy" versus everyone uses the Google Homes.
An excuse to have a spyware device in every room. How quaint.
If it is communication you are after, a second hand 79xx series VOIP phone is 20£ on ebay. While in theory, you need a per phone license and a Call manager to run the setup in practice anyone who buys them for 20£ runs them using Asterisk(*). Add 50£ for a BananaPi (I would not want to run VOIP for more than one phone on a Razzie with its "entertaining" Ethernet) or a similar amount for a second hand NUC or a hackable "Thin" Client and you have a grand total of < 200 per household which you can actually use to communicate with the outside world as well.
Compare that versus a 200£ spyware device in each room. Sorry, no contest.
(*)I have ~10 of those - one off ebay, one bought 15 years ago for real money and the rest collected from skip diving at various places I worked for.
DECT well at least my DECT setup will also do an all stations broadcast and alert all attended phones to a call from a known number.
Functions used for years are so old hat these days, they need something new and shiny to make them feel loved. - - - or do they?
I do not need to re-buy functions I already have so why bother?
Or simply use WhatsApp or similar on a normal smartphone, which everyone nowadays has anyway, in the pocket or otherwise nearby. Around my house, they all are joined to my local WLAN, so there is no charge for the messages. (Whether or not WhatsApp admins can read the utterly boring messages ("come up for dinner") and VOIP calls is irrelevant, but supposedly they are nowadays end-to-end encrypted).
There's probably some startup out there called Ober recruiting an army of supposedly-self-employed waiter/butlers (to be replaced with robots when possible) to listen in for such demands and be ready to whizz around to your house on roller skates or hoverboards to comply, with the USP that it eliminates domestic tension of this kind. And, in the febrile minds of investors, somehow make money from it.
Great idea. What a wonderful family environment we are preparing ! I'm sure the next generation is not at all going to feel bereft of family connections when a speaker tells them to do things. I'm sure that educating your offspring via loudspeaker is not at all going to make them feel like they're in bootcamp and you're the master sergeant (who likes their master sergeant in bootcamp ?).
You have kids. Talk to them. Interact with them. Show them you care.
Otherwise they will leave you one day and never, ever think of calling you.
I'm sure that educating your offspring via loudspeaker is not at all going to make them feel like they're in bootcamp and you're the master sergeant (who likes their master sergeant in bootcamp ?).
But the Kids listen to their device. One could use this as a child minding service. Just have some pre-recorded messages which it barks out from time to time
Stop that.
Play nice.
Don't hit your [brother|sister].
Be quiet.
...
Leave the cat alone.
Rather than dragging, I prefer the idea of frozen marbles.
Store marbles in the freezer, and pour them into the bed when needed. The kid can't roll away from them, and they don't get the sheets wet. And once the kid is up, you can collect the marbles and put 'em back in the freezer for the next time.
Why would anyone want this?
We have a ship's bell (from an old MTB) fixed to the wall at the foot of the stairs. The reaction to it is predictably Pavlovian, and I haven't needed to change any batteries since we bought it.
You can also express frustration, etc. in the way you ring it, as in, "Get down here NOW, with CLEAN hands, or your dinner is going out on the back lawn for the starlings." They understand the code. Totally. They even look sheepish when they sit down.
Can't imagine how Google can possibly improve on that.
Thank god children will stop dying of starvation now we have a means to call them to dinner!
Anyway you look at it, those "assistants" remain a solution in search of a problem, and while I know creative people have found uses for them, there is no really compelling reason for them to exist, so they need to advertise *any* potential use, no matter how insignificant or ridiculous.
Which will do two things: anger New Zealanders, who wonder why they're excluded, and; give the domestic intercom industry beyond the anglosphere a warning it's in the sights of Google's disrupto-tronic innovation-ray.
Kiwis have trained sheep they can use to carry messages.
The domestic intercom industry in certain countries is safe: France is not going to allow Google to mangle the purity of the French language (stop laughing in the back, there) with their Google-translated merde. Germany fears that the things may, somehow, be nuclear powered. Russia will allow it in only if it broadcasts pix of the Shirtless One and his pony. (And hands over a slice of the profits.) And the government of the great People's Republic will object on the basis that it is the only entity allowed to spy on its citizens.