Re: Changing the name
The problem is that the catch words are built-in to conserve precious battery life.
Thing is.. A 3 syllable word or phrase takes just as much to process as any other 3 syllable word/phrase when you have to process everything even remotely close to tell if that's the target word/phrase. It has to process every thing it hears that could be close enough - and that's assuming there's some level of pre-processing to avoid it trying to process "you're stupid".
However, if I record a phrase in my voice, then it only has to respond to my voice. I can make it what I want (so doesn't have to be a name), and it only has to check what it hears against what it has in memory - reasonable match = listen, otherwise ignore. My much-mentioned T209 was given a 3 or 4 word wake-up phrase that would never come up in ordinary conversation, and that only one other person managed to get past no matter how well he mimicked my voice. And this was mid 90's tech.
Given that the device is going to be sending stuff off over a wireless or other link, processing/sending off audio data and so on, it's rather ingenious to claim "battery life" for such things. Takes more battery life to send audio over WiFi than it takes to compare with a block of internal ram. My T209 had something over 24hours talk time, and enough standby time that it could last a couple of weeks between charges if I didn't talk on it often. So all this waffle about "saving battery life" really is just shite. Especially in an age where most of the western world are used to their phabs needing to be charged every half hour.
Don't forget, the context of this conversation is the wake-up word and letting people change it. Especially away from a fairly common first name, which was a ridiculously stupid idea to use and suggests that Amazon intended such incidents.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
