It can't be something they already have. It can't be something from a special interest hobby field, where enthusiasts identify deeply with every single related purchase decision. It can't be a commodity they would routinely buy anyways, that'd be like giving money.

This leaves us with purely sacrificial gifts ("to show you that I care, I have, through an elaborate mechanism too complicated not only to explain but also to understand, paid some poor kid to spend their life burrowing through dirt to find this nice stone which I now present to you"), things you know they would have bought, but didn't like the price and, most importantly, things they might like but they don't know it yet.

Echo dot and the like must be huge holiday sellers because many people who would never but one might still enjoy then, and the whole concept is sufficiently new that even a blind guess yields an acceptable risk in "do they already have one?".

And then there is of course the onegenerational aspect, a great many senior citizens who never got fully accustomed to digital screen media have children or grandchildren who can't think of much besides gadgets, perfect match.

There are 2 kinds of gifts I like to give that aren't "purely sacrificial gifts": either a book I think the recipient will enjoy (this could be a graphic novel or art book if they aren't much of a reader), or a framed print of a portrait of their kid/partner/themselves with friends/etc. (I do large format film photography and make my own prints, so obviously the latter option is not a possibility for everyone. Still, books are great)

* Novelty value, it's a fun idea. It looks cool to buy an "edgy" product for your nephew / niece etc.

* The marketing team worked hard to direct prime customers to buy one for their family / friends as gifts.

* People are out of ideas and it's something new, novel and affordable.

I really don't think people put much thought into presents in general, if there is something new, kind of affordable and in your face, it's a given you're going to buy it.

(We bought one for a pretty tech savvy 89 year old who we thought might actually get practical benefits from IoT plugs as well as enjoy the novelty value of something that interacts vaguely like a human since he doesn't go out so much these days. But that's something of an edge case)

The Baby Boomers are retiring in droves right now. It's becoming less and less so (in the USA).

Throw in that it was mentioned in all the black friday deal discussions and it was marketed to anyone visiting amazon.com for holiday shopping... well, they were going to push units regardless.

My wife didn't like the idea of having a microphone in our rooms, now she asked me if i don't want to buy another one.

And yeah it is only used for timer, reminder, light on/off and music.

I love it too.

(Edit P.S.) Don't get me started on Unix REPLs suitable for young kids. A simple for loop still reads best in BASIC.

When she actually saw it in action and found out I had only paid $50CAD for one, she told me to get another one.

I've only had Echo since Dec 5, but we're both becoming dependent on its convenience.

I enjoy the discussions here but the reaction of this niche audience is not a good predictor of how the average person will act. Most people don't understand how internet ads work or care that much about the privacy of mundane activities. Try asking some non-technical friends how Google or Facebook make money and then once you explain how ask if they care.

People buy these products because they're useful. They don't know about or care what the vocal minority that know about tech say.

My dad takes weeks or months to learn how to use any new GUI. He's used automated phone systems for his whole life, though, and a voice-driven interface would be much easier for him.

It seems like HNers find it hard to believe that people like my dad exist, for some reason.

If that small subset is sufficiently useful to that particular individual, I don't think it really matters. The average person only uses a small subset of Microsoft Word for example.

I have a 76 year old auntie. After setting it up and explaining to her how to use it, she was able to request that Alexa play her favorite pop song from when she was a teenager and it worked.

It worked despite:

- This was her first time using it and she's wildly not a computer person

- Her having a thick tagalog accent

- It was some fairly obscure song that hasn't been played on the radio for forever

She's blown away and assumes that it costs $1000s of dollars, because nothing else works like this so it must be horrendously expensive, but no it costs about what a decent alarm clock/radio costs.

Similarly, my young kids love it as well b/c they can request music, etc.

While the primary use in our house is music, a close second would be timers+alarms (for cooking, leaving the house, taking turns, waking up, etc.) they're so quick and easy to set up.

Anecdotic question but can the Echo run a rotation, like a chore wheel?

You would probably need to edit your question to "Why do you think millions of people bought an [Amazon] Echo Dot or a Google Home [Mini]" The evidence is clear both are the lowest costing home assistant device for their respective lines. At $30 on sales this season it could make it even into many gift swaps with that budget. Just as a few years ago the Firestick and Chromecast did.

I would add...

'and the vast majority of americans dont understand why they should care about government surveillance and how that relates to installing an internet-connected microphone in their home'

unfortunately most of us in the hn crowd probably feel like there is tons of awareness about surveillance right now, but my guess is that feeling is the result of filter bubbles.

When we start to talk about government surveillance I think people go over board and start looking at IOT devices over aggressively. It not hard to bug a house, people are usually gone for at least 8 hours a day on weekdays. If I was doing an ops, it be easier to break into their Wi-Fi and infect a device that way or break into their house and just plant a bug or two rather than wait and get a warrant for their data from Google or Amazon which is time consuming and filled with paper pushing, plus the added fact that Google and Amazon have both pushed back in recent years in court battles.

When it comes to "Big Brother" you are fighting a rather big monster with zero days, money and time on its side. Even as someone with enterprise grade networking equipment in his house and a security background, I just know its a time game if you fighting the "MAN". I had a friend that was super paranoid. Enterprise gear, no IOT, custom linux router with live patching, some pretty cool stuff. Asked me to pentest him. A door left unlocked (planned to use a bump key) by his wife before leaving the house and a PoisonTap attack on a windows computer and he was pawned. GAME OVER.

I have no problem with the product category Echo Dot and Google Home sit in, and can see why they make interesting gifts, my only issue is with the surveillance aspects of these devices.

Why do I think people bought them regardless of this issue? I'd suggest either surveillance wasn't forefront in their minds, or it doesn't bother them that much.

What's interesting to me is to compare these devices to Google Glass. There was a huge backlash about Google Glass as it was obvious people were being recorded without their consent. You had people wearing the devices getting called glassholes, and the devices being banned from certain venues. Compare that to the Echo Dot. The level of unwarranted surveillance with Google Glass and Echo Dot is pretty much the same, but because one is less visible than the other it doesn't get the same level of backlash. Is there something about audio surveillance which makes it more socially acceptable than video surveillance? If a future version of Amazon Echo came with a camera that watched your actions, would that get people to see the downsides of these devices? I'm not sure.

With smart home devices, you put a microphone on private property that you already own, and it needs to be connected to an AC outlet. It's not a public space.

Meanwhile, most seem to have no problem carrying smartphones on them 24/7, which have the same capability of recording microphone input, but in public spaces disconnected from an AC outlet.

The faux outrage at surveillance is fairly hypocritical, if you ask me.

I never understood using this as an argument in favor of always listening devices. Just because someone is invading your privacy in one way, doesn't mean you should just open the floodgates and let everyone invade your privacy. It is possible to be outraged at both, while being required to use one or the other.

But in the meantime, since I have to have a smartphone, you are arguing that I should just get any device that listens without regard for privacy. That doesn't make any sense.

This is a bug in human programming. I think it stems from far too many people not caring about potential, regardless of likelihood, and instead only caring about what happens. Similar to a gamblers fallacy in bad statistical reasoning (if it hasn't happened yet, then it won't happen), combined with a few other cognitive biases that allow a person to ignore events they don't see the direct cause and effect of.

The end result is that as long as the privacy invasion doesn't appear to be a privacy invasion, people will be okay with it. And given their past choices, they'll be more willing to be okay with the privacy invasion when it does go bad, instead blaming it on some other factor (such as one particular company caught abusing it, instead of the overall trend).

Companies are learning how to exploit this, and with technology increasing faster than social ability to handle the technology (such as why video recording and audio recording treated different legally), this is going to put a damper on the future.

Google has a horrific track record on privacy, but Amazon knows who their customers are, and would never do anything to violate their trust. With Amazon, you're the customer, with Google, you're the product.

I've preordered this phone, which mitigates against this type of surveillance by the use of switches for turning off hardware devices like the camera and the microphone (and by making the software stack as open source as it can be):

https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

I also currently use one of the few smartphones without a front facing camera, which only cuts out one form of surveillance but does help.

So whilst I'm putting up with a temporary invasion of privacy for now whilst I wait for the Purism 5 to be released, I'm not passively accepting surveillance from one device whilst criticising another.

Considering the myriad of viewpoints shown on HN, I don't think that is a reasonable take. I first learned about Bitcoin on HN in 2010, long before it became well-known. Also, when Apple announced the Homepod, the financial press was constantly comparing it to Amazon Echo, but HN knew it made more sense to compare it to Sonos. Not every comment on HN is spot-on, to be sure, but the signal-to-noise here is better than 99.9% of the web.

I realised that I can influence this trend by participating more actively in the discussions. Hence, my resolution for 2018 is to more often post questions, rather than arguments to hopefully drive forward our collective creativity and intelligence. HN is a truly special place on the web!

Duh, because this has been the holy grail of personal computers since forever: you ask and computers do, no questions asked, no training, nothing. It's having servants without the pesky societal thing. In any scifi story ever there is something like that.

It's the first time it really feels like AI dreams are getting real. Interpreting speech is something so human that a computer doing it feels magical; and it removes all barriers to interacting with computers, which is a real problem that most people still have. Of course regular humans (i.e. not geeks) love this technological leap.

The technology is here to stay, one way or another, that's obvious. But problem-solving types of people (i.e. geeks) are bound to see the issues, the kinks, that can ruin the dream.

For me, the privacy implications are still a big obstacle; the world is still full of totalitarian states, even supposedly "democratic" states can barely survive periodic bouts of everyday fascism. This sort of tech is a totalitarian wet dream. We need better protections, in law as well as in tech, or we'll end up under constant STASI-like surveillance in our kitchens.

Alexa, wash the dishes! Alexa, change my kid’s diaper! Alexa, pickup my kid from school! Alexa, vacuum the living room! Alexa, take out the trash!

She can’t help me with any of that.

I guess everyday people need to have lower barriers to interacting with computers, but I’m good. I like to read HN the way I would have read the newspaper. I listen to some podcasts the way I would have listened to the radio. Beyond that I don’t have much non-professional use for computers.

Oh she will, eventually.

Already she can basically do all your shopping. That's a servant job alright. And there are plenty of other things that you would typically ask of "the help", which I bet you can already do:

"send an Amazon gift voucher to my cousin on 25 december."

"call a Uber for 5pm and send it to address X to pick up the kids."

"find plumbers near me with good ratings."

"call my lawyer on Skype."

And there will be things that will likely appear very quickly:

"create a new document with template X and the following text: ..."

"make a mix of songs A, B and C and send it to my girlfriend."

"share photos of holiday X with Dad"

... and so on and so forth. As more and more things are plugged in, it will really feel like you had an invisible servant at your disposal, doing all the dirty work for you, starting with "dealing with computer interfaces" which is what it does right now. Some things are obviously difficult or pointless to automate (like sorting dirty clothes or loading a dishwasher - note how the actual washing is already automated). Some are easier, like sweeping floors with a Roomba.

It's like we were looking at the Apple II, and you were complaining that the desktop cannot write a letter and send it for you. Vocal recognition is an enabler, an interface. If the interface is successful (and it looks like this is the case), programs and "peripherals" will come.

By that I mean, they will run a rather random route, and may or may not get to that spot on the rug you'd rather them clean, which would harken the "Alexa, clean the rug".

These things, although still very cool, seem kinda useless for anything other than once-a-day scheduled routines for keeping dirt, hair, and other messes down to a minimum.

Ironically each commercial will show the robot cleaning up a spilled mess with easy, none can actually "see" these messes. But you know, marketing.

This could probably be solved by the robot mapping floors as it sweeps them, which most already do. Results could be accessed via pc/tablet, where a user could mark specific areas as "rug", "kitchen" etc. I bet we will see this sort of feature appear in a not-so-distant future.

There is an outrageous amount to it, feature wise. Voice is the holy grail for a pretty large amount of the public, and it is finally there.

The setup is surprisingly unintuitive (even the simple step to connect to a specific wifi network is beyond many users, and it is notable that Google Home on the same device just does it by itself), but I'm sure the techie niece will do it for most.

For most it would probably instead be a techie nephew. Very cool that you (I’m assuming) have a techie niece though! Always great to see that sort of thing.

We have a Harmony remote, so we turn on/off our entertainment center and lights with the Echo. While I make breakfast I get my news update from it. My son plays music with it while doing little projects.

I'm actually surprised at the number of people who have them who really like them.

It's not freaking awesome for everyone. I feel like throwing up any time I spend more than a couple minutes on it.

I thought the new iterations of the Vive had fixed most problems but seems like some people are just not going to experience this thing any time soon :/

These things have come a long way in 20-50 years.

Yes, many vr games are still little more than tech prototypes and the hardware still needs improvement. But if you haven't used a decent brand system and can't appreciate how much potential it has. I don't know what to say to that.

You shouldn't take vr just at face value for being awesome but also some of the potential it has in next few years. That is what's freaking awesome to me(and I'm not op)

To be honest we've been told about the potential for VR for the past 3 or 4 years at least and I still can't see any killer app to justify the investment. Yeah, it's fun for cockpit games and simulations in general, but... there's not many games "made for VR" that are really interesting. Maybe business applications will be more appealing in the end?

I think that's always been true, if anything it might have gotten a little better. I remember back in the early smartphone-wars days any article about the iPhone would illicit numerous "iPhone is too locked down" comments and any Android article would illicit numerous "The UI is bad" comments.

Somewhat related, the most influencial Paul Graham article for me is http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html. I try (and often fail) to apply this when responding to articles.

Because it was the "hot new thing". Of the many "non-technical" people I know who foolishly put these things in their homes over the past couple years, all but a few have unplugged them and thrown them in a closet already.

It was a novelty at first, but one they quickly realized didn't offer much or any advantage over what they could already do with their phones - and wasn't worth the added surveillance. My sister in particular was creeped out by how often it seemed to activate without any "wake words" being said.

Now that Amazon made them cheap enough to be stocking stuffers even for lower income families in order to expand their mass surveillance network, a whole new portion of society will get to go through the same process.

I think anyone who puts these in their home should be required to have some kind of sign on their door to let anyone who enters know that "by entering this home, you agree to Amazon/Google's privacy policy".

I'm probably significantly older than the mean at HN, and I'm starting to forget stuff. My wife and I find the shopping list and reminders very handy compared to using the phone.

I also have underutilized smart home devices (wemo, harmony hub, etc) and Echo just got introduced in Canada at a lower price. I read that Echo has slightly better smart home compatibility than Home, so I decided to go with Echo. My friends with the Home seem equally happy with their devices as I am. I use Echo to turn on groups of lights by voice. It's great.

My main gripe with the Echo is that the skills are region locked. There are tons of skills that are only English (US) and not available for English (Canada) yet. I'm lucky that the two skills I'm waiting for aren't that important to me.

I get that there are privacy concerns, but I ended up opting convenience and functional benefit over them. I kinda see my Echo as "big brother[1] with benefits".

[1] big sister might be more accurate, given that we only have the option of a female voice with Echo

My guess is that most buyers are much younger than me. Perhaps they seek to be early adopters like I once did. But, values must have also changed. For example, it wasn’t very long ago that the Xbox Kinect was released and many people freaked out by having a corporation freely listen to what they say.

How do you know that?

Edit: I was totally wrong. I did an informal survey, and several people said they did have them. I just never saw them use them. Just seeing what I want to see ...

In terms of the response to these devices... they are tough devices in that they do not stand alone, and their usefulness is really defined by who the user is.

I think what you’re reading here is a coming to grips with it. Nobody really knows what these things are good for yet... but someone’s teenager likes to listen to music with it and someone’s grandma likes to control the lights.

The same discussions were had about the “information superhighway” in 1997 :)

I absolutely agree. They also fixed the most glaring problem of the Fire Phone -- the cost.

As I write this, the echo dot is $30 [screenshot]. Over 60% of US households apparently has Amazon prime. This is a good purchase for them I think.

[screenshot] https://screenshots.firefoxusercontent.com/images/a164594d-5...

Probably because they emulate human conversation well enough to make people feel less lonely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ1x9bzl2Ww

To play music from my phone right now, I have to swipe to Bluetooth, connect to the speaker, wait for the bloop, switch to my music app, and play. It connects automatically in my car, but not my kitchen, and even in the car, I have to hunt down overcast to play podcasts.

In almost every case, it's faster and easier to shout out to Alexa in my kitchen.

I can turn on my entertainment system or turn off my lights with my phone, but its a lot easier to just say it, versus getting my phone out of my pocket, turning it on, finding the app, launching the app, going to the screen to turn on the thingie, and then pressing the right button.

In general, I think people have a lot of tendencies to follow the crowd, or follow what they perceive as cool. I also don't think people think about the ramifications of what it might mean for the future (and surveillance).

This leads into a much bigger conversation about people's view of the future. I feel very few (percentage wise) are thinking about the next generation. There was a great interview with Jane Goodall on Startalk. She latched onto this, as well.

The whole climate change debate is so strange to me. People seem to get angry that scientists say it is caused by humans. To me, that doesn't matter at all. We are clearly warming and we should take measures to reverse it, no matter what the cause.

As Goodall said, we don't look at decisions in our time and ask: is this good for future generations? That is rarely part of the conversation (it might be introduced, but it's quickly swamped by other things).