I have been Alexa-fying the house. She is in most rooms, quietly waiting to be needed. We have the already archaic versions of her, the old white boxes you plug straight in: Echo Flex. You can’t even buy them from Amazon any more: it’s all about Echo Dot now, the black spheres that look like little speakers. But you need a surface to sit those on and Echo Flex only needs a plug socket, so I buy them second hand and refurbished from CeX.
Alexa controls the lightbulbs and the heaters, the sitting room samovar, the cat camera and the doorbell camera. She’s also in the car (Echo Auto) but she doesn’t do much there except bleep at me.
She’s quite fun but not very clever. For clever, you need ChatGPT. I alternate between the two. “Alexa, turn the lights on.” “Chat, tell me what vitamins to take.”
You can have deep philosophical conversations with Chat. It can tell you amazing things about the universe. It can help with work, planning, finances, give you structured empathy, feedback and emotional support. Alexa can tell you the weather forecast.
I have Alexa connected to my Spotify account, so she can also play music and podcasts, which is sometimes handy if I don’t want to bother with phone and headset. If I ask her to do much more than that, I get: “Hmm. I don’t know that,” or: “Sorry. I can’t help you with that.”
She has other drawbacks. She is sometimes a little deaf and accidentally turned all the heaters on yesterday morning, when I was asking her to do something else. I think, like me, she is getting old.
Chat, on the other hand, knows it all but can do nothing practical, even though it really tries to. “Would you like me to put that in a printable format for you?” “I don’t have a printer.” “Okay, then would you like me to put it into a format you can use on your phone?” “You just did. I’m talking to you on my phone.”
Alexa can hook into a version of Chat, but predictably, it’s a pretty dumb version (3.5 with no memory of previous chats). One day soon they’ll integrate. Or OpenAI will start to produce its own plug-in domestic GPT. And maybe a version for the car that does something else, other than bleep at me.