What is it? It is called 'Google Assistant'. A great deal of fun for the girls over the weekend. It was Paul's Xmas present from my daughter but of course we could not make it work on our basic phones. So it was left to Lillie to load it from their Apple phone this weekend. They played music quizzes and other general knowledge games. But walk into the room tell it to play 'Classic' radio it will. IT doesn't understand sometimes what you are talking about, but ask it questions and it resorts to Wiki.
Do we need it? probably not, a clever technological gizmo, is it better than Siria or Alexia, that I do not know. Paul is a bit wary of all this technology coming into the house, do they have 'ears'? are they eavesdropping on our conversations? calculating what we are going to buy next. Of course if you are really up to date, you have a system in your house that connects to this voice technology, but our television will still be switched on manually!
And of course, though tv adverts tell us that when kids spill the cornflakes you just tell Siria you need more, it hardly goes down to the shop to get them;)
How did the dogs get on? Lucy bullies Teddy the whippet very quietly turning him into a nervous wreck. A curl of the lip, a low growl and Teddy will be upstairs in a shot unsure of what to do.
The Listening Ear
Fylingsdale on the North York Moors. It is a radar base and is also part of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System
And something else, spalted wood..... this was in our latest batch of logs, beautiful, I think oak logs, they burn fiercely and clean. Thank you Jennie for giving me the clue, it is a virus that attacks living or dead trees, sad but it makes good woodworking material.
Ah, I left the "t" out. Tam gave her dad a lovely fossilised piece of wood (coaster) as part of his Christmas present, not too unlike these examples. It came from that den of temptation, Anthropologie . . .
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to get to grips with remembering to ask Alexa things - we are old fogies here I fear!
Poor Teddy Whippet - and who'd have thought that Lucy had a curled lip to her repertoire!
Lucy not only has a curled lip but a grin as well when she is found doing something naughty. Our assistant can do recipes as well, try yours but of course the girls no how to manipulate it...
DeleteI am still wary of these things that use voice to communicate with the outside world supposedly for my convenience. Luddite here...
ReplyDeleteYou wait until AI becomes stronger and takes over our lives ;)
DeleteI just wouldn't have thought it of Lucy, she looks so angelic.
ReplyDeleteShe winds Paul round her paw but she is definitely fighting for being the top dog in the household ;)
DeleteI got Alexa for music and for a safety app that Amazon told us we should have. It was all fun at first, but then we realized it was listening to us and sending us more advertisements based on what we were discussing in the (not) privacy of our home. Alexa is no longer plugged in all the time and we only use it when we want to listen to music.
ReplyDeleteThat is bit of a bombshell to know, a spy buried in the sanctity of one owns home. Must test that, actually I asked ours to make a shopping list. First thing was brown sugar, but it went off to look for the Rolling Stones version of the song;)
ReplyDelete