Why in the world are people paying for this? You can get displays like this for digital photos that don’t even require an internet connection, much less a subscription. Is this how far people have gone in their unwillingness to learn to use technology that isn’t some cloud/app based bullshit? Just put some pictures on an sd card and be done with it.
My wife bought internet connected frames for family. We set the frames up on a visit and the pictures are delivered automatically to the non technical relatives as we upload new ones.
That said, I’d never use an echo for this, that’s super invasive.
I’m going to be honest. Outside of elderly relatives on the cognitive decline, the “inability” to transfer files to a SD card is nothing other than laziness. Any functioning person that’s capable of making themselves a PB&J sandwich is more than capable of it. They choose to all of a sudden be stupid the moment a computer enters the discussion. It’s a choice made purely out of laziness.
doesn’t most of amazon’s revenue come from AWS? why do they even keep trying with these stupid home surveillance/advertisement gadgets that no one asked for?
Owning that space in peoples homes is the point, I bought them just for controlling my lights via voice, but the screen started as a clock and weather report and now shows adverts almost constantly.
I’m looking at HomeAssistant as a replacement but you have to realise that unless you are tech savvy, you probably don’t even know HomeAssistant exists let alone know how to set it up for your requirements.
Even with home assistant set up, I still have Google assistant handling the voice control aspect. I might be wrong but I don’t think home assistant comes with any voice controls. You still need something else if you want to control it with voice.
Edit: it looks like there is something built into HA called Assist. I tried it a bit and while the basics work, I find it harder to use than google assistant.
Getting Home Assistant to play nicely with Google without using their Nabu Casa service definitely is a hurdle, but once you get over it, it’s super nice. I ended up just blocking Google DNS inside my network to force all the Google home devices to use my internal DNS to fix the https/hairpin NAT issue. It wasn’t a big deal since my kids are getting older and I needed to block outbound DNS in general since they’re getting savvy enough to get around my content filtering.
Oh I just paid for Nabu Casa. It’s only $65 USD / yr and it supports the dev of HA. I’m happy to pay for it for how much I get out of HA.
