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View Full Version : In other tech news - Alexa has lost her voice today



Gman
03-02-2018, 12:23
One of the dangers of relying on "the Cloud"...
Alexa has lost its voice as Amazon Web Services suffers widespread outage (https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/3/2/17071634/amazon-alexa-loses-voice-aws-outage)



Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa has gone quiet today in an unintended, real world reproduction of the company’s Super Bowl ad (https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16954704/amazon-super-bowl-ad-alexa-cardi-b-anthony-hopkins-commerical-gordon-ramsey-rebel-wilson). A regional outage impacting Amazon’s servers has led to Alexa becoming unresponsive on Echo products and other devices that support the assistant; I just tried a simple weather inquiry on the Echo Dot in my living room, and the signature blue ring stayed lit up for about 15 seconds without any answer. A tone eventually sounded, and Alexa said it had lost connection.

Subsequent attempts have all failed, producing a red ring accompanied by Alexa asking me to try again later. The Verge has reached out to Amazon for details on when its normally helpful assistant might be back up and running. The issue is likely tied to ongoing troubles today with Amazon Web Services. Slack and other applications that depend on AWS as a backbone experienced downtime earlier in the day.

I had a notification on my Echo and asked Alexa to read it to me...and got the red ring and "Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding right now. Please try a little later."

It's a good thing I'm just toying with the technology and don't have any dependencies on it.

sampson
03-02-2018, 12:29
Oh darn.. I wonder if fbi/nsa is affected? (Effected?)

Gman
03-02-2018, 12:34
Oh darn.. I wonder if fbi/nsa is affected? (Effected?)
They have huge investments in government infrastructure for that. They run on unlimited tax dollars, so the need to virtualize on a shared platform isn't there.

Their feeds from AWS might be affected.[panic]

Gman
03-02-2018, 12:48
Just came back up for me.

Singlestack
03-02-2018, 12:50
You couldn't pay me enough to use that spyware.

sampson
03-02-2018, 12:57
You couldn't pay me enough to use that spyware.We got one as a "gift". [emoji23]


I would like to change the Wake word from "echo" or "Alexa" to FBI

TFOGGER
03-02-2018, 13:25
You couldn't pay me enough to use that spyware.

https://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/a3MzOb5_700b.jpg

sampson
03-02-2018, 13:31
I think the novelty is wearing off on the Alexa in my household I think I can probably get rid of it now.. maybe.https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20180302/89dd8b1dcbd7a334979d50db0ce173fa.jpg

izzy
03-02-2018, 13:36
I got an echo as a handout at a conference, it went straight into the garbage.

CS1983
03-02-2018, 13:47
I got an echo as a handout at a conference, it went straight into the garbage.

Should have sold it and bought ammo, or something.