It doesn’t speak slurp. 
Especially slurp with an Aussie accent.
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If it had said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t understand that, mate – that would have been freaky!
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I just find it beggars belief to have something listening to you in the bedroom!
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I understand there is an entire industry devoted to making “bedroom recordings” and putting them on the internet.
But joking aside yes it would have been better if the Alexa thing was switched off by default.
( I was going to say “I have it off on all my devices” but that would be too easily misconstrued… )
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It is easy enough to switch off by pressing the button on the top. There are ways to program it to switch off at set times.
Are you worried about triggering an action when you sleep?
Personally, I find it useful to say “lights off” when I have finished reading to save getting up and doing it. It is also the height of luxury in the morning to say “heater on” before getting out of bed.
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What’s wrong with a bedside light?
And a timer on your heater?
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Now they reckon air fryers are spying on us, well the chinese brands are.
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Absolutely nothing wrong with a bedside light Sue – if you have one – and somewhere to put it.
When I go to bed I usually have a glass of water in each hand and reading materiel under my arm. Stepping into a dark bedroom and finding a light switch is a little awkward but just saying “light on” is simplicity itself.
In winter when the heater is on every day of course a timer is useful. In these autumnal days when heating is not needed so often, waking up on an especially cold morning it is very comfortable to say “heater on” so you can get up to a warm house.
I bet those people who are complaining use a smartphone and are unknowingly giving out much more data than their air fryer ever does.
Quite frankly, if chairman Xi wants to know what I am cooking, good luck to him
. I might then get some targeted advertising via other routes but I can live with that.
But then you miss the nightly bonding ritual of arguing which one needs to get up and turn the light off, that frisson as your feet hit the cold floor, and the enormous pleasure of stepping into a hot shower. Without the downs, the highs are never quite as fun.
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Well I suppose that’s one way to look at it.
Today, quite out of the blue, Alexa announced it could translate any phrase I gave it in to French
Did you test it? How did it do?
I did and it seemed to work well. It will be very useful for quickly finding an unusual word or one I have just forgotten.
Every morning while waking up I struggle to remember a name, usually that of an artist from some point in the past eight centuries, or the name of a town in some country where I’ve lived. It’s usually because I haven’t thought about these people or places for a long time, but nevertheless, one worries about early stage Alzheimers and so I never try to track the name down through Google, but always try to establish other synaptic routes to the answer and then the name becomes easy to remember again.
Simon Patterson’s art work, The Great Bear is a good illustration example of this sort of memory hunt
When our nest door neighbour moved in he was a chatty, sociable person but we have watched Alzheimer’s take its terrible toll. It is terrifying to watch and so difficult for his wife.
I found your Great Bear technique very interesting. I used to use a similar technique when I had to give a public talk without having to refer to notes. For very specific reasons, it is easier to remember and communicate ideas in threes. My talk would be represented by a walk through all the rooms in a building that I was very familiar with. I would visit three rooms on each floor. And inside each room would be three very familiar items. Each of these three items would represent a theme I wanted to mention in the talk.
For example, the three main points relating to the subject of my talk might be “fast”, “accurate” “cost effective”. So I would remember a microwave for fast, a grandfather clock for accurate and a cheque book for cost effective and place them in my imagined tour in the order in which I wanted to present them.
It sounds complicated when written down like this but once your imaginary tour is compiled is is easy to remember.
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Precisely yet Gates blames cow farts/burps. 
Only works if you have a visual memory (check your NLP). If you ask my OH to visualise something - eg an orange - he cannot. I was running a meditation session and included in the introduction something like “maybe there’s a favourite calming sound that comes to mind” A woman came up to me afterwards and thanked me. She said “most people would have just said, ‘imagine you are on a beach’ and I then spend the rest of the session trying to imagine I am on a beach!” People who are not visual have much more difficulty recalling things or (of course) visualising things. OH struggles with how our house is going to look while it’s still at the planning stage. The danger then is, when it’s created, he says “that’s not what I wanted”. Learning NLP when we first started going out saved our relationship as it helped me understand how completely differently our minds work. Still exasperates, but at least I understand.
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That’s a very ancient mnemonic strategy from Classical antiquity, when memorising was valued above the written record. As far as I can remember(!) it was also used by Hannibal Lecter in the novel, The Silence of the Lambs.
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I love that! I didn’t know it and now I do, how excellent!
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