Getting rid of Amazon's Alexa

I remember the hype I got when Alexa was available in my country years ago. The idea of having a smart home was appealing to me. Controlling the lights, electric plugs, etc. by voice and automation was really convenient back then.

But suddenly things for some reason started to stop functioning correctly. Alexa didn't understand what we were saying sometimes. Some devices & services stopped working with Alexa commands. A clear example was Spotify, for some reason Spotify Skill wanted me to upgrade my phone to keep working, I don't know why the command "play a song" suddenly isn't compatible with my phone now. (I know this isn't exactly Alexa fault, but still an inconvenience.) My Samsung TV also stopped turning on/off, and I never had to install a Skill for it, so I don't know why that happened.

So we started to use Amazon's Music, and we got the surprise that we have a limited "skip songs" feature daily, because... why? (oh right, because Amazon wants you to pay a monthly subscription for that feature)

Then there is no option to play an album, or a simple song. Alexa will always come back with "playing this song, and similar ones". I didn't ask for other songs Alexa.

It also needs Internet all the time. With no Internet available, it converts to a paperweight. The need to send every single command to their servers to monitor us was really bothering me.

Sometimes Alexa would also suddenly say things that we didn't ask for. Of course I went to check the audio logs and see why it got triggered, with the paranoia that someone was listening to us.

And that's the thing though. I was letting a device record my family and house's activities 24/7. It has been proven Amazon's employees has been listening to audio logs to "improve their services" for years. At first I didn't mind much the privacy invasion, thinking of how "convenient" Alexa was in exchange, but I feel like an idiot now for letting this happen.

I slowly started to replace everything I did with Alexa with other alternatives. All the automation and services I did with Alexa, was now replaced with other software/applications. I started to remove Alexa devices from several rooms, to only leave one in the dinning/living room.

But today I finally removed the last device. Took me a while to find a convenient way to adjust the lightning there, but it's done.

Oh and the nail in the coffin of this experience, was Amazon's pushing Alexa+ AI. Yeah, now they want to record your audio with AI as well. No thanks.