29 thoughts on “Christian Alexa!”

  2. “Alexa, play a song to set the mood”
    “How about I call your accountability partner?”
    – made me chuckle.

    1. Perhaps there will be different settings. From this mild Siri version all the way up to the “fire and brimstone” setting. Lots of ‘you’re a sinner and going to hell’ references.

  4. As funny as this is (and it IS), Alexa does have a noticeable liberal bias. And, I’ve got to agree that I would expect such alternatives to exist fairly soon, though perhaps not as over the top.

    2. As funny as this is (and it IS), Alexa does have a noticeable liberal bias.

      Nerds in general have a distinctly liberal bias, I suspect (bearing in mind that America is wildly more right-wing than almost any other country in the developed world).

      I would expect such alternatives to exist fairly soon

      There will be a hole found in the security, and the configuration files will then get bowdlerized beyond belief.

    1. Oh, I’d only get one. And put it in the bathroom. For, as the saying goes, shits and giggles.

  6. “I can do all things through Christ, who gives me strength.”

    :jar finally opens:

    That was the best part of the video, but I found the rest only mildly amusing, and only in concept. The execution was really lacking here. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by all the great material on YouTube these days.

    1. That’s the point where it jumped the proverbial shark. The jokes before it are subtle. Afterwards, they’re mostly nagging.

    2. Me too. Part of the problem is that this Alexa always thwarts him. It doesn’t have to be specifically a Christian Alexa to do that, and that isn’t what a buyer of Christian Alexa would want. So it really fails as satire. What would be funnier is some kind of Ned Flanders thing.

    3. Perhaps I’m just spoiled by all the great material on YouTube these days.

      For you, subscriptions to GodTube and PureFlicks.

  7. Pretty funny.
    My understanding though is that Echo actually stores all your dialogues at Amazon for use in marketing…and who knows what else.

    1. I’ve read that Amazon, Google and Microsoft feed the data to their AIs to improve their understanding of human speech but I haven’t heard that they use individual data to market directly back to their users. I suspect it would be a privacy violation to use your data other than what it was intended for, at least if it weren’t anonymous, in many of the markets those companies operate in.

      1. I suspect it would be a privacy violation to use your data other than what it was intended for,

        In the UK, using such data for purposes not included the end-user agreement, would certainly be illegal – and fines in the hundreds of thousands of pounds For tax-dodgers like Amazon, probably tens of millions.
        That’s why they make the EULAs incredibly indigestible and as wide-ranging as possible.

        1. In the US if you accidentally drag over an ad for flea powder you will, within hours, be inundated by proffers of various pet products. I wish this was illegal.

  9. The guy in the video is John Crist – a homeschooled, Christian stand up. Does a lot of church gigs & plays up to the spectrum of Christian standards [e.g. promoting homeschool on his merchandise tees with a spelling mistake…]. More than a 5-min video from him would be too much! Pretty safe & dull.

    The Amazon logo is always facing the cam, so I guess he has an arrangement with them [no objection]. On his website: “John currently lives in Los Angeles with his zero cats and is a member of City Church” 🙂

      1. 🙂 I read a report today that claimed 20% of our power consumption, within a generation, may be from data centres & the running of billions of devices [the coming ‘Internet Of Things’] where all physical objects are tagged & ‘connected’ to some degree.

        The data centres will not be storing sciency data much – it’ll be information that can be sold on people & their interests. No Alexa nor helpfully ‘listening’ Samsung smart TVs in my house while I can move around myself.

        Though I do remember when TV remote controls were regarded by miserable old sods as the harbinger of social collapse, but maybe they had a point: the thin end of the wedge.

          1. Not in this house – until at least a couple of years have gone by without any significant security breaches in devices in the genre.

          2. The most common IoT I see right now are entertainment systems in cars – Google, Apple etc.

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