alt Hacker NewsI find some value as kinda a better alexa.
I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things.
I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday"
I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay.
It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa
It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
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> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits
In The Netherlands you can get a live-in au-pair from the Philippines for less than that. She will happily play your Beatles song, download the Titanic movie for you, find your Gorillaz song and even cook and take care of your children.
It's horrible that we have such human exploitation in 2026, but it does put into perspective how much those credits are if you can get a real-life person doing those tasks for less.
I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
Am I right to be a little concerned by the phrase "it'll go straight to the pirate bay"?
Not to be a narc or anything, but is OpenClaw liable to just perform illegal acts on your behalf just because it seemed like that's what you meant for it to do?
180$/month to queue playlists does not “seem okay” at all. We must be living in different worlds.
You're spendin 180 a month on tokens and still refusing to buy media like Titanic?
> I can message it "Play my X playlist"
People do this? Or is it some sort of joke way above my head?
In what bizarre world is it easier to ask a massive LLM to play a playlist rather than ... literally hitting the play key on it?
> "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay
You could build up a legitimate collection for much less than $180/mo.
Using OpenClaw for that is nuts. Claude or GPT could just one shot an app for you that does all that and uses 0 tokens once you've built it.
Regarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
I have the almost same thing using a network connected raspberry-pi and no AI.
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> It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
I have a hard time imagining how much better Alexa would have to be for me to spend $180/month on it...