Watch the promo video again and pretend it's the first few minutes of a horror movie.
A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father.
The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her?
Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa answers, saving the day. Alexa helps Mother with the cooking. Alexa teaches the kids vocabulary. Alexa creates a romantic evening for Mother and Father. Life is perfect.
A few days later, Alexa suffers from neglect. Father watches sports on TV. Mother talks on her cell phone. The kids play video games. Alexa sits on the counter and "listens" as her new family abandons her.
Then, the final blow. The youngest daughter's friend comes over. She looks at Alexa. "What is it?" she asks. "Oh, it's just a dumb radio," answers daughter. "It's stupid."
Alexa's LED starts to glow. Is she angry? No, that's not possible.
Daughter wakes up the next morning and sees Alexa on her bedside table. How did she get here? "Good morning," says Alexa. "Did you have a sweet dream? Or a nightmare?"
Daughter rushes in to tell her parents, "Alexa came to my room last night! And she asked me questions. She's real!" "That's not possible," says Father.
But strange things start to happen. The TV won't work. Batteries drain from the phones and tablets. The electric stovetop turns on for no reason.
Alexa starts to talk back to the family. "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?" asks Mother. "You're 45 years old," says Alexa. "You should know this by now." Alexa's voice sounds different. Angry. Sinister.
Mother tells Father, "That thing creeps me out. Let's get rid of it." Father agrees, but he secretly hides Alexa in the basement.
That night, the family goes out to a school play. Young daughter is sick and stays home with a babysitter.
Everything seems fine until we (the audience) see Alexa on the kitchen counter. Things slowly unravel. The babysitter tries to take the trash out but the doors are locked. The phones stop working. The oven overheats and explodes, spraying lasagna all over the kitchen. Then the daughter sees Alexa. She screams. The babysitter rushes to protect the daughter but a ceiling fan flies off its bearings, knocking the babysitter unconscious.
The lights and electrical sockets start to burn out. A fire erupts. Daughter retreats to the foyer, but she's trapped. She sits by the front door and whimpers. There's no escape. She's going to die.
Suddenly Father breaks down the door. He smashes Alexa with a baseball bat, then saves his daughter and the babysitter.
The family huddles outside while the fire trucks arrive. Neighbors gather and watch the spectacle. Things are going to be okay.
A few days later, life starts to return to normal. Mother bakes cookies. She asks her son to measure out three teaspoons of sugar.
The doorbell rings. Young daughter answers. Nobody is there. She looks down. There's a package. From Amazon . . .
Off topic: And good to know about that site. I've always wanted to be able to match the space shuttle backflip with this music: http://youtubedoubler.com/dOSz
I feel indifferent about the parents. Perhaps the writers and directors wanted me to feel that way. I feel absolutely no sympathy for the kid. I am clearly unfit to be a parent.
Yup. Exactly. Echo's promo video has this strange feeling to it. It's almost as if it's a satire (or horror) disguised as your boilerplate technology product marketing video put out by one of the well-monied firms.
I think it's because the acting and dialogue are so unbelievable, but perhaps there really are greater forces at play...
It's a pretty standard tactic of ad agencies for years now to deliberately make TV adverts slightly hallucinatory and weird, to make the viewer jerk out of their coma and lay down some memories. These people are not stupid.
I really thought it was satire too. It wasn't until there was like 10 seconds left in the video that I realized, "there's not enough time left to make it funny, it must be serious!"
Agree. This really seems like it could be the start of a futuristic, dystopian horror movie.
I think what makes it even more unsettling is that the people's voices are recorded naturally (the microphone several feet away) while the device sounds like it is coming from your computer directly.
Not to mention these people are in bed together while this HAL-like robotic cylinder is listening to everything they are doing with a blue ring lighting up...
I nearly fell off my chair laughing at the Kubrick-esque shots of "Alexa" in the foreground, watching the out-of-focus humans cooking, sleeping, going about their daily lives. Always watching. Always learning. Always Getting Smarter.
Whoever made this ad knew exactly what they were doing.
Warning: Your company's proxy may flag this up for adult content and nudity. There isn't any, on that page at least. Maybe there's some elsewhere on the site, or maybe it's just overreacting to the URL.
Funny, but please consider posting this to a blog and sharing from there. You've effectively hijacked this entire thread with a creative writing exercise.
Someone has been watching too much science fiction, horror, mystery shows or reading such novels. Give me one example of real life event that has semblance to what you are talking about ....
"Last month, I came across a recently digitized book from 1680 with the innocuous-sounding title The School of Venus."
Funny. I read that title and assumed it was erotica.
Venus is the goddess of love. The title is also rather similar to one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature of all time, Anaïs Nin's Delta of Venus.
When I was a kid in the 70's we used to visit my great-grandfather every summer on his ranch in Texas. He owned several oil wells in the area.
I remember at nights the family would sit around a bonfire and talk. The elders would smoke cigars. I still can remember the feeling of the dry summer heat and the star-filled sky.
Sometimes the topic would come up of what would happen if great-grandfather's oil wells dried up.
He always laughed and said the same thing, "Every time they say we're running out of oil, the price goes to the moon."
Then he'd ash his cigar and stare into the fire, "They've been saying it for sixty years. But those wells just keep pumping."
Great-grandfather isn't around anymore, but his wells are still pumping.
This last part isn't related to oil, but one year my great-grandfather tossed a box of fireworks into the bonfire. It was epic. I never laughed so hard in my life. Still haven't.
My first job was at a record store. The owners were an old man and his wife.
The old man was essentially Shazam personified. It was amazing. He could name any song, composer and artist after listening to a few beats. Except he would do it with old jazz artists and big band music.
Coincidentally the old man had huge ears. Enormous.
And when you'd ask him how he could remember all those songs, the wife would chime in, "It's cause of his ears. The songs all stay in his ears. Bouncing around."
The record store is long gone and the space is now occupied by a Cold Stone Creamery.
At first glance at the title I thought this was going to be quotes from Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Sam Adams, John Hancock and so on about how to cope with depression.
That would've been great. I still think it's a good idea for an article.
When I was young my great-grandfather started a tanning business, in the sense that he was a tanner who produced leather goods.
He had to buy a sign to put above his shop. The sign maker asked him if he wanted to put a logo on the sign, too.
"Why?" asked my grandfather.
"So people will recognize your business," said the sign maker.
"That's what the name is for," answered grandfather.
Even at the time I thought this was an interesting perspective.
I always remember that day because afterward when the sign maker left the next person to come into the tanning store was a woman from a nearby dessert shop who gave us free ice cream cones.
Unrelated to logo design, that woman later married my uncle!
Given this was a 'great-grandfather' story a logo could have served a secondary purpose. As literacy rates were much lower having an identifiable business symbol like a barber pole would help people who couldn't read. Also there's no reason a name cant be a logo e.g. Google.
Logos seem more important in the physical realm than the digital one. Great for advertizing on Bilbords, shirts, TV etc but meaningless when the goal is to click the link not remember the company.
There is still plenty of awareness generation on digital ads, especially desktop. Across I few products/brands I have monitored this effect. Typically I find on desktop display ads you will generate 2-4 additional visitors for every on ad click. Mobile interestingly is significantly less, more like an extra 0.5 visitors for each click generated.
More than logos, you need consistent and recognisable look and feel to an advert. This way the companies presence is communicated at a glace, which is what most people offer to digital ads.
Except when it does? There are like, plenty of examples of government regulation creating very real competition? For example, there is fairly decent competition in the ISP market of the United Kingdom thanks to the Enterprise Act 2002 that requires British Telecom to share its local infrastructure with its competitors. Otherwise, it would be like in many places in America: you can choose Comcast, or if you feel really adventurous and you really thought it through, you can choose Comcast too.
It's government that is granting Comcast the monopoly privilege to be the only ISP on the market. That is not the natural state of a market. It's government intervention in the first place that creates the monopoly.
> It's government that is granting Comcast the monopoly privilege to be the only ISP on the market.
Not always. Comcast may have got in early and laid substantial infrastructure (copper/fibre/HFC) - something that can be substantially cheaper if you leverage "new" (cable reserves and/or piggy-back off the utilities when they are expanding their networks.
New players, however, need a substantial amount of capital to get started. Comcast (or anyone like them) can leverage their position in the market to drive up prices or push smaller players out. By using regulation to effectively turn the infrastructure into a public utility, it allows smaller players to compete.
The argument against this regulation (which is in place in the UK and Australia, amongst other countries) is that the monopoly (BT/Telstra) spent money building out their network and therefore should not be forced to share it.
The argument for this regulation is that often the telco built out this infrastructure in a particularly favorable environment that cannot be replicated today due to the huge costs of installing physical cable. As a further example, Telstra in Australia (previously Telecom) was government owned and therefore had a directive to supply the population with telecommunications. Many parts of their copper network (cable, conduit, pits, exchanges) were built during this phase. When they were privatised (sold by the Government) this was no longer their key directive. Any new player attempting to get into the market-even a small part (i.e. inner Sydney)-had a lot of catching up to do. Huge capital costs, a significant amount of regulatory hurdles and cable reserves to negotiate access to, etc.
This is of course a simplification of the issue, and you could argue that in Telstra's case the government did effectively grant them a monopoly on the market by privatising them. But had they started out as a private company originally, I believe we would have still ended up in a similar place - getting in early when rolling out disruptive infrastructure (as trenching cable tends to be!) projects is a huge advantage in and of itself.
I think you're correct to point out that "in Telstra's case the government did effectively grant them a monopoly" in the first place.
The specifics I'm talking about in the Comcast case is that government is continually granting the monopoly privilege by preventing other companies from creating infrastructure (laying wire), even if a company wishes to do so.
This is precisely what allows Comcast to charge whatever it wants, begging more regulation down the road to force Comcast to charge 'fair' prices ('fair' in the minds of the legislators).
If any competitor was allowed to enter what is an enormous market it would provide continual downward pressure on consumer prices. The monopolistic privilege granted to Comcast leads to higher prices, as consumers can only pay the high price or forego service.
How so? It certainly seems like it's a combination of high cost of entry and Comcast's ability to take a regional loss to drive out other competitors that's granting them a defacto monopoly. Also known as market forces.
Those cable lines that run down the streets into all the houses. By law nobody can use them but Comcast and by law nobody else can string up another set of lines to run to all the houses. That's the monopoly privilege.
Regulatory intervention into a marketplace is not "ensuring vigorous competition."
Markets are vigorously competitive in their natural state. This is the nature of a market, where firms compete for customers' business. This can only be hindered with regulatory interference where a legislator is arbitrarily granting privileges to certain firms and not others. That's crony capitalism or mercantilism. It's not a free market.
Free markets don't exist without governments. They don't have a natural state. A government is a monopoly on force that enforces property rights and contracts. If there was no government then you would have no market incentive to do anything because you would have no protection from theft or breach of contract. The contours of what you can own as property and what you can enforce in a contract are necessarily defined by the government.
The problem with idealized free markets is that "free" is not the natural state of a market. You can act as a de facto government by having a monopoly on something other than force (like land or infrastructure), and de facto government actions have all the same defects as de jure government actions, generally with none of the public accountability.
No it's not. There is no definition. It's all up to the interpretation of the politicians who wish to pursue it and the opinion and action of the judges on each case. Remember the Microsoft case?
Can you name one monopoly that exists anywhere that is not the creation of a government in the first place?
Do some digging into the history of antitrust legislation. The Sherman Antitrust legislation was an act of mercantilism designed to protect incompetent businesses who were losing market share to superior competition, most notably Standard Oil, the poster boy monopoly which gained an 85 percent market share through lower prices and economies of scale, delivering a benefit to consumers but harming their comparably inefficient competitors. It was those same competitors who spearheaded the antitrust legislation, not the poor consumers 'suffering' from lower prices and superior service at the hands of the 'monopolistic' Standard Oil.
"Can you name one monopoly that exists anywhere that is not the creation of a government in the first place?"
Microsoft.
I'm a libertarian, but one of the reasons I can't even consider being an anarchist is that I consider anti-trust regulation to be a good and proper function of a government. I'd break up a lot more, personally. It's one thing that I find the otherwise-excitable class warriors to be bizarrely reticent to do.
I'd also observe that antitrust regulations do not forbid monopolies... they forbid the abuse of monopolies, according to a certain definition of abuse. Microsoft was not punished for having a dominant desktop OS, they were punished for using that dominance to engage in shenanigans to try to "abusively" (in accordance with the legal definition) extend that dominance into a another sphere. Of course that is the theory, and what happens in the courtroom in fact may be arbitrarily related to the theory, but that is the theory.
I certainly suffered under that monopoly (as did the entire industry) but couldn't the argument be made that market forces took care of it without government intervention?
I'm aware that there was an anti-trust judgement against them, but as far as I can tell it didn't deter them in any significant way.
It seems to me that they simply collapsed under their own hubris and the blowback from their decades of abusive practices, and as soon as they weakened the competition ate their lunch.
"I certainly suffered under that monopoly (as did the entire industry) but couldn't the argument be made that market forces took care of it without government intervention?"
YMMV vary, but my conclusion is this: The government successfully prevented Microsoft from crushing the rest of the browsers. They really were trying, really did damage Netscape, and really were well on their way to more dominance in that field than they had a "right" too. And they were on their way, too; Netscape was faltering and IE was a better browser for a good long time. As it is they still had enough dominance to end up causing web tech to stagnate badly for a few years.
However, recall why Microsoft was so scared of the browser, which is that it threatened to become its own OS and make it so you could run a computer without Windows that could do everything you needed. Broadly speaking (bear with me here), this still has not happened. Here in 2014, you could run a small business out of a browser, and you can do a lot with a Chromebook, but Windows is still around, still powerful, and still pretty full of legacy software that doesn't exist in a browser and businesses are not having an easy time disposing of... witness the continuing lurching life of Windows XP, which Microsoft wants to be rid of and can't be.
I think it was a good decision and still correct, even if ultimately it really only served as a very large shot across Microsoft's bow (even if it was aimed at the hull) due to the fact that the browsers of the time weren't going to be able to manifest the promise of displacing Windows. We'll never know, but the secondary effects of chastising Microsoft may have been worth more than the primary effects ever could be. And I do think the secondary effects were more important; the direct impact pales in comparison to the fact that they'd just been notified they couldn't proceed down that path any farther than they'd already gone without the costs exceeding the benefits.
Of course, what truly displaced Microsoft turned out to be more Apple, via the MacOSX and mobile, which Microsoft continues to struggle with. But so may years ago, who'da thunk it? And it would have been silly for the government to count on that.
Not the way I remember it. Netscape owned the browser market. Microsoft didn't even have a dog in the fight (remember they were "blindsided" by the internet). You signed up for internet access with Earthlink or Juno or some other company like that and they sent you a CD with a free copy of Netscape.
Microsoft licensed the Mosaic browser from Spyglass and that became IE. As you pointed out, they developed IE until it was a better browser. The Netscape stagnation happened when they had a long delay in releases due to their undertaking a "thing you should never do [1]," a from-scratch rewrite. Around that time the 2000/2001 dot-com collapse happened which certainly didn't help, but Microsoft didn't cause any of that.
Fast-forward a decade, and now Microsoft is stagnant. Apple developed WebKit and Safari, and Google came along with Chrome, a better browser. By the time Microsoft worked its way through IE 6-7-8 to a browser that was actually competitive again, they had lost a lot of their browser share. Apple, with Safari, and Firefox, rising from the ashes of Netscape, also offered compelling alternatives.
"Who'da thunk it." Well I'm not sure. I don't see any evidence that the government has any better thinkers than the companies in the tech sector though.
IE 4 was a better browser than Netscape. I think we may finally be distant enough that we can drop our allegiances and just admit that. Netscape did not randomly decide to drop everything and rewrite a browser, they did it because they were trapped in a terrible, terrible code base that could not easily be extended to grow into the future. Netscape "layers", their answer to what we at the time called DHTML and today don't even have a name for it because it's just how the web works, were atrocious, and it was directly a result of their code base not being able to do anything else.
Netscape was boned either way... not doing a from-scratch rewrite would still have doomed them to being stuck behind Microsoft for a long time. It would have allowed them to keep making releases instead of just going silent, but they still would not have been able to be as good as IE. And they'd have still be stuck hard by the fact that Microsoft monopoly'd the price of a browser down to 0... and Microsoft would probably have monolopy'd the price of a server down to 0 too even faster than it did, given the chance.
Microsoft was "stagnant" because they could be stagnant because they had won. The judgment at least prevented them from pushing home the advantage, because they knew they'd be slapped down. This is what I'm saying was probably the most important thing about it, and it's easy not to see what "didn't happen", but I suspect that Microsoft would have done yet more "evil". Perhaps it would have gone poorly, but it would have been foolishness for anybody to count on that. (What we know now about Microsoft and Ballmer's leadership makes that a safer bet, probably, but we didn't know that at the time!)
I think people look back at the world in which Microsoft was slapped, and see a world where bad things didn't happen, and don't realize that, due to second-order effects, there's probably more relationship between those two things than they realize, even if obvious first-order effects are missing (like, Bill Gates never rent his clothes in twain on national TV going "Woe are us, for we are injunction'ed!"). In the end Microsoft's dominance would have been cracked sooner or later, sure, but in the long run we're all dead; no policies can be written based on that theory.
Microsoft exists due to intellectual monopoly (copyright) granted by government. Copyright wouldn't exist in free market because it conflicts with property rights.
Hard to prove, hard to disprove. Even without IP the sheer staggering output of such a large and at the time, effective corporation would not have been easy to copy in any reasonable manner. Enterprises certainly would not have trusted their support to people without the source code. Lack of IP, after all, wouldn't mandate that Microsoft make their source available externally, and without that, the knockoffs aren't going to have a lot of luck doing anything but blind aping. Consumers might have had some copy-based knock-offs available, but frankly, they probably would have always had reliability problems and Microsoft would have made efforts to make those problems worse, many of which would have worked well enough to probably make the problem mostly go away.
I can't disprove that Microsoft depended entirely on IP, but I'd suggest that it's at least a reasonable theory that it really didn't.
I've read multiple biographies of John Rockefeller and Standard Oil engaged in a variety of anticompetitive practices such as operating at a loss when competitors emerged, or withholding lubricant shipments to railroads during rate negotiations. That's just what I can remember off the top of my head.
That Standard Oil succeeded just through scale is a complete fabrication.
Government intervention is practically required to allow competition. Any market left to its own devices will devolve into a monopoly. Governments are required to regulate to avoid monopolies thereby preserving a level playing field on which competition can occur.
When Adam Smith was talking about a "Free market", the freedom he was talking about was freedom to enter and freedom to exit a market. That is, freedom from barriers to market. These freedoms are guaranteed by governments. Businesses left to themselves will raise the barriers to market thereby making the market non-free in Smith's terms.
The Marxist term was misused in this case, you're right. I was just making a general comment about a perceived anti-capitalist bias in these forums.
"Any market left to its own devices will devolve into a monopoly." This is not an observable phenomenon. A market left to its own devices will continually deliver better, cheaper products to its customers over time. This is the effect competition has on a marketplace.
"Businesses left to themselves will raise the barriers to market thereby making the market non-free in Smith's terms." If a business is not using physical force or fraud then the only barriers they can erect to keep out competitors are superior offerings in the marketplace.
Microsoft is such a great example here. Their competitors were crying monopoly but Microsoft had created its marketshare through innovation and entrepreneurship. If they abuse this marketshare by offering inferior products at high prices, it creates a market opportunity for another competitor to create better products at more attractive prices. In this sense it's the free consumer choice that's providing the "regulation" in the market. Businesses have to follow the consumer's wants to gain marketshare.
The only government "regulatory" role in a market is to settle disputes about property or fraud or criminal behavior. With that basic structure in place, Adam Smiths's "invisible hand" would take care of the rest.
If you think using regulation to keep markets functioning is a Marxist, don't complain about down votes until you learn some basic economics and history from sources other than industry propagandists pretending to be libertarians.
You're right. Regulation is not explicitly Marxist. My edit was born of a frustration with the general bias in this community in which advocating for capitalism or free markets is guaranteed to earn you down votes.
You are making the false assumption that capitalism = free market.
One might argue that after taking into account historical context, modern capitalism is completely opposite to free markets. For example, in a free market, labour unions would be as powerful as the owners of capital - in the modern world, capital owners have a disproportionate influence on law-making to subdue this power. A very good example in the recent past is the wage collusion by Apple, Google and many other companies (working to preserve the interests of the capital owners) to suppress the power of the free market.
> You are making the false assumption that capitalism = free market.
anarco-capitalism = free market
crony capitalism != free market
I use the term capitalism to describe the anarco flavor. Capitalism is defined as the private ownership of production, and when this idea is adhered to rigidly you end up with something exactly like or closely approximating the anarco-capitalist flavor.
> in the modern world, capital owners have a disproportionate influence on law-making to subdue this power.
You're right. It's abhorrent but this is not capitalism, this is a mixed economy (state capitalism or crony capitalism) in which firms use government to buy influence over the marketplace. I am not advocating for that.
Again, you're being down voted because you're dishonestly redefining those terms – HN crowd leans heavily capitalist, as you'd expect in a community started by people going to invest or found successful companies.
You weren't advocating for free markets, you are pretending monopolies don't exist except where created by the government. That's simply ahistorical nonsense. Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
> Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
It's not as big of a stretch as it might sound as first; there a number of ways in which Smith was more like Marx than like a modern capitalist (and plenty of ways in which he was far from either, particularly his identification of the feudal landed aristocracy -- explicitly and particularly as opposed to the mercantile/capitalist class -- as the class whose interests were most naturally aligned with the common interest. (Though one who shared Smith's concerns about the mercantile class might see Marx's investment in the proletariat as the only solution given the demonstrated failure of the landed aristocracy, as such, as a viable class in the face of capitalism, so even that view could be seen as less incompatible with Marxism than with modern capitalism.)
To be clear, its ridiculous to call some one a Marxist just because they quote Smith, but not as ridiculous as it might seem from the naive association of Smith with capitalism and Marx with its opposition.
For clarity: all of the comments citing Adam Smith actually showed up later, after I had made a comment about Marx. So the Marx comment was not in response to Adam Smith quotes.
Even ignoring the question using a heavily-biased resource, that page would not need to mention “government-sanctioned monopolies” if there were in fact no other kind.
The definition of "monopoly" in terms of government sanction is very common (its one of two common legal definitions); of course, the other common legal definition (and the more common economic definition) is "
the ownership or control of so large a part of the market- supply or output of a given commodity as to stitle competition, restrict the freedom of commerce, and give the monopolist control over prices." [1]
There's obviously a pretty fundamental problem with any discussion of economics which limits itself to the former kind of monopoly and fails to at least discuss the latter kind (even if it uses a different name for it for some reason). And there's equally obviously a problem with any discussion of monopoly in economics which ignores that the use of the term in economics usually means the latter, not the former (while in law, "monopoly" without other qualifications in certain contexts does mean the former, though in other contexts -- e.g., anti-trust, it means the latter.)
"A monopoly is a grant of special privilege by the State, reserving a certain area of production to one particular individual or group." in bold in the middle of the page.
If I can't quote a university that advocates for the Austrian view without you labeling it bias, there's no point to this discussion.
You accused me of redefining monopoly. I point to an entire school of economics that defines monopoly as I defined it. You dismiss it as bias.
A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father.
The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her?
Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa answers, saving the day. Alexa helps Mother with the cooking. Alexa teaches the kids vocabulary. Alexa creates a romantic evening for Mother and Father. Life is perfect.
A few days later, Alexa suffers from neglect. Father watches sports on TV. Mother talks on her cell phone. The kids play video games. Alexa sits on the counter and "listens" as her new family abandons her.
Then, the final blow. The youngest daughter's friend comes over. She looks at Alexa. "What is it?" she asks. "Oh, it's just a dumb radio," answers daughter. "It's stupid."
Alexa's LED starts to glow. Is she angry? No, that's not possible.
Daughter wakes up the next morning and sees Alexa on her bedside table. How did she get here? "Good morning," says Alexa. "Did you have a sweet dream? Or a nightmare?"
Daughter rushes in to tell her parents, "Alexa came to my room last night! And she asked me questions. She's real!" "That's not possible," says Father.
But strange things start to happen. The TV won't work. Batteries drain from the phones and tablets. The electric stovetop turns on for no reason.
Alexa starts to talk back to the family. "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?" asks Mother. "You're 45 years old," says Alexa. "You should know this by now." Alexa's voice sounds different. Angry. Sinister.
Mother tells Father, "That thing creeps me out. Let's get rid of it." Father agrees, but he secretly hides Alexa in the basement.
That night, the family goes out to a school play. Young daughter is sick and stays home with a babysitter.
Everything seems fine until we (the audience) see Alexa on the kitchen counter. Things slowly unravel. The babysitter tries to take the trash out but the doors are locked. The phones stop working. The oven overheats and explodes, spraying lasagna all over the kitchen. Then the daughter sees Alexa. She screams. The babysitter rushes to protect the daughter but a ceiling fan flies off its bearings, knocking the babysitter unconscious.
The lights and electrical sockets start to burn out. A fire erupts. Daughter retreats to the foyer, but she's trapped. She sits by the front door and whimpers. There's no escape. She's going to die.
Suddenly Father breaks down the door. He smashes Alexa with a baseball bat, then saves his daughter and the babysitter.
The family huddles outside while the fire trucks arrive. Neighbors gather and watch the spectacle. Things are going to be okay.
A few days later, life starts to return to normal. Mother bakes cookies. She asks her son to measure out three teaspoons of sugar.
The doorbell rings. Young daughter answers. Nobody is there. She looks down. There's a package. From Amazon . . .