I've had an Echo for a couple months. I bought it for $99 as a Prime customer. Generally, I'm very happy with it, but I don't think I'd be as satisfied at the $180 price point.
Good:
- The hardware is really well designed.
- Being able to listen to NPR affiliates elsewhere in the country is awesome (Seattle's KUOW affiliate is bad, but my hometown stations of MPR and The Current are great).
- The Prime Music and Pandora integration is generally pretty cool, although the Prime Music selection is a bit thin at times.
- Timers and kitchen measurements are helpful.
Bad:
- The iOS app is absolutely horrendous. Imagine the worst web/native hybrid app that you've ever seen, now set your expectations down another order of magnitude. I cannot understand how a company with as many resources as Amazon—especially one that did such an amazing job on the hardware—could create such an utterly horrible mobile companion app.
- The Echo has trouble understanding my girlfriend (a complaint I've heard from a couple other Echo users)
- You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?
- No really, the iOS app is awful. Like, I'll go out of my way to avoid ever having to open it.
> You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?
I think you're looking at this the wrong way.
The product is the iphone, the human-interaction agent is Siri
The product is the echo, the human-interaction agent is Alexa
Because you're communicating with a device that refers to itself in the first person. Anthropomorphization is inevitable. It's not like this is new, either. 2001 comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples that predate HAL.
"You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such."
Wait, what ?
Never mind the name mismatch - I agree that is odd.
But ... this is quick convenience device for rapid reaction to spoken commands ... and the command is three syllables ?
I understand the need to avoid false positives - waking up and responding to common speech patterns that get used throughout the day that are not directed to the device, but surely you can come up with a two-syllable command that won't generate those.
I have no intention of ever using a device like this in my home, but if I did, 50% more syllables for every interaction would drive me nuts.
There's one benefit to having both Echo/Alexa. When I have guests over and their fascinated by Echo it's much easier to have a conversation about it using the word "Echo" - otherwise they'd trigger Alexa using the wake word every other sentence..
It's also handy when Alexa is accidentally triggered (like one time when I was watching a youtube video). I whisper to my wife "Don't talk Echo is listening!" :)
It seems to be the norm. "Hey Siri" is three syllables. "OK Google" is four. "Hey Cortana" is also four.
I bet they really can't find a 2-syllable word that doesn't false positive all over the place. At least not with either the quality of speech recognition or the wide range of accents that need to be understood.
I had an Echo for a month or so, then sold it on eBay after realizing it didn't fit our needs.
- It listened to me just fine, but wouldn't listen to my wife. Our dog does the same thing. I think there might be a connection there.
- The sound quality was good for the size, but doesn't compare to some other small bluetooth speakers I've experienced (like the SoundLink Mini) that make me think, "Whoa, is all that sound coming from that tiny thing?"
- Agreed that the iOS app is awful.
- The biggest miss from my perspective was the lack of integration (at least at launch) with a comprehensive streaming service. We had it in the kitchen, and it was a really nice concept to be able to say, "Alexa, play Hotel California by The Eagles" in the middle of cooking dinner, without having to clean off your hands and touch your phone, but really, Alexa could only play a sample of Hotel California by the Eagles, unless you owned it it in your Prime music library. Deeper integration with Spotify or Rdio or something would have fixed this. Maybe it's already been fixed, but if not, that's a fatal flaw.
- The hardware quality, including the remote, was top notch.
- At $100, it could be very compelling for rooms where your hands are busy. I almost kept it just for the garage, so I could use it while working on the car, or working out, or cleaning up. The kitchen is another good option. But the lack of complete music integration, and the fact that I could resell it on eBay and make money, made me give up on it.
My father picked one up via Prime a couple of months ago, and I have been impressed with its ability to recognize different voices - mine, but also my five year old son's.
Likewise. The voice recognition is the best by far. 100x better than Xbox One (well, it isn't hard to beat Xbox; it's voice recognition is useless), and I felt it's even better than Siri. My wife doesn't speak to it (her?) much, but the few times she tried it didn't have any problems. Will explore more.
The real potential will happen if/when Amazon opens its API. The ability to plug Echo natively to other systems and services (household appliances, websites, trello, x.ai, etc). They just launched integration with IFTTT, which is a first step, but there's so much more that could be done with a true open API.
> You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?
You're not wrong, but this might have been intentional. I've heard complaints from people with Xbox Ones where the Xbox will suddenly decide to turn on because the owner was having a conversation with a friend and mentioned the word "Xbox." By calling the product Echo, you can have a conversation about the Echo without triggering the activation word. You're almost never going to say "Alexa" without intending to turn on the Echo.
But I never refer to the product as Echo. I refer to it as Alexa, because no one who comes to my house knows what an Echo is. So, when I refer to it in conversation, I call it "the A-word" (not kidding)
I think this is the key difference between it and the iPhone: Siri is one of the ways that people interact with an iPhone, not the only. In fact, Siri is probably a minority means to use an iPhone. (I know it is not for me.)
But Alexa is the way people will interact with Echo, after setting it up. So it makes less sense to keep the two ideas separate.
Could you or someone else chime in with an explanation of how this works? Specifically I see all the promotional material or astroturfing or whatever about how awesome it is for families, and I also see how it links to numerous single individual person services (google calendar, various music services, audible, etc) but I can't figure out how (or if) it handles the 1:n mapping. If I ask it whats on my calendar I really don't want to hear by son's assignment notebook from school, or even something as simple as asking about traffic, my wife and I do not work in the same location, if my wife and I and my son have three separate audible accounts...
As a side issue I have no idea why its so expensive. The hardware looks like my old roku plus a speaker but the cost is that times more than three? I mean on the assumption it would wedge me into the amazon ecosystem, as a bazillion year customer and a prime subscriber, I'd expect it to be free. "Here its free and works with audible now go buy even MORE audible books"
As far as I can tell, it's a single-account device. It's great for families iff your use cases are music, timers, alarms, and weather. At some point I'd love to get around to adding my calendar, but that seems strange for the reason you mention.
Have you tried KPLU? They are the other local NPR and are a bit better. Still have local programming, for instance. They do go to jazz during the day (though some of us think that's not a downside).
> The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?
Um, you say Siri instead of "iPhone" so I think they're doing exactly the same thing as Apple.
Could it be that there might be other names coming in the future - so the product is Echo, but variants are "Alexa", and then some others would come later? (My son really like a "Steve" for he loves Minecraft... lol)
It's basically a web view embedded in a native app shell. The user experience of the website it opens is designed to approximate the iOS user experience, but completely fails to do so.
Good:
- The hardware is really well designed.
- Being able to listen to NPR affiliates elsewhere in the country is awesome (Seattle's KUOW affiliate is bad, but my hometown stations of MPR and The Current are great).
- The Prime Music and Pandora integration is generally pretty cool, although the Prime Music selection is a bit thin at times.
- Timers and kitchen measurements are helpful.
Bad:
- The iOS app is absolutely horrendous. Imagine the worst web/native hybrid app that you've ever seen, now set your expectations down another order of magnitude. I cannot understand how a company with as many resources as Amazon—especially one that did such an amazing job on the hardware—could create such an utterly horrible mobile companion app.
- The Echo has trouble understanding my girlfriend (a complaint I've heard from a couple other Echo users)
- You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?
- No really, the iOS app is awful. Like, I'll go out of my way to avoid ever having to open it.