Amazon Echo

[jaypro]

 

 

WHAT IS AMAZON ECHO?

Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It's always on—just ask for information, music, news, weather, and more. Echo begins working as soon as it hears you say the wake word, "Alexa." It's also an expertly-tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc

 

New *toy* from Amazon.  Seems like a glorified fancy clock/speaker/alarm/voice control.

[Toddwjp]

Cool, the next failed thing from Amazon.

they should stick to making there store better

[Rheinwasser]

i dont want to be running around saying 'alexa' or 'cortana'.

why can't i just change it?

[DigitalHermit]

So, it's a fancy screenless lovechild between Siri and the Beats Pill with less humor?

[jaypro]

i dont want to be running around saying 'alexa' or 'cortana'.

why can't i just change it?

 

Imagine if you had someone in your house named Alexa, and the voice command wasn't changeable.

 

Game over.

 

 

Overall, this seems like a thing to push buying music through Amazon.

You can only import 250 songs to Amazon Music Library.

 

• Music: Listen to your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.

[StingBull]

i dont want to be running around saying 'alexa' or 'cortana'.

why can't i just change it?

Virtual assistants will never be there for me if I can't name mine "Dipshit"

[werto165]

Face palm 

[PopReference]

Amazon Kinect?

[LAwLz]

Ah just what I need for the yearly Trivial Pursuit game on Christmas eve at my parents. I'll just put the code word to "can you repeat that?". I assume you can change the code word to something other than Alexa, right?

 

No but really, I think this seems interesting. I don't think this particular device is good (especially not for 200 dollars), but I am sure we will get something like this integrated into other things in the future. Having a separate device might be a pain, but having it integrated into your TV, your fridge and a few other things people already own, then let them communicate with each other would be great.

I mean just look at the video. They got an Echo in the kitchen, living room, bed room and probably like 1-2 other rooms. That's about 1000 dollars already spent for the 5 separate Echo units.

[jaypro]

Screenless is kind of silly.

 

I don't think voice recognition is to the point where there will not be mistakes.

 

Siri uses the phone screen to show what you said, and there is a button on the phone to quickly stop siri if it misinterpreted you.

The same goes for the kinect/cortana/google now.

 

Imagine if you set an alarm, and "alexa" heard you wrong and set it at a different time.

Now you have to painfully ask alexa to cancel that alarm and set another alarm.

 

 

Also, in the video they made a cut every time between the question and response.  They should have showed the real response time rather than cut it all out making it seem instant.

[Scheer]

I use my Moto X voice features quite a lot and have always wished it worked better where it could hear my when in my pocket... If this works almost as well it will be well worth the $100 to me.

 

I'm in for a invitation, hopefully I get it.