Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville

medium.com

45 pointssteven30 comments

> "Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap"

No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's tactic of allowing only those people who already own an Alexa device has backfired, if an otherwise well researched article misrepresents this basic fact.

I'm sure Echo is great if you live in the USA.

I'll echo that gripe. Amazon have hobbled their ecosystem by the bizarre design decision of mandatory configuration by US zip code. This effectively excludes all non-American users, and makes the barriers for overseas developers prohibitively high.

Since I am in Australia, my Echo is good only for parlour tricks and streaming audio: without an accurate time and place, even simple things like checking weather are impossible. Forget about booking a cab, or home automation. So I have not tried to develop for the platform, because I do not develop things I cannot test.

Perhaps Amazon were afraid of diluting their product focus. But failure to think globally means your product cannot be a world leader.

It's understandably annoying from a consumer perspective but perhaps there are valid reasons for not being in other markets just yet and Amazon decided to launch early and incrementally roll it out?

Having Alexa for almost a year now. My daily routine:

Evening -> "Alexa, set the alarm @9:30"

Morning -> "Alexa, stop"

Uhm, it has no memory?

Don't think so.

They added repeating alarms a couple weeks ago. e.g. "Alexa, set alarm for six a m every day"

That's not going to get confusing at all! http://www.alexa.com/

Good thing Amazon owns both

"Now you can talk to your website analytics software?" – "No, the other Alexa thing, which nobody has a clue what it is."

Funnily enough the articles tag line applies quite well to alexa.com

> Amazon’s Alexa is a stupendous novelty act that can play thousands of songs, guess your weight, and conjure a pizza from thin air!

Pretty much applies to how Alexa.com attempts to measure traffic

Even, I was confused while reading the headline. I was thinking it was about Alexa and Amazon partnership.

Alexa.com is a business service known only to people who work with websites.

Alexa the device is for regular folks

I find it interesting that the author completely looks over Cortana when listing the various voice assistants. Cortana is perhaps the most widespread voice assistant, it being on almost every windows pc.

> it being on almost every windows pc

Every PC with Windows 10. I'm not sure how many there are, but it may not be most widespread or most used.

Windows 10 is probably on roughly 14%-15% of Windows PCs, which is some way short of "every".

According to Microsoft, more than 270 million devices run Windows 10. However, Cortana voice isn't supported in all countries, and many people have turned "her" off.

I thought the subheader was a sarcastic dig. Playing music is virtually the only thing Alexa seems capable of doing, and even then only semi-reliably.

You obviously don't have one, and if you do, you've horribly wasted your money. Even on day one it launched with more use than that.

I can set or check my thermostat, control any light or group of lights in my house, get an Uber to pick me up, have the morning news headlines read to me while I'm making breakfast, check traffic on my way out the door, add notes to my to-do list as they cross my mind, and add things to my shopping list with my face still in the refrigerator.

Those are all things that come out of the box with no custom code. With the additional skills I've personally written I have it tell me releases and showtimes at my nearest theater, I can ask if the garage door is open or closed, and a few other half cocked ideas.

The Alexa skills kit is quite easy to get your head wrapped around and the limit really is your imagination.

pretty much what i could do with a cell phone (had i not disabled voice input), but you lose all that when you leave the house/room?

It's different.

And I and the rest of my family can do it from anywhere in four rooms without me or my phone being present. It's wonderful.

> control any light or group of lights in my house

Alexa has nothing to do with that. The hard/expensive part is making all the lights in your house accessible via remote control.

From the user pov, that's just engineering.

Users want stuff to work. They don't care about the engineering behind it. In fact they want to see as little engineering (friction) as possible.

Alexa is the part that makes the engineering fun and useful. And it's much harder to build a system like Alexa than it is to build a 433MHz dimmer system for your lights.

Alexa is actually the new Windows. MS, Apple, and Google are following not leading now, and they should all be worried Amazon got a successful and popular consumer hardware product into this space first.

> Alexa is actually the new Windows.

That's one of the bolder and inherently unprovable statements I've heard in quite a while.

Alexa has a lot to do with it, my wife doesn't use the app for our home automation hub, and when I'm home I don't either.

Pulling my phone out, unlocking it, firing it up, getting to the right section. Even with everything optimally placed it takes just as much time as me walking into the other room and turning the light off. So all that home automation I installed was going mildly unused because your phone as a control when you're in the house is just kind of not worth it unless you're talking upstairs vs downstairs.

As soon as Alexa got integration with HA products our usage immediately changed- especially my wife. She went from just plain not using the home automation to using it for everything.

I installed all of our home automation gizmos, configured the hub, grouped all the rooms, etc. I know how much Alexa has to do with any of it working, but it has everything to do with them being used.

Hard/expensive is relative.

The Samsung SmartThings hub[1] is $99. GE Link[2] and Phillips Hue[3] Zigbee light bulbs are $15 at Home Depot. Z-Wave replacement outlets[4] and switches[5] are less than $50.

And there are a ton of other Z-Wave and Zigbee compatible devices available.

Alexa has been an awesome addition to my home automation. Instead of reaching for a remote control or a smartphone app I can just say "Alexa, turn on the <insert name here> light".

[1]: https://shop.smartthings.com/#!/products/samsung-smartthings...

[2]: http://www.homedepot.com/p/GE-Link-60W-Equivalent-Soft-White...

[3]: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Philips-60W-Equivalent-Soft-White...

[4]: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-Z-Wave-Enabled-15-Amp-Sce...

[5]: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-Decora-Z-Wave-Controls-15...

You've basically just given a link for 90% of the HA in my house. I don't have the SmartThings hub, I have the Wink hub (for better or worse- I'd give it a B+). I slowly replaced most of the switches in my house room by room as the fancy struck me by just being bored on a Saturday and driving down to Lowe's/Home Depot and picking up a Z-Wave switch or two.

I replaced a few outlets here and there with Z-Wave outlets so that I could have a lamp come on w/ the overhead light because we have a couple of big rooms with crappy overhead lights. Also because it was interesting.

The garage door status/opener is a hodgepodge of my own making (basically an Arduino plugged into an NRF chip to talk w/ my RPi that is plugged into a vpn into AWS to get Lambda comms from Alexa events and Wink API events).

Excluding the hardware and code I built, it was as simple as replacing outlets and switches in the house- which are probably pages 5 and 6 of the things you should know if you live in a house that you have to take care of.

That garage door solution sounds interesting if not overly complex. I automated the garage door using a MIMOLite[1] Z-Wave dry contact bridge wired to an extra remote control.

[1]: http://amzn.com/B00B6RZ7MM

Oh yeah, it'd make Rube Goldberg proud. At the time it was actually my very first piece of home automation. It was built before the zero, Edison, or other dual system devices came around, and I got frustrated with timing issues trying to set up a two wire serial between the 1st gen Pi and the Arduino- so I looked about my shelves for something else and decided on using the 2.4Ghz NRF modules I had [0]. The Pi went from being VPNed into my VPS so that I could have an app on my phone to integrated to Alexa, and a bunch of steps in between over the last half decade.

I went from Arduino from the store to building my own using a flashed chip so I could drastically reduce power and make it coin cell operated, just to see if I could. Stuff like that.

I've actually just ordered an off the shelf Z-Wave garage door interface. My bundle of wires sitting on the garage door opener in a 3D printed case has always just been an excuse to play with something new when I didn't want to really spend all that much time figuring out what my next gadget should be.

Thanks for the link though! I've been wondering what kind of Z-Wave interfaces are out there that I could use in micro controller projects. Most of my experience has just been 2.4Ghz and Zigbee.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E594ZX0 (mine originally wasn't the + model)

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