Also, I know it's not possible... but something I wish I could do in the SDK, I want to ask Alexa (which sits on my counter) to listen for my instant pot to beep, and than tell me. Sometimes I walk away, and don't hear it.
However, I would MUCH rather say "Alexia, tell upstairs that 'its time for dinner'", and it to be replayed upstairs. Rather than walking into the next room and yelling up the stairs like a neanderthal.
'My Cave is so big I can't even shout to the end. . . '
The main use case I had in my mind is when my son is sleeping, shouting is undesirable. It would just be really convienent.
That said, I think the bigger problem would be triggering it to playback the recording - unless I'm missing something, they just respond to spoken commands.
Which would mean at best you could use it like a voicemail service: "Alexa, play me any messages sent from downstairs".
I struggle to find to the words to express just how absurd this sounds to me. I must be getting old.
Other things that were great, and I now miss---vaccum tubes in offices. Sure you don't need them to send messages, but if you want to send anything physical, however small, now you have to walk.
Oh and I certainly miss the bell system, where you could stand in the living room and ring a bell in any room in the house to tell the occupants that dinner was ready.
Most multi-handset cordless phones have a built-in intercom that will ring all the other handsets and establish a loopback call. But I bet not many people even have those any more ...
So, I would say this is not so much new as retro. True old-timers would recognize this use case right away.
"Alexa, if you hear my wife and the neighbor having sex, file divorce paperwork, and get me on the next flight to Barbados."
<Some pattern recognition app> | <docusign> | <priceline app>
| <gym online registration> | <facebook api delete>
That my friend is the next level!
If she's wrong it's not the end of the world. You don't need 100% accuracy for the solution to be useful. In fact you probably need to attend to whatever else was beeping anyways.
1. You tell Alexa to let you know when the oven is preheated.
2. She hears the washing machine beep and tells you the oven is preheated.
3. You come back, find that the oven is still not ready.
4. You conclude it's probably the washing machine and go check it out, forgetting to tell Alexa to let you know when the oven is preheated.
It's kind of like saying that using a rotary phone UI on your smartphone would have been okay, because we've managed with it just fine for a long time back when we had rotary phones.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The point is that the audio pitches aren't outside human detection and don't have distinct enough patterns right now. Changing pitch and patterns would require appliance manufacturers' support, at which point you might as well go with mature, well-defined and well-implemented solutions, such as WiFi connectivity, rather than defining and implementing your own protocol based on audio pitches and patterns.
It's just a thought, like I'm against the whole thing in general, but it seems like this is doable without needing a lot of support
Also despite sounding similar to tone deaf humans one probably runs at 4001.342 Hz and the other at 3999.114 Hz which likely sounds the same to me, but to a computer is likely very obvious.