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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Amazon kneecapped this product before it even came out. Nobody who has used both Siri and Alexa thinks Siri can compete as a virtual assistant, so all this thing had going for it was sound quality, and then Amazon announced the Sonos One. Barring a huge improvement in Siri, I don’t think even Apple die-hards are going to buy this in large numbers.

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As a counterpoint, I intend to purchase one. The only smart features I want are the easy ones - "play X, pause, dim lights, remind me of Y." Alexa & Co. are better at the expense of privacy.

The combination of respecting privacy and hifi sound (assuming they deliver) is killer.

One company wants to sell me a camel that's going to try and get its nose under the tent to sell me other stuff. The other company wants to sell me a speaker with voice commands to play music and turn my lights on and off, and is willing to take my $350 call it a day. I'm going to purchase the latter when it's released.

Put another way, I'll happily pay Apple $350, but Amazon literally could not give me an Echo.

Is this a common perception? I've used Alexa (on Sonos One actually) and I thought it was terrible at recognizing commands compared to Siri. Even worse when it doesn't understand you it defaults to listing products you may want to buy. It felt like a parody of voice assistants rather than a real product.

I'd love for Siri to be more extensible but I still find it far more reliable, pleasant to talk to, and ultimately more powerful when integrated with HomeKit.

Had the Echo since it first came out in 2014 and now several Google Homes. The Google Home is far ahead of the Echo in ability to understand natural language and much smarter in answering questions.

I pre-ordered the Echo so have been using it for a long time too. Interestingly for me I’ve found it’s gotten dramatically worse over the last two or so months for simple commands that I use basically every day (turning off lights, setting alarm)

I have a first-gen echo, and I will say, hands down, my iphone 7+ with "hey siri" can hear and understand me better. It's also faster at performing actions on my philips HUE hub.

I'm an Apple diehard, and yeah Siri has a lot of issues. Very few integrations and doesn't work often.

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