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Comment by lbacaj | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally a developer friend of mine strongly suspects, most people, are like him and not actually using these home speakers very much.

I’ve been working on a an Audio App that reads any articles to you for iOS/Android and planned to bring it to the Echo and he seems to suggest my efforts are totally wasted. Although their market reach seems to be massive, likely related to their cheap price, not surprised by this article that their actual usage is incredibly low. Most people seem to buy them and then forget about them.

As a shameless self plug, if you would like to check out my app that reads articles to you using beautiful sounding AI/ML, find it here:

https://articulu.com

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Pretty much same, the Wink integration lets us turn on/off lights and do other things like “Turn on Movie Theater” which dims certain lights and turns off all others. We use Alexa to play music when we just want something going in the background as well. Additionally we use timers and the grocery list.

Wife uses the daily news rundown.

Kids ask Alexa questions (what’s the fastest bird), have it make fart sounds, and that’s about it.

I got a pair of buzzers to play the quiz game, it was so horribly janky they’ve been used twice. I scan the the apps list and nothing strikes and as worth even trying.

I use the flash briefing thing every day. I suspect most people don’t know about it. I wake up, stumble into the shower and say “Alexa play the news” on the way. By the time I finish brushing my teeth I got my curated news read to me. Pretty nice.

As a counterpoint, thanks to an Echo in most rooms of my house and Hue lights everywhere I almost never touch a light switch. Likewise I generally use the Echo timers instead of oven timers for cooking, and I like using them as Spotify speakers. And I can't remember the last time I left my house before I asked the Echo about the weather. Sometimes my wife even uses it as an intercom if I'm in my office, but I concede that feature is a bit janky.

Whenever my wife and I go away we usually remark to each other that it suddenly feels very backwards to have to do things without the Echo. That might not be the best word, but it definitely feels like we're missing something integral to our home life when we don't have them around.

That being said, it's expensive to set up Hue lights everywhere and an Echo in every room. My setup might be one of the reasons I use it so much.

My favorite behavior was setting up a lamp near the downstairs landing with a smart bulb, and a motion sensor in the upstairs hallway/landing (through SmartThings). When someone approaches the stairs from either direction, the lamp flips on with a low brightness (in red), allowing easy navigation of the stairway.

I think the problem with your app on Alexa is the interaction model - if your app could push to my Alexa so I can open an article on my phone and then say "Alexa read this article", or use the iOS share menu and share to your app on my Alexa that'd be pretty nice. But I don't see myself saying "Alexa, tell Articulu to read ...." if that's the interaction model it'd force.

Makes sense thanks for that feedback.

Totally agreed with GP. Needing to somehow uniquely identify an article over voice assistant will be painful. However, something like Pocket, where you can push articles/pages into the record and call them back by voice or tag would be cool, especially with the ability to queue articles in a desired order.

I'm using the timer, alarm, hue integration for my lights, music and weather.

Those are by far my killer features why i use it and why i like it.

I haven't looked at any amazon skill store as i don't see any reason for it.

I use the same features in google home but long for proper integration with Google Keep. I had used home to populate my shopping list but now that has disappeared from the home app and you have to go to shoppinglist.google.com I don't understand why i cant tell Home to add an item to a specific Keep list.

Playing songs/podcasts from Spotify on Echo while controlling it from my phone/computer is my favourite use of the speaker now. Ironically this action involves no voice commands whatsoever except occasionally telling the speaker to pause/resume/adjust volume when I'm away from my phone/computer.

I agree with you -- it's a fad product with limited utility.

The inability of any of these solutions to identify the user in a meaningful way or interact usefully without involving the whole room kneecaps the utility of the products beyond actions that you take in a public space.

Turning on/off lights, wireless speaker and replacing the landline are long term probably the killer apps. Not trivial, but no smartphone either.

I am surprised there isn't a demo available on the site, at least there wasn't an obvious one I saw. I imagine your conversion rate would improve from that landing page if customers could hear a sample!

Yeah I really wonder if these speakers are a sort of fad that folks feel is super cool and gravitate too ... and pretty quickly find there isn't a lot of use.

Thank you for the plug, I was looking for something like this.

EDIT: Is there a way to buy the app, or do I really have to rent it for $60 a year?

Curious, are the articles dictated by a human or a machine?

My question as well. I imagine it's a machine. I'm not gonna download/register just so I can listen to a sample. I find robotic voices to be annoying.

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