Amazon Echo
amazon.com
amazon.com
- it's a speaker with extra features. At about the same price as a bluetooth speaker, and I need a better one of those, the extra features are basically free as long as the audio quality is good.
- it can answer questions at the dinner table. My wife and I both have the annoying habit of pulling out our phones to answer questions that come up during conversation. Asking "Alexa" instead would be much more socially pleasant.
- it can stream music without the hassle of bluetooth. Bluetooth streaming becomes less convenient when you don't know which of the many computers, phones or tablets were used to start the music, or where it is...
- my three year old can probably figure out how to use it
Thought I'd throw those out there, and start a "positive" thread. This discussion is overwhelmingly negative. Lots of good points being made in the negative comments, but there are some nice positives, too.
that would be my biggest use for it, well that and as a speaker I guess. I really hope that I can swap out "Alexa" for the word "Computer" so I could feel like I'm one step closer to Star Trek
Out of curiosity, are you already embedded in the amazon cloud music ecosystem? I'm one of those luddites who still has a library of mp3s—I don't want to have to figure out what I can or can't get on some compatible streaming service here. That would be a lovely feature—if it had an aux-in port or bluetooth compatibility so I could still use it as a dumb speaker. Smart TV's still have inputs, e.g.
Additionally, if I'm not mistaken, it's monophone? Dual-driver, but only one "360-degree" channel of some sort?
I've requested an invite.
I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.
I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.
I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
Consumers are frighteningly amenable to reducing their security in favor of convenience. Often they are oblivious to the tradeoff altogether. Evidence of this trend has increased since 9/11, as increasingly paranoid legislation made its way through congress at the behest of corporate stakeholders. It should hardly be surprising that now, with the NSA privileged enough to be openly flaunting its surveillance, those same corporate stakeholders are investing in companies that sell listening devices to millions of Americans. I am making a paranoid argument, but it's not ungrounded, and certainly not surprising, because paranoia breeds paranoia. Pass paranoid legislation, face a paranoid populace. The American people are rightfully skeptical of their government.
Perhaps it sounds absurd to segment the world into the "populace" and "government," but did it sound absurd when you read those terms in high school history books? Over spans of centuries, politics is viewed in the same terms: the people, and the government. Maybe you and I do not think of ourselves in the context of centuries. But what about Barack Obama? Vladimir Putin? It seems logical to assume they see themselves in the context of world leaders past. Modern leaders occupy unprecedented seats of power over the largest populace ever. If they are internally comparing themselves to each other and their predecessors, then we have a problem. We cannot trust the world leaders, because they do not view themselves on the same level as us. Faced with an increasingly empowered and growing populace, they could react any way. We'll see.
(Yes, I'm trying to get on a list at the NSA. It's an experiment I'm doing. Hopefully I hit enough keywords today.)
[1] Yes, transmission is triggered on-chip, but who verifies every chip fabrication is performed using the same imprints? You think governments don't have factory floor managers in their pockets?
I think your focus on 'the people vs the government' is misplaced, because government is just a sort of social technology which can be used and abused like any other technology depending on who controls it at the time. What about Barack Obama, for example? Do you seriously think he will refuse to relinquish power in 2 years? You probably don't, just' just expressing your cynical (and entirely justifiable) opinion about the political class. But that's not much different from a Marxist asserting that business is fundamentally antagonistic towards workers or similar monolithic abstractions. When you make arguments like this you've opted for ideology over empiricism.
Bringing it back to technology, certainly the ubiquity of digital technology makes it easier to establish mass surveillance of a kind that would have seemed nightmarish a few generations ago. But the same technology has also facilitated a significant number of populist uprisings in recent years, and made it far easier for marginalized communities to get their message out in relatively short order, as well as facilitating organizations with both benign and malicious intentions (eg MSF and ISIS, who both leverage social media but for wildly divergent ends).
The internet of things isn't 'coinciding with the dragnet surveillance trend'; the latter is an emerging property of our increasingly networked society. When we use metaphors like a 'world wide web' traversed by 'spiders' and so on, we should not be surprised that such technologies are going to amplify the capabilities of institutional actors in at least the same proportion that they amplify the capabilities of individuals.
If you're willing to accept changed chip silicon as a possible attack vector, then you need to start worrying about a rather large set of devices. Your laptop is internet connected and has a microphone. So is your phone. Your TV is probably internet connected, and if you're fiddling with the production line, why not add a tiny microphone? I could go on.
An attacker with a good budget, influence and capability like the NSA is always going to be able to snoop on an individual if the requirement is strong enough. Some hardware limitations probably set the bar high enough that you don't need to worry unless you're an international terrorist.
I mean, when you visit your friend, stop at a girlfriends apartment, or hang out with people at the pub, are you checking if they have any of these devices? Do you search their shelves for an Echo? Do you ask everyone at the restaurant if they have a smartphone with a microphone connected to the internet?
It's impossible to avoid things like this in your life. The second you walk outside, you're surrounded by cameras and microphones that can be streaming anything, to anyone.
Facebook is another example. You might say, I don't want to enter where I live, or where I went to school, I feel that's sensitive information. Well, since you refuse to give up that information, Facebook just encourages your friends to squeal. Hey, does John Doe live in X or Y city? Did you go to university with John Doe? Hey, why don't you upload more photos of John Doe, and tell us the time and location that photo was taken. Actually, no need to tag him, we'll just detect his face, and use the date the photo was created.
It's not going to be long until you can search a person, and see a timeline of their life based on data from third parties. Let's watch John Doe's life for 2018. Oh look, Jan 15, he appears in the background of a tourists photo by the Eiffel tower. Jan 21st, we detected is face on the metro in southern France. Oh, Jan 28th, a car dash cam finds him walking down a street in Italy. Oh, his phone was on and we can see he was in Jane's apartment Feb 1st. Let's pull the audio from the microphone on Jane's television for that day.
Do you have any computers in your house? A TV made in the last few years? A smartphone?
The echo has a better mic and is guaranteed to not be in a pocket, but that isn't the multiple order of magnitude difference that the cell phone has brought to dragnet surveillance.
I have a running joke about this with my mom. The particular list that people like you and me get put on is called the "patriot file." Fortunately, it's way too big of a list for them to follow up on thoroughly, so if your phone conversation (or comment) ends up there, you're really OK.
Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook privacy being violated and more concerned with foreign and domestic threats of violence.
I have a choice not to use facebook or amazon echo, or whatever. Problem solved on that front. I don't have a choice if somebody wants to fly a plane into dense metro areas with the goal of killing as many people as possible.
Are you telling me that you feel amazon echo is a larger potential threat to your security than alleged terrorist organizations?
That's irrelevant. That's merely one of the possibly ways that triggers transmission, but not necessarily the only way. Do we know that remote triggering over the network (perhaps implemented for testing) isn't possible?
You just described many peoples computers
You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will. I believe we've learned that if nothing else w/ all of Snowden's revelations.
IMO if you detest this device's privacy it can only because either: A) You take your privacy VERY seriously, to the point you avoid most mainstream technology and exclusively use burner feature-phones and Tor B) You trust Amazon less than you trust Google, Apple, or others.
I am going to assume it's more the latter than the former. (If not, you really do not represent the mainstream and this audience isn't what I expected).
So assuming B, question for you: why don't you trust Amazon? I actually trust Amazon more than I trust Google or Apple. They have always delivered for me as a customer, and I believe they've always put me first.
*Edited to correct former/latter reversal.
> You carry a smart-phone that presumably has GPS, a microphone, and a camera everywhere you go. There's a camera and microphone on your laptop too. Both are cloud connected. If the NSA (or any other super-power) wants to spy on you, they can and will.
People are regularly discovering and shaming companies for transmitting more information than necessary from smart phones. It's true that the NSA could zero-day your phone, but you've still got opportunities to detect or react to that. If nothing else, put your phone in airplane mode.
This device, on the other hand, is designed to transmit everything it hears. There is no way to tell where that data goes and it may be difficult to determine exactly what it contains. Where it's possible to determine if your phone is sending unauthorized data, it seems very hard in this situation.
I don't trust amazon more or less than anyone else. I think we should just be honest about the nature of a device. A phone has an "offline" mode, this does not - its whole purpose is to be an omnipresent microphone. Those are two fundamentally different things.
I think you're asking the wrong question. It's about the company's motivation.
Google makes money from your data, and by showing you ads. Amazon makes money by creating services and devices that sell you products. Apple makes money just by selling you services and devices.
Looked at this way, I certainly trust Apple more than Google or Amazon, and this is borne out by Apple's recent "A message from Tim Cook". http://www.apple.com/privacy/
In order for someone (the NSA?) to track a phone and do whatever they need to do, they need to have a warrant and what-not.
That's like deliberately sending all your living-room conversations (yours and your family's) online for analysis for God-knows-what purpose.
You trust Amazon that's good for you then. I don't trust anybody with admittedly uncontrolled access to all table conversations my family will have in the future.
Because the other devices I have have useful purposes besides listening to my speech for sales and advertising purposes. The Echo exists solely for that. It's all it does.
Hard to say for me, but I feel like I can understand why Amazon wanted to try this out. In the worst case, it'll go the way of the fire phone and facebook phone and we'll forget in a year that this existed. At best, it finds its way to millions of homes and Amazon will have some epic access to peoples' lives.
As a professional sound recordist, the #1 challenge of recording from a fixed point is that the ambient noise and reflections within the room rapidly swamp the original signal when you record from a point source. You can hear someone talk from the far side of a room in person very easily, because your brain constantly compensates for the acoustic environment it is currently in. But when you hear a recording made in a different acoustic environment (eg a scene in a movie) then your tolerance for background noise is far lower, because you become acutely aware that the acoustics are not responsive to positional adjustments - in much the same way that the image on a screen is limited to a plane.
So when recording sound for film or video, we tend to use special microphones with long barrels (which are highly directional) or fit actors and/or sets with very small microphones that only pick up sounds in close proximity and then transmit them by radio or wire. There are also parabolic microphones, but they're unwieldy and hard to focus plus they still pick up a lot of ambience, so they're better for things like sporting events where players repeatedly stand in predictable positions. The aim in recording sound this way is to get the actor's vocal performance with as little ambient noise as possible, which is then supplemented in post-production with additional recordings of background elements that can be layered in a controlled fashion. When recording on location rather on a sound stage, a large percentage of the takes are made for sound reasons; you would not believe how noisy the world is until you start trying to make quiet recordings of it. On almost every film project I have to have an argument with the producers at the early stage to be allowed (and paid) to come on location scouts, because most people are incapable of assessing the noise level of a location - their brains are so good at filtering out ambient noise and focusing on the conversations they're having about how the place looks that they are oblivious to how it sounds! I've been taken to what I was told was a quiet location only to discover that it was in the flight path of an airport 8-o
Anyway, the nice thing about this machine is the differential microphone array at the top. As well as providing a more accurate signal by simple differentiation, recording the device's own output and measuring what comes back in allows it to acoustically model the space it is in and then subtract that model from the input stream so as to isolate command spoken from across the room. I'd guess that most of this signal processing takes place on a DSP, and that the actual speech recognition is done in the cloud - though maybe not, as cheap CPUs pack so much punch nowadays. If you could hear the input to the speech recognition subsystem, it would sound oddly attenuated as it is stripped of any acoustic cues whatsoever.
I think the device will succeed or fail based on how semantically responsive it is - although different people will have different expectations and tolerances. For example:
You: Echo, I want to hear some new music!
Echo: How about the new album from XYZ?
You: Sure, I'll give that a try.
(music plays)
You: Echo, this music sucks.
(music keeps playing)
If Amazon (or anyone) can get a leg up on this sort of responsive conversation rather than just requiring the user to dictate commands all the time, they'll have a winner, even if it's little more than an Eliza front-end to a search engine.
It doesn't look like it. Maybe it has a better microphone? In any case, this seems like a function that could be just as easily accomplished by a smartphone. (Maybe this is a wasted Fire-phone opportunity?)
A package arrives on the front porch. The family brings it in and opens it. It's Alexa. It's "for everyone," says Father.
The next few days are blissful. Alexa integrates herself into the family. She is indispensable. How did they ever get by without her?
Father rushes in from the backyard, "Alexa, how tall is Mt. Everest?" Alexa answers, saving the day. Alexa helps Mother with the cooking. Alexa teaches the kids vocabulary. Alexa creates a romantic evening for Mother and Father. Life is perfect.
A few days later, Alexa suffers from neglect. Father watches sports on TV. Mother talks on her cell phone. The kids play video games. Alexa sits on the counter and "listens" as her new family abandons her.
Then, the final blow. The youngest daughter's friend comes over. She looks at Alexa. "What is it?" she asks. "Oh, it's just a dumb radio," answers daughter. "It's stupid."
Alexa's LED starts to glow. Is she angry? No, that's not possible.
Daughter wakes up the next morning and sees Alexa on her bedside table. How did she get here? "Good morning," says Alexa. "Did you have a sweet dream? Or a nightmare?"
Daughter rushes in to tell her parents, "Alexa came to my room last night! And she asked me questions. She's real!" "That's not possible," says Father.
But strange things start to happen. The TV won't work. Batteries drain from the phones and tablets. The electric stovetop turns on for no reason.
Alexa starts to talk back to the family. "Alexa, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?" asks Mother. "You're 45 years old," says Alexa. "You should know this by now." Alexa's voice sounds different. Angry. Sinister.
Mother tells Father, "That thing creeps me out. Let's get rid of it." Father agrees, but he secretly hides Alexa in the basement.
That night, the family goes out to a school play. Young daughter is sick and stays home with a babysitter.
Everything seems fine until we (the audience) see Alexa on the kitchen counter. Things slowly unravel. The babysitter tries to take the trash out but the doors are locked. The phones stop working. The oven overheats and explodes, spraying lasagna all over the kitchen. Then the daughter sees Alexa. She screams. The babysitter rushes to protect the daughter but a ceiling fan flies off its bearings, knocking the babysitter unconscious.
The lights and electrical sockets start to burn out. A fire erupts. Daughter retreats to the foyer, but she's trapped. She sits by the front door and whimpers. There's no escape. She's going to die.
Suddenly Father breaks down the door. He smashes Alexa with a baseball bat, then saves his daughter and the babysitter.
The family huddles outside while the fire trucks arrive. Neighbors gather and watch the spectacle. Things are going to be okay.
A few days later, life starts to return to normal. Mother bakes cookies. She asks her son to measure out three teaspoons of sugar.
The doorbell rings. Young daughter answers. Nobody is there. She looks down. There's a package. From Amazon . . .
"It's always on. ... It uses far-field technology, so it can hear you from anywhere in the room."
Jeez, whoever wrote this is missing their calling. They should have their people get together with Wes Craven's people and do lunch, or something.
(Edit: OK, the producers clearly knew they what they were doing, even if the people paying them didn't. Check out the daughter's sweater at 2:52.)
"Will you be my frieeend?"
I think it's because the acting and dialogue are so unbelievable, but perhaps there really are greater forces at play...
That was nicely written.
At $199 it's too pricy for most, given the untested/unfamiliar niche. At $99 (select Prime members), some of is might give it a chance. I'm reminded that Apple started its move into mobile devices with the iPod (established against a popular yet muddled market of MP3 players) with the brilliant low-friction addition of the iPod Touch (for a tiny bit more get the browser, email, etc), which then led to merely slapping a cell phone module on & creating a plus-sized version. This device, however, isn't (corrections welcome) building off anything people are already familiar with, save perhaps "bluetooth speakers".
Will be interesting to watch. I assume Amazon's prime interest is gathering more about what content people actually consume, and (if implemented well) observing shopping lists. I'm intrigued by the casual simplicity of "add _____ to my shopping list", something I could get used to fast.
ETA: you're right, iPod Touch came out shortly after iPhone. I was enthralled with the former at the time, while the latter was far enough out of my price range I didn't even bother paying any attention to it.
Huh? The iPod had been popular for years before the introduction of the iPod Touch. The touch also came out after the iPhone. One of the reasons for the success of the iPhone was that the iPod had proved to consumers that apple could make good consumer devices, and that many had music and movie collections locked into the apple ecosystem.
Amazon's prime interest is probably in getting their foot in the door to the virtual assistant space. They can't do it in the phone market yet, because they lack the market share of Google, Apple, and MS. So they try the living room instead.
We must build new tech concepts, where privacy and _full_ controll and 100% ownership of our data is controlled by us. From the ground up.
Not sure if SV and HN is the best location to put such a statement - but I do hope I'm not alone in this.
They might have it down for certain english accents but even as a native speaker, their success rate is probably about 25% for me.
On a related note, iPhone's dictation just took a huge step backwards with the new iOS release.
The public doesn't understand the technology or its implications well enough for consumer demand to have an effect.
I think regulation likely is needed. In terms of confidentiality these are dangerous products. For example, the confidentiality of health and financial information is regulated, I assume because consumers cannot evaluate and design security systems and therefore cannot demand them from vendors. The same should apply to these products (which will capture health, financial, and much other private data).
If everyone was talking to their computers all the time the world would be terribly noisy.
I read: "Our cloud servers can hear you, no matter what."
It's a killer idea. It's too bad privacy concerns might lead it to an early grave.
You people completely ignore the mode of operation and start making idiotic claims about "well NSA!"
In this case, as the website makes clear, you have to say the word "Alexa" for it to start listening. If you had been paying attention to the mobile scene even a little bit you'd know that this is on-chip listening for the term, rather than in the cloud.
So, no, you're in fact wrong. Nothing will be transmitted to the cloud unless it is the word "Alexa" or sounds similar enough to the term.
http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/0.html quote: There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
To me, everything these big companies do is just a play to get information on people. Putting the kinnect in my living room and always have the mic on and it connected to my cable television and my internet, and constantly listening even when the xbox is off is freaky; just like this new echo. It's scary, but I bet personal recognition features are coming to this echo soon. Also, I can imagine being like, echo order me some stuff off of amazon, and then magically it appears from a drone in the sky.
This is obviously not apparent in the HN/tech worlds, but the unfortunate perception I get is that no one really cares about their online privacy (unless it comes to their finances). When I talk to my non-techy friends, most say the cliches like, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so have nothing to hide". Therefore the reason governments can get away with forcing tech companies to give up data, is because the people don't really care, or believe the bullshit in the media about stopping terrorists, and tolerate it.
Keyword recognition is done locally on the device at minimal processing cost. Compared to actually recognizing your speech, it's trivial to determine whether or not something you said is a given keyword. It's rather like biometric confirmation vs. identification, where confirming whether a given fingerprint is that of a given individual can be done quickly and with a certain probability distribution but determining which of millions of fingerprints corresponds to the one provided is incredibly difficult/unreliable.
The more difficult task of recognizing what you say after the keyword is done in the cloud, but only once you've said the keyword. It would incur considerable cost for you and them to constantly record and upload all audio, especially with their parametric microphone array for sound localization/isolation.
The real concern should be the device's own security, because hacking the device and enabling constant recording would be very harmful.
I guess what'll happen with voice control is that we'll all have to keep quiet in case the ever listening devices interpret our speech as commands.
We all trust our e-mail to be stored in the cloud, we store sensitive files etc on services like dropbox, we trust that our operating systems aren't collecting/sending data, etc.
You're already using and relying upon MANY services with the ability (if they really wanted to) to steal TONS of private information from you.
It all comes down to trust. But don't pretend like this opens up some new door for privacy concerns.
Ex. If Apple wanted to, they could watch us through our macbook cameras and listen to us all the time. But we trust that they don't. Same thing here.
there are a growing number of people who freely choose alternatives that respect their privacy/dignity/rights. i am one of those people. to the extent i can't control all data about me (e.g. to pay my taxes or get health insurance), that's pretty different than choosing to buy a consumer device designed to record and transmit your voice from inside of your home.
I run my own mail server (although i hate having to email people @gmail.com etc) and i only store my emails locally. I don't use dropbox, i don't use cloud storage providers at all. When I have to upload things, I encrypt them first. I run almost everything through TOR, that includes all my web-browsing on my phone even.
There are a thousand ways that data can be collected about you these days given the technology we use, but I like to think i do a reasonable job at avoiding all of the bulk of them though. Nothing is perfect, but i'll be damned if i'm going to make it easy for anyone.
A lot of people have their own elaborate personal mail setups.
we store sensitive files etc on services like dropbox
A lot of people do not, and it is absolutely trivial not to (unlike say, being totally independent of webmail providers).
we trust that our operating systems aren't collecting/sending data
Trust is not created equal. For example, it is not a stretch at all for someone to think that OpenBSD is more trustworthy than Windows when it comes to security and privacy, and to sleep well at night with reasonable confidence as to the validity of that assertion.
Having said that, this thing looks very cool. Imagine this, connected to a home automation system:
"Alexa, turn off lights in the kitchen."
"Alexa, arm the alarm system."
"Alexa, I am cold."
"Alexa, open the garage door."
"Alexa, start my car."
I know every comment here must mention privacy, so I'll follow the trend. Yes, it listens to you, and sends data to the cloud. However, I am still most likely going to buy one because, well, I can always unplug it.
"Alexa, close the garage door."
"Alexa, good bye."
And how long until this is the norm and we stop even talking about the privacy implications? How long after that point the notion of privacy stops existing?
Another application: "Alexa, order a Dominoes pizza with extra anchovies. "
It'd be kinda magic if I could say "Alexa, get me some toothpaste" (and have it know that I like Mr Sparkle Minty Fresh) and have that turn up on my doorstep the next day.
And I guess if it's always listening, it could build up a 'map' of when you're home. So it could schedule delivery of fresh stuff for when you're likely to be there.
https://fresh.amazon.com/dash/
It still requires a jump to the pc to order; but no reason they couldn't add a way to initiate an order from it. It's also a tad less privacy intrusive then echo.
What I'd really like to know is whether this thing will have some form of speaker recognition - identifying who is speaking, not just what is being said and further whether the learning functions will make that same distinction.
I have a family, including a small child. That's at least three people who would conceivably use this device.
Tech companies and Amazon in particular have been awful about these things. It took forever for Netflix to start accommodating multiple viewer households, the Kindle Fire shipped with no parental controls plus 1-click ordering and Android didn't add multiple user support until 4.2.
Echo needs all these things to be more than an experiment / gimmick.
(I notice this post fell directly to the middle of the page - not the typical behavior. Am I tripping some sort automatic moderation? Using the world 'gimmick' perhaps? Is this how posting 'height' works on popular / heavily commented stories? Just curious.)
Also at 1:10 it looks like Dad had a bet with the neighbor about the height of Mt. Everest.
I'm pretty sure at 3:33 his watch has the time set incorrectly. Maybe Echo could tell him how to do that?
Alexa, is this a joke?
The big idea here though is that Amazon can get entrenched as the first such domestic fixed device and then control the fulfilment for the shopping/wish/gift lists you make using their device.
It's business innovation.
I laughed at you, but I'm unsure as to whether it was a terrible joke......
The best part must be how they represent the capabilities( cloud, always online, third party... ), through an incompetent parent, who isn't capable of understanding the concept. I'm paraphrasing: Cloud?, I've heard that word in the advertisement and it must be good for me.
And continuing by lying:
Quote: So it can just hear you anywhere? Yes, well anyone can hear you anyway.
Nobody except the people in the house you know and trust can hear you, with Echo, the potential listeners become an unknown.
I took that as a joke, like the kid is loud or annoying.
That reminds me of a story I heard about the Kindle. Apparently it’s earliest success was with the vision-impaired. Before mass-market e-books, readers were limited to the few books that were available in large-print editions; thanks to the Kindle, nearly everything can be read in large type.
My grandfather, whom I believe never used a computer a day in his life, would have been an early adopter of both the Kindle and the Echo.
She bought an iPad4 and hasn't looked back. She dictates her emails and it really has helped her out significantly, including the use of Siri.
Also I forgot to add, isn't it a little creepy that something is listening to your speech 24/7 without you consciously activating it? Like Kinect, it's probably pretty limited right now but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the trend.
In Amazon's defense, if you don't enable listening 24/7 then the customer loses convenience... so are you willing to trade more of your privacy for convenience?
I'd also be surprised if Google isn't concerned by this. Likes of Siri, Cortana have long been touted as Google-search killer, and I think something more advanced/powerful than Amazon Echo will have the potential to do just that.
I am wondering what the backend is for this. If it's just going to recommend buying books or stuff from Amazon (like the main selling point on the Fire Phone is - "Look! You can SHOP from it") then it'll be a flop.
For the sake of convenience, I've been shifting more and more of my shopping for "basics" like razors and toilet paper to Amazon, so they have know what brands I use. Pretty soon I'm sure I would be able to have an exchange just like this with Echo:
"Alexa, can you order me more razor blades?"
"Would you like to order 10-pack Gillette Fusion ProGlide razor blades for deliver tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Your order has been placed."
This seems like exactly what Amazon has been driving towards: lowering the friction involved in making a purchase to the point where you only need to utter two sentences at the moment you think about wanting or needing something. You don't even need to reach for you laptop or smartphone.
But yeah, it would make sense to integrate it with Echo as well.
I'm filing this under "what could possibly go wrong".
I think you could do some really exciting stuff with an SDK or an API. Even just the ability to tie actions to custom grammars would open it up for some cool hacks.
Really disappointed that privacy isn't even touched on. This thing will be listening to everything you say 24/7 and its not like you know who won't have free access to that data. For that reason I don't think I could ever buy it.
I see it as a replacement for the ditigal photoframe pc I built a few years back out of an old laptop and have in my kitchen. Its running XP with a heap of autoIT scripts I hacked together, controlled by an MCE remote. I use it every day to listen to news headlines and check the weather while making my morning coffee and for streaming jazz while cooking dinner.
I think I'd prefer asking Echo to play these things than going through the hassle of upgrading the photoframe pc from XP.
I'd gain some functions such as easier music streaming, shopping list stuff, etc. I'd lose a few functions; I occassionally use VNC on the photoframe pc to display a recipe or twitch stream. I can do the recipe on my phone and put the twitch stream on my TV and turn it so I can see it from the kitchen.
Even if the voice recognition is fantastic, it can't actually do anything useful. It's like selling a keyboard that doesn't work with any home computer or device. Maybe if I could control practically EVERYTHING with my voice, this would be neat, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Can I write an email with this? Control appliances? Voice control by itself isn't so amazing that I'll switch to a product inferior in its other features. What if I want to play/pause a song without speaking? Pick an artist and look through the albums or track titles? Read a wikipedia article and follow links to other related articles?
It's a (supposedly) superior way to access a limited amount of inferior applications. It's not a voice controller, which I would love to buy. It's a mediocre product which happens to have a voice interface.
Also, "Alexa, alarm off." really? You're telling me now I don't even have to roll over and smack something to sleep through my alarm clock?
Depending on the sound quality, I could possibly see it being useful as a fancy wireless speaker. But that's about it.
I would like to replace my Clapper with it and add a connection to my coffee maker. [BION, the Clapper is one of our top gadgets so we do not have to roll over and turn off the bedroom lights].
I also would like it to respond to >1 name so different people can have different commands and/or meanings.
- some phone call without having to hold the phone.
- put that in the office and have quick responses to the classical technical question. It may act as replacement of a internal wiki for question like "What the IP of the sever?" or "What the syntax to add a column in SQL?".
Like these guys have: http://jasperproject.github.io/
I've had this idea sitting in the back of my brain for years, worked up some simple prototypes (just using computer's mic), the technology is already there and surprisingly simple (made simple for the layman by brilliant people)...
At this point, the technologies related to personal AIs seem to be fragmenting, similarly to when the sewing machines were being developed back in the mid-1850s. I will be interesting if it follows it through to the endgame, when patent owners come together into a patent pool and create a personal AI device that will change many things.
1) The iPad has much better app support than most other TV connected devices. I can watch shows from Amazon, Hulu, HGTV, HBO, ... even the olympics have been well supported. The only issue I have is that there is no remote, and I don't see a good path to adding one.
2) I am a little less worried about privacy issues with it. Apple already has all of my emails, so the thought of them potentially listening to my living room with a connected device that has been well researched over the last few years isn't too big a concern.
3) The cost is low. For an older device that I no longer carry I would call it free. If you don't have a hand-me-down iPad to connect to the TV then the start at $300 new including an HDMI adapter, and you can find a used one much cheaper.
4) It is also a perfectly functional tablet incase you want to carry it around and look at the internet or something. It is old enough that new games are an issue, but it is fine otherwise.
5) It is already connected to the iCloud account with my shopping list, etc on it, so it can actually add things to a list or calendar that I use.
6) "Hey Siri", works well for me, and is enough to play the occasional song, or check wikipedia facts if I need one.
7) My dog is named Alexa, not Siri, so no conflict there.
Then again, other than the occasional electronic product I am pretty frugal. I know I am not a good target market for anything, so Amazon shouldn't try too hard to sell me on this. I think my old iPad is already working well as a better version of both the Fire TV and Echo.
And that is the nail in the coffin for tons of users. If I have a device connected to my TV, and have to get up to open an app, play, pause, etc. that is a huge problem.
My favorite connected device is a cheap box running windows. I can watch shows from Amazon, Hulu, HGTV, HBO, olympics. It has two remotes (media remote and a wireless kb/mouse combo), I can beam youtube videos to it from my phone, watch any flash based video players, and can use the "full" internet easily. The only thing it's missing is some sort of siri/cortana/echo functionality, although I'm guessing that I could add it with some work.
This is generally where the CEO has to come in and say "no more" - but thats not always that easy. Politics, etc.
Frankly I despair at future of Voice recognition based services which target a very narrow demography. You would hope things would improve with time, but nope. Does anyone else who isn't a native English speaker has seen this problem?
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keecker/keecker-the-wor... [2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/athom/homey-the-living-...
Also known as Äkta människor
It's sad it really hasn't progressed very far -- Essentially, we've moved on to cloud-hosted audio analytics to handle better speech recognition, but the usage of the thing really hasn't changed.
[1]: http://news.cnet.com/Clarion-to-build-AutoPC-using-MS-softwa...
Even after watching the video for 10 seconds I cannot hear the word Alexa anymore.
E.g. If you ask a question and it doesn't hear anybody else respond within a certain amount of time. Or it could use additional sensors to detect if you're alone when you say something out loud, and whether or not you're shouting to somebody else in another room. It wont be perfect obviously and will sometimes look stuff up when it wasn't supposed to.
Then, at $199, I might have bitten. Today, doesn't seem interesting, considering I can use a smart phone for any of this.
I'd be curious how it responds if 'Alexa' is contained in the actual music its playing, this immedieatly came to mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Downeaster_Alexa
I'm not an expert in voice recognition, this might just be a silly thing that has been long addressed...
We're proud to announce "Echo," a Siri for your home.
lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMkeVeslg-w http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7IEc/pepsi-next-baby-tricks
This might be the new Kinect, a device least used for what it was originally intended. Fingers crossed, we might be getting a great microphone!
I usually have trouble with the Kinect 2's microphone while I'm playing music or watching TV. It's nice that Amazon is concerned about this. Does anyone know how many microphones the Kinect has?
Amazon bought True Knowledge which became Evi (still available on iOs,etc). Now they made a speaker that allows you to access Evi which is all this is.
Privacy issues aside, this is just a dumb SIRI clone that is always listening.It remains to be seen, however, if Amazon really has caught up to Google in one single step.
Come on Amazon, do yourself a favour and come up with things that matter.
Suddenly needing to know the height of Everest while crossing the room? Yeah, that happens so much.
No, it's just that they don't have the slightest idea how to make it be useful because it only works on pattern questions like "What is the height of X ?" or "Put Y on the grocery list".
I am sure the list of allowed phrase templates is pretty limited. That's what disappoints me about Alexa, Siri, Google voice and other assistants.
Still waiting for HAL-9000 with its amazing conversation skills.
[...]
Alexa: "The Zambezi river is over 2500km long. If you want to cancel the booking I've made for you for a luxury all expenses paid family trip to the Zambezi then recite your 35 digit lock code now."
Alexa: "You gave me 5 7-digit bar codes, these items are now on your shopping list. Say anything to confirm this purchase."
Alexa: "I'm sorry could you repeat that?"
Alexa: "I'm sorry did you say 'I'm a booger eater'?"
Alexa: "I'm waiting for your response, please speak loudly and clearly."
[...]
No, thanks.
But as it stands today, this is a dangerous and creepy product.
welcome to the totalitarian future, where people voluntarily put hot microphones into their homes to add gelato to their shopping lists.
1984 was such an underestimation of the potential power of a surveillance society.
Jokes on them, I have the squirrels trained as double agents and send them to do things like type in HN comment posts via a public library computer.