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.

I don't really understand the value behind this. It seems like voice recognition is the main feature behind it, but that doesn't create a reason for a product to exist. It's basically my smartphone, except I can't carry it in my pocket everywhere.

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 it to read to me. My wakeup browsing headlines, my kindle ebook or names of recent Facebook postings.

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.

Maybe can you do:

- 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?".