Amazon Echo Released | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Echo Released

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117 points_red183 comments

I've had an Echo for a couple months. I bought it for $99 as a Prime customer. Generally, I'm very happy with it, but I don't think I'd be as satisfied at the $180 price point.

Good:

- The hardware is really well designed.

- Being able to listen to NPR affiliates elsewhere in the country is awesome (Seattle's KUOW affiliate is bad, but my hometown stations of MPR and The Current are great).

- The Prime Music and Pandora integration is generally pretty cool, although the Prime Music selection is a bit thin at times.

- Timers and kitchen measurements are helpful.

Bad:

- The iOS app is absolutely horrendous. Imagine the worst web/native hybrid app that you've ever seen, now set your expectations down another order of magnitude. I cannot understand how a company with as many resources as Amazon—especially one that did such an amazing job on the hardware—could create such an utterly horrible mobile companion app.

- The Echo has trouble understanding my girlfriend (a complaint I've heard from a couple other Echo users)

- You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?

- No really, the iOS app is awful. Like, I'll go out of my way to avoid ever having to open it.

What is so bad about the iOS app? It hasn't bothered me but I don't use it very much.

It's basically a web view embedded in a native app shell. The user experience of the website it opens is designed to approximate the iOS user experience, but completely fails to do so.

I think you just described every cordova/phonegap/ionic app out there. Which is not to say it isn't bad :).

I agree it's terrible, but I use it very rarely so it doesn't really impact the product experience that much.

> The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?

Um, you say Siri instead of "iPhone" so I think they're doing exactly the same thing as Apple.

> You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such. Can you imagine Steve Jobs saying: "here's our big feature for iOS 5, it's called Siri, but you'll interact with it by calling it Yoko"?

I think you're looking at this the wrong way.

The product is the iphone, the human-interaction agent is Siri

The product is the echo, the human-interaction agent is Alexa

Isn't that kind of an irrelevant distinction if Echo is mainly designed around that one feature/gateway to features?

Have you used an Echo? The product and the human-interaction agent are clearly intended to be the one and the same.

You don't buy an Echo that comes with Alexa; Alexa is the whole point of the Echo.

You could essentially do the same through Siri - in either event, the separation of the entities still makes sense.

I don't personally understand the need to humanize interactive services and apps, but I guess Siri made that appealing.

Because you're communicating with a device that refers to itself in the first person. Anthropomorphization is inevitable. It's not like this is new, either. 2001 comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure there are plenty of examples that predate HAL.

The different names seemed odd to me at first but it's not that big of a deal. I presume Amazon thought about this.

An slways-on, self contained voice controlled speaker is an entirely different experience than Siri.

You're not wrong, but this might have been intentional. I've heard complaints from people with Xbox Ones where the Xbox will suddenly decide to turn on because the owner was having a conversation with a friend and mentioned the word "Xbox." By calling the product Echo, you can have a conversation about the Echo without triggering the activation word. You're almost never going to say "Alexa" without intending to turn on the Echo.

But I never refer to the product as Echo. I refer to it as Alexa, because no one who comes to my house knows what an Echo is. So, when I refer to it in conversation, I call it "the A-word" (not kidding)

I think this is the key difference between it and the iPhone: Siri is one of the ways that people interact with an iPhone, not the only. In fact, Siri is probably a minority means to use an iPhone. (I know it is not for me.)

But Alexa is the way people will interact with Echo, after setting it up. So it makes less sense to keep the two ideas separate.

"You call it Alexa, not Echo. The box says Echo, but you will never interact with it as such."

Wait, what ?

Never mind the name mismatch - I agree that is odd.

But ... this is quick convenience device for rapid reaction to spoken commands ... and the command is three syllables ?

I understand the need to avoid false positives - waking up and responding to common speech patterns that get used throughout the day that are not directed to the device, but surely you can come up with a two-syllable command that won't generate those.

I have no intention of ever using a device like this in my home, but if I did, 50% more syllables for every interaction would drive me nuts.

It's really not a big deal.

There's one benefit to having both Echo/Alexa. When I have guests over and their fascinated by Echo it's much easier to have a conversation about it using the word "Echo" - otherwise they'd trigger Alexa using the wake word every other sentence..

It's also handy when Alexa is accidentally triggered (like one time when I was watching a youtube video). I whisper to my wife "Don't talk Echo is listening!" :)

Is there any way to change it?

I imagine if your name was Alexa (or even Alex) or had a close friend with that name you could also get a lot of false positives.

You can easily change it to Amazon if you do not want it to be Alexa. However that is your only other option.

The only other current option is "Amazon".

You can change it, but the only other option is to have it respond to "Amazon."

I have this problem with the PS4s wake word being Playstation quite frequently.

It seems to be the norm. "Hey Siri" is three syllables. "OK Google" is four. "Hey Cortana" is also four.

I bet they really can't find a 2-syllable word that doesn't false positive all over the place. At least not with either the quality of speech recognition or the wide range of accents that need to be understood.

"Xbox Select" on the Xbox One as well.

And I personally found "Hey Siri" to be triggering enough false positives that I couldn't leave that feature on.

Yeah, same here. It's closer to other phonemes, whereas "Alexa" sounds like fewer things.

The intent is to keep false accepts down for the trigger phrase.

It did not even occur to me to be so overly concerned about an extra "uh". Surely you're kidding?

Have you tried KPLU? They are the other local NPR and are a bit better. Still have local programming, for instance. They do go to jazz during the day (though some of us think that's not a downside).

> You call it Alexa, not Echo.

I thought the idea was you could call it whatever you want in the official version, but the beta just had it set to Alexa?

No, you have two options "Alexa" or "Amazon". My kids love interacting with "Amazon". She tells some pretty corny jokes.

Dang, I should have bought at the $99 price point when I had my chance.

Yep. At $99 it's a no-brainer and you might consider one for several rooms in the house. At $180 it's a much tougher call.

Could it be that there might be other names coming in the future - so the product is Echo, but variants are "Alexa", and then some others would come later? (My son really like a "Steve" for he loves Minecraft... lol)

> You call it Alexa, not Echo.

You can configure what you call it. It doesn't have to be Alexa.

> The iOS app is absolutely horrendous.

The iOS isn't awesome but it's not horrible. I guess you haven't tried the home automation iOS apps like WeMo yet?

You can call it either Alexa or Amazon.

"my girlfriend"

Could you or someone else chime in with an explanation of how this works? Specifically I see all the promotional material or astroturfing or whatever about how awesome it is for families, and I also see how it links to numerous single individual person services (google calendar, various music services, audible, etc) but I can't figure out how (or if) it handles the 1:n mapping. If I ask it whats on my calendar I really don't want to hear by son's assignment notebook from school, or even something as simple as asking about traffic, my wife and I do not work in the same location, if my wife and I and my son have three separate audible accounts...

As a side issue I have no idea why its so expensive. The hardware looks like my old roku plus a speaker but the cost is that times more than three? I mean on the assumption it would wedge me into the amazon ecosystem, as a bazillion year customer and a prime subscriber, I'd expect it to be free. "Here its free and works with audible now go buy even MORE audible books"

As far as I can tell, it's a single-account device. It's great for families iff your use cases are music, timers, alarms, and weather. At some point I'd love to get around to adding my calendar, but that seems strange for the reason you mention.

You can add another profile, but it seems limited to 2. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

I had an Echo for a month or so, then sold it on eBay after realizing it didn't fit our needs.

- It listened to me just fine, but wouldn't listen to my wife. Our dog does the same thing. I think there might be a connection there.

- The sound quality was good for the size, but doesn't compare to some other small bluetooth speakers I've experienced (like the SoundLink Mini) that make me think, "Whoa, is all that sound coming from that tiny thing?"

- Agreed that the iOS app is awful.

- The biggest miss from my perspective was the lack of integration (at least at launch) with a comprehensive streaming service. We had it in the kitchen, and it was a really nice concept to be able to say, "Alexa, play Hotel California by The Eagles" in the middle of cooking dinner, without having to clean off your hands and touch your phone, but really, Alexa could only play a sample of Hotel California by the Eagles, unless you owned it it in your Prime music library. Deeper integration with Spotify or Rdio or something would have fixed this. Maybe it's already been fixed, but if not, that's a fatal flaw.

- The hardware quality, including the remote, was top notch.

- At $100, it could be very compelling for rooms where your hands are busy. I almost kept it just for the garage, so I could use it while working on the car, or working out, or cleaning up. The kitchen is another good option. But the lack of complete music integration, and the fact that I could resell it on eBay and make money, made me give up on it.

My father picked one up via Prime a couple of months ago, and I have been impressed with its ability to recognize different voices - mine, but also my five year old son's.

Likewise. The voice recognition is the best by far. 100x better than Xbox One (well, it isn't hard to beat Xbox; it's voice recognition is useless), and I felt it's even better than Siri. My wife doesn't speak to it (her?) much, but the few times she tried it didn't have any problems. Will explore more.

The real potential will happen if/when Amazon opens its API. The ability to plug Echo natively to other systems and services (household appliances, websites, trello, x.ai, etc). They just launched integration with IFTTT, which is a first step, but there's so much more that could be done with a true open API.

Yeah, the iOS app is horrendous. Seriously.

Disclaimer: I work for AWS (not Amazon but part of Amazon).

I like the idea that this is backed by a service that has an API that can call out to other APIs. It has an "app store".

I think you can sign up for the SDK already: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/devices/echo

It's one of the only devices in my home I use as often as my cell phone.

I look forward to the day when I can push information back to the echo using apps like tripit:

"ranman your flight is leaving in 2 hours, should I call an uber or give you the train schedule?"

"It's lunch time, want to see what's in the neighborhood you haven't tried recently?"

"You have an incoming skype call from X"

"Welcome home, want me to turn on the news?"

The only downside is that it depends on always on and fast connectivity.

I'm not particularly concerned about the privacy of it all (I do recognize the concerns other people have) but I would be interested in learning more about how the privacy is handled.

The other interesting device in this category is the Jibo: https://www.jibo.com/ but I haven't seen any of the details on the developer side of that yet.

I do love my Echo, it's just.. it's entirely Amazon ecosystem and that really limits its usefulness for me.

As an amazon employee I'm sure you're probably bought into the Amazon ecosystem. Maybe you even have a fire phone? :p

But I'm primarily an Android user. I'm just imagining what a device like the Echo would be if backed by Google Now. It would be ten times more powerful, easily.

My girlfriend's primary complaint was "it can't even recommend me a book" (Because Amazon was.. well.. a book seller!)

So, here's the thing that I like about it... if google now had an API then you could build an app that talked to google now for you. I like the idea that I can host my own echo endpoints at echo.ranman.org and then have my own server make calls out to other stuff.

I don't really use anything amazonian besides a kindle and the echo (although I do really like the fire TV stuff).

I use a ton of other apps/stuff -- and many of those have APIs. If I could call out to those APIs with my voice and then get stuff back it would enable a lot of convenience and intelligence that's hard to do on just a phone (or if more apps supported making API calls via siri, google now, cortana, etc.)

I'm really excited to see what people build with the SDKs and I hope it takes off.

I have access to the SDK but I haven't built anything with it, and I remember having an NDA. So I don't know how much I can say about it's functionality.

I'm excited about it, but it's more cautious optimism because it's kind of limited, but I don't remember if it's too limited to have the kind of stuff another commenter pointed out like "When does McDonald's close?"

And Google Now does have an API.. they're just super protective of it right now. It will definitely be more interesting once it starts to open up ;)

Just curious how early did you sign up for the SDK and how long was it between your request and when you were given access? I requested access probably a month ago and haven't heard anything since.

I signed up fairly early and I got a request in a few weeks.

Thanks. It seems like they have either slowed down sending out SDK invites or the number of developers requesting has increased. I'm probably not the only one who waited to signup for the SDK until I had received my Echo.

It is a bit limited if you compare it directly to something like Google Now (or OK Google?). But I think once more developers get involved we'll see some cool things. For instance, a frequently mentioned feature is "What time does McDonalds close?" which Echo currently can't answer. But perhaps pretty soon we'll have a Yelp app which can do that.

Now goes the other way for me. It's like a little puppy that has read my entire internet history. Now when I do anything google's got 3 redundant reminders that are always a few minutes late. From most recent flight:

- Hey you've got a flight (2 days before)

- Hey you've got a flight (11 hours before)

- Hey you've got a flight (4 hours before, eg 3am, thanks)

- Hey your flight is now leaving 3 minutes later (1 hour before flight)

- Hey your flight has changed gates (initial gate assignment, already at gate)

- Hey your flight has changed gates (actual gate assignment, already at gate)

- Hey your flight is now boarding (on board door closed already)

- Hey your flight leaves in 15 minutes (20 minutes after flight was in air)

oh and:

- Hey amazon shipped you a package (package has arrived and amazon told me about it within 10 minutes)

- Hey that baseball game you wanted to watch later, here's the score!

- Hey you once looked at a SF Giants article... Here's their score and when they play now and for EVER

- Hey

> I'm just imagining what a device like the Echo would be if backed by Google Now. It would be ten times more powerful, easily.

Maybe, but competition is good. Google isn't the only company capable of R&D, and if Amazon turns this into something amazing then you can bet that Google will work to make their stuff even better. This is a Good Thing for all of us, and as an Apple user I hope it inspires them to get into the game.

I like that Echo NEVER ever talks without being talked to. I don't know how you could integrate Google Now without it being pretty annoying.

Not talking about the Google Now notifications. Meant "OK Google"

> "It's lunch time, want to see what's in the neighborhood you haven't tried recently?"

Since you might be more up to date with what echo can do.. could it work as an ad-block for TV (mute, switch channel)? Perhaps using 3rd party API for tagging ads.

It's very possible but unlikely until the next version of the device. Basically you would need an IR transmitter that had a web endpoint and could control your TV/set top box. I have ridiculous hacks where I set an alarm/reminder to say "Xbox turn off" around bed time.

>"Welcome home, want me to turn on the news?"

How do you do this?

(S)he doesn't, it's an example of something ranman is looking forward to.

Oh, whoops! Neat.

It sounds a lot like these 90s videos about the "house of the future". If I want to listen to the news, it's way less of a hassle to pull my phone or touch my watch and press play. Voice interaction is pretty slow and intrusive.

Maybe I have the wrong circle of friends and acquaintances, but I have never ever seen anybody interact with Siri or Google Now by voice other than as a demonstration or a joke in social settings.

I love my Google Now, I love even more that it does not shout things at me when I am in the bus.

I have the Moto360. I use it a LOT via voice, and especially so while driving. The voice recognition tends to work at better than expected rates.

In crowded settings, or sitting still, I will almost always just grab my phone before having to worry about whether or not the environment is too loud, which is (I suspect) why you probably see so few people using it.

Do you use it to text when you're surrounded by other people? The biggest drawback for me is not how noisy the environment is, it's that I literally tell other people around all that I'm doing with my phone. And as a fellow bus rider, for instance, that would annoy me to hear your text to your wife. But I found out that nobody actually does that.

As a general rule, no, unless I'm doing so to make a point / be heard. For example, I'll often verbally take a note of book recommendations that people give me, both to preserve the note for myself (as book recommendations are serious business) and to affirm to them that I am taking their recommendation seriously without having to explain that I am taking their recommendation seriously.

Beyond that, I agree that verbal commands on a bus would be inconsiderate both to the other passengers as well as the recipient of the message, whose privacy I just (slightly) violated. That said, if I'm sitting on a bus, I don't really have a good excuse for not typing the message myself, and typing is still slightly preferred except for when my hands are occupied or my phone is not conveniently accessible.

I was also wondering how useful Echo would be since I rarely use Google Now. As an Echo user, I can tell you it's vastly different. Echo is always there... always ready and it's surprisingly very fast. The array of microphones works great and Echo hears me from very far away (in other rooms out of line of sight, down hallways, etc). Google's voice recognition is probably still better and I do have to repeat commands sometimes - but I can be anywhere in the apartment and Echo works well.

When I'm getting ready in the morning, I will rarely check the weather on my phone because first, I need to find my phone (I seem to put it in a different place every morning) and then I need to click multiple times to see the information I want. With Echo, I can say "Alexa, will it rain today?" or "Alexa, what's the temperature?" and get an answer instantly while I'm doing other tasks. It might be less useful for smart watch users that wear them 24/7 (I don't own one).

>it's surprisingly very fast

This is very true. With Google, you have to say "Ok, Google", wait for it to go "bleep" and start listening, and only then ask.

With Echo, you just say "Alexa, what time is it" in a single second, and you get your reply.

Voice interaction works great in situations where you either don't want to, shouldn't, or can't interact via touch. These situations also tend to be the ones where you don't want the distraction of any computer device (eg: driving, sports, etc.).

My biggest bias here is that I don't drive. Talking loudly to your phone feels way more intrusive in a packed train than in the intimacy of your car, even when you're stuck in traffic.

The opposite: pulling out a phone to listen to the radio or set a timer is more cumbersome.

I've had one for about six months and the only thing I use it for is as a Bluetooth speaker and as a five minute coffee timer. In fact, when I have friends over I ask them to try to get it to do anything because it's always hilariously bad.

Part of the problem is that it just doesn't do much. It can't seem to answer 9 out of 10 questions I ask it. It's very unstable and I get a flashing ring on top indicating that it needs a forceful reboot about twice a week. It doesn't seem to connect to anything in the outside world other than wikipedia. They did recently add calendar support but it can't read both my home and work calendar at the same time so it's not especially useful. It can't talk to my email, it can't send me emails, it can't look up movie times, it can't look up traffic, it can't price flights, it can't tell me when a book will be released. It has a built-in shopping list and todo list but they are only accessible from its (awful!) iOS app and don't do anything else. It can tell me the population of Florence, Italy. I learned from this thread today that it can do unit conversions. It can reply to some movie memes like "show me the money".

Part of the problem is discoverability. I don't know what it can do and in true hilariously bad form "what kind of cool stuff can you do?" just makes it reply "I don't understand the question"

So maybe you can answer here: what does it do? What cool things am I not doing with it that I should be doing? What am I missing out on? Is "show me the money" the best I can hope for?

I've got Philips Hue lighting in my house, so I use it frequently for that: "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights". It's particularly helpful because I have the voice remote in the bedroom, so I can do an "Alexa, turn off all the lights" before crashing and know that things are off. Home automation for me is the holy grail - If I could link Echo to something like Vera/MiCasaVerde or other full-home-control system (shouldn't be difficult, they have decent web APIs), the whole "Alexa, Time to watch Silicon Valley"-dim-the-lights-turn-on-the-tv-start-playing-my-show thing becomes a pretty easy reality.

I use the grocery function often and have IFTT linked to add stuff to ToDoist (agreed, the mobile app is horrible - who knew Amazon would make such a miserable shopping list app).

Lastly, living in the PNW, I do get a lot of mileage out of "Will it rain tomorrow?"

Granted, nothing I couldn't do with an iPhone/Android, but Echo's cheaper than a dedicated mobile device.

Jibo looks very cool, like an animated version of Echo, but it's a bit pricey at $749. They have an developer+SDK version for the same price which is open to anyone with the money to buy it. There are some initial forums for Jibo over at Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/jibo) but since the robot hasn't been officially released yet, they're kinda sparse on details.

If I had told George Orwell that people would pay for the right to have an always on microphone in their house, he would have said, "That's to far fetched even for me. I'll stick with the government forced TV in the living room."

Smart tv's have already beaten this one to the punch by a few years now.

Are TV manufacturers continuing down this path of lunacy? I thought once they got caught they'd turn the damned thing off.

They were planning to evaluate the reaction after they got caught and then determine whether to continue. Seems people forgot about the whole thing after a few months and I doubt it caused more than a blip in lost sales, so they're probably still doing it.

So if I buy a new TV the first thing I do is turn off WiFi connectivity. I pay for a bunch of features that nobody in their right mind would use if they thought through the consequences.

So don't give them your money! Yes, sometimes fighting against crap like this requires sacrifice. Right now, the people that are trying to normalize surveillance are betting that most people are too addicted to TV and won't go without.

This is one of the reasons some of us try to make a big deal about fighting "insignificant" things (the DRM module in firefox (EME) is a recent example). They aren't a huge issue today, but when left alone, the sacrifice required tends to grow.

Does anyone actually use the "smart" features on their smart TV?

I know of zero people who do this... and I've asked.

I used the $200 off feature when I purchased an identical panel without a half-finished roku knockoff builtin.

You now know one. We do not own an Xbox/PlayStation-gaming system, or Roku/Apple TV-like streaming box in our living room. New LG TV came with "smart" features, and we use them (Netflix really) daily.

I use the Netflix and Plex apps on my Vizio and they work well enough.

My brother does - or at least, I assume you're talking about the different apps that come installed on TVs these days. For example my brother uses it to watch Netflix, BBC iPlayer and another VoD service that I don't remember the name of. He also uses an Apple TV, but most of the time he just uses the television's interface.

Clearly you and your friends aren't the target market for smart TVs.

I know several people who actually use their TV's Netflix app, and occasionally Youtube or Pandora or something for music, but they're in the minority, and here's why.

Most people already own a TV, and have an HTPC/Xbox/Roku/Chromecast/whatever device that works for them. All that happens is the old device gets plugged into the new TV, and they're good.

Conversely, most of the people I know who use their smart TV's Netflix app have zero dedicated devices to play Netflix on their TV. The ones with Macbooks don't even own the whatever adapter to plug their laptop in using an HDMI cable I'd give them.

They also exclusively use Netflix and Youtube for online video, so the question of codecs on a downloaded mkv file never comes up.

Uhh yes? Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, and the YouTube app (it is Chromecast compatible).

We use it extensively. We've talked about cancelling cable but my wife watches the live sports too much.

PS - We'd also use a HBO Go app if they had one. Currently it is Amazon Fire and game console exclusive as far as I know.

my panasonic smart tv has a netflix app, but it's so clunky and unbearably slow that it's faster and easier to boot up a playstation and browse netflix on that.

"Smart tv's have already beaten this one to the punch by a few years now."

Yes, but no technologically clueful or savvy person is buying or using a "smart tv". Those are "grandma devices" that get sold to the demographic still shopping at Best Buy (whatever that is).

The HN crowd thoughtfully buys computer monitors that don't connect to networks. Like an NEC commercial (airport) display.

Right ?

As a very technologically savvy person, most TVs I have bought recently are "smart" TVs, just because that functionality happened to be included. I don't use it, but I imagine it's probably listening anyway.

This is the case for most non-technical people as well.

If I have a choice of a "smart" TV and a dumb one with the same panel, I pick the dumb one (it's also cheaper, but I'd probably pay extra). My "smart" TV in the living room would show ads on power-up until someone told me how to deactivate them. It still nags me to update its useless apps when I accidentally press the "internet" button on the remote.

I wasn't aware that airport displays like that are available to the public. Fascinating!

It's on "always on" to the extent it's listening for a trigger word.

Now you can say that "hey they could be secreting recording you anyway."

Sure, but so could any internet connected device with a microphone or speakers.

Plus non-internet connected cellphones. We know full well that the baseband within cellphones can be updated to turn a cellphone into a passive listening device.

This is pre-smartphone tech'.

As we recently saw with this feature being forced into Chromium, implementations change, and auto-updates happen.

Even if the current implementation acts as you describe, do you trust that Amazon won't change4 that behaviour in the future? How about when Amazon is handed a national security letter? Do you trust Amazon to pull a LavaBit to avoid having to change the firmware? Do you trust that Amazon actually got the security right and nobody will ever crack the device and change its behavior?

Also, claiming that other devices are also surveillance tools does not excuse this device.

Yes. Yes, I do. Because I am the paying customer, not the product being sold.

Wrong. You and your habits/data are the product for Amazon to sell/use. The box isn't the product.

It is an indisputable fact that I paid for my Echo, and that my information as a result of that purchase is used by Amazon, where they may profit from me when I purchase more products. I do not believe that Amazon grossly misuses my data; what reason do I have not to trust them? My value to them is derived from my purchasing decisions.

It is an indisputable fact that I didn't pay for Chrome, and Google doesn't care at all about what I buy because they're not selling me anything. My value to them is derived from the data I provide, in many cases, unwillingly.

So, respectfully, I'm not "Wrong", and it's presumptuous to say so.

In order to trust Amazon, you would also have to fully trust the government(s) that have the authority to force Amazon to do things.

Not really, you just have to trust that they won't make Amazon do the things you don't want Amazon to do. You don't need to have "full trust" in anybody, really. You just have to have enough trust regarding what you're concerned about. Trusting that a government will spend its education money on education, for example, has no bearing on whether or not they'd force Amazon to record you 24/7.

I don't think that works both ways.

It still communicates through my network. My router/firewall/etc sitting in between my network and the Verizon ONT can do packet captures on all traffic going through it.

I can tell exactly when when the Echo is and isn't listening

If you regard your privacy that highly that the very small change that the NSA will bug your Amazon Echo, then sure, don't buy it.

But the NSA/FBI/Virgina Police can:

get my emails from google

get my emails from my work

get my emails off my phone

read my texts, pix, and other cell phone information

listen to my phone calls

hack my shittily exposed to teh internet home server

get my facebook information

tap my ISP

search my house when I'm not there

bug my house

If they can force Amazon to record me against my will, they can force apple to. Or leveno to record on my laptop. Or the Xbox Kinect on my TV. If I were plotting to join ISIS, yea probably a bad move. Otherwise it's a very minor threat.

Is there a reason you trust this device less than the computer with a microphone that you carry around in your pocket all day?

Not the GP: One of these advertises 'always listening'. The other one doesn't.

One is an established device to actually talk to (usually) one other person, of your choice. The other one records you to send the information ~elsewhere~.

One is - in theory, let's leave the three letter stuff out - protected by quite a lot of battle-tested laws. The other one is so much harder to judge.

Do you trust the advertising/documentation/claims?

If so, Echo advertises that it is listening for its wake word and doesn't transmit the audio until that is used. It sends the information to a service of your choice.

If not, why would you trust that the other device's microphone doesn't activate and send your audio remotely?

What laws protect you from your phone/tablet that don't apply to the Echo?

If I'd be a trusting person, I probably wouldn't have this exchange with you. I don't have social network accounts (except for a ~mostly~ readonly Twitter thing), I don't use Google Now etc.

Now, I admit that this just shows that I'm not part of the target market - just like the thread's author I assume. I don't claim that people are stupid if they buy into Echo, I just don't see why on Earth you would want to.

"why would you trust that the other device's microphone doesn't activate and send your audio remotely?"

As explained above: All voice activated features have an off button and I try to keep an eye on things/removing services/disable whatever I can. The distinction here is that one device works perfectly fine if you can convince yourself that it doesn't listen to you. The other one doesn't.

"What laws protect you from your phone/tablet that don't apply to the Echo?"

IANAL - but tapping your phone is something that the law is rather specific about and it is usually well protected. You can argue that the use of the phone's microphone outside of a call would be really not 'phone' related, but I'd hope (erm.. maybe I do have more trust than I'm aware of myself here?) that a court would find the invasion worse. Again: One is a device that is meant for private communication under your control. The other one is a microphone in your living room that is sold to stream your audio (yes, I understand the wake word concept) to random corporations.

And in the end it's a matter of limiting exposure. I _do_ think that the phone can be abused. It's just not practical to avoid one in my daily life. I take precautions and accept the risk. Without bashing Echo fans, I personally just wouldn't see the benefit and therefor cannot accept the risks.

Bottom line: Having a phone with a microphone and then buying another microphone for the living room isn't a case of 'Ah, all is lost anyway' for me. I don't think the comparison makes sense/leads anywhere.

I think the point is: why do you trust the "off" button for the features on your other devices but not trust the assurances of the Echo about what it is doing? The other devices could just as well lie about whether they are off.

I'm certainly not a lawyer, and I'm not sure which laws you're referring to, but I know that some laws relate to one's expectation of privacy which would certainly apply to an Echo in your bedroom just as well as your phone.

It's perfectly reasonable not to want an Echo because you don't value its features.

My point is that we may get the emotional 'creepy' factor from thinking about the Echo listening, but that rationally the risks and trust involved are not greater than those with, for example, a smartphone.

We agree that smart phones could spy on you.

We don't seem to agree about the comparison in general.

A smart phone

- offers a button to disable voice activated features

- remains useful without voice activation

- is arguably (job?) not optional

- is no reason to dismiss feeling uneasy about 100% unrelated, additional 3rd party controlled microphones

Yes, a smart phone can probably pull off any attack on my privacy that I can come up with for the Echo. But that's not relevant for my feelings about the Echo IMHO. I can dislike Android AND iOS. I can worry about smart phones AND express similar things about the Echo.

Both Android and iOS have always-listening modes: OK Google and Hey Siri.

I have no clue about iOS.

I've never seen 'OK Google' work (because everything Google Now, Google (Games|Music|Books), G+ etc. is terminated and/or disabled and/or removed). Don't claim that this is something you cannot (try to, if we're paranoid) avoid, some mandatory, intrinsic feature of the phone.

And, once again, how do you know you disabling all that actually turned listening off. It could easily still be listening and just not reacting to OK Google because that component was disabled. You have absolutely no guarantee that what you did works, and that your device is not spying on you, but you somehow have a massive problem with the Echo (which also has a "turn off microphone" button) spying on you.

Read the sibling threads.

I agree that I have no guarantee. That is not related. I don't have a massive problem with the Echo - I plain don't get the risk/reward situation and it's not for me.

The only problem I do have is people jumping from 'having a smart phone' to 'cannot seriously be worried about random other gadgets with microphones'. There's no connection. That logic is flawed.

A lot of Moto devices actually are "always listening" -- they have a co-processor that just listens for the "OK, Google" hotword.

None of those points are very compelling. Fact is, any pc or cell phone could be rigged to eavesdrop and it would behoove the providers to implement and prove that it's not possible.

Dunno, paying for objects that respond when you call their name (and, like the Echo, make a lot of sound, and are mostly useless) is a pretty longstanding practice. The old type is more emotionally fulfilling, but higher maintenance.

But the TVs in 1984 did have microphones, didn't they? Or at least cameras.

I'm pretty sure the parent was commenting on the "will pay for it" vs "government-forced"

It's pretty depressing! It's also the case that so many photos are taking place in urban areas that if you are Google/Apple/Facebook, you can almost certainly face-recognition someone's path through all the photos people take of the areas.

it's stupendous.

I do think Amazon should implement and explain why it could never be used to eavesdrop.

You have a microphone, camera, GPS tracker and wireless transmitter on you at any given moment how much different is this really?

A cautionary tale: Echo starts recording when it hears the "wake" word ('Alexa' or 'Amazon'), but it can mistake other words or parts of speech for a wake word (for example, consider how close the phrase "he likes her" is to "Alexa"). Browsing through the history I have found snippets of conversations that Echo had no business listening to, and which the recorded subjects certainly did not wish to send to Amazon.

I've had Echo ever since it was first released for Prime members. I live in a small studio apartment. Not once has it ever accidentally turned on. Not from me, guests, or the tv.

I've had maybe 3-4 times in the same period, but they were understandable. Like "a mess of" triggered it once. We just laugh and move on. I do think the "always listening" argument has some merit, because it seems to me it must keep a buffer of sound to recognize so that it always catches the "A" part of Alexa. But that's not "always listening to everything", versus "always listening for a very specific initial trigger sound".

Do you have complete tcpdump logs to prove this, or are you assuming it works that way Amazon said so?

What about new versions of the firmware?

You can go to http://echo.amazon.com/ and see the entire history of recordings with the option to delete any.

Why is this hard to understand? The map is not the territory! Any data you didn't record yourself may not be complete.

If you controlled the firmware of a device that surreptitiously records more than it should be recording, would you show those "extra" recordings to the mark nicely chronologically sorted with the legitimate recordings?

If you were a criminal (or government agency) attacking these devices with bad firmware or buffer overrun, would you have even the slightest care about making sure echo.amazon.com is updated to show your eavesdropping?

// only five karmas and a username that is a googlewhack (!) bringing up exactly 5 posts and nothing else smells a bit like JTRIG

...I guess i just misunderstood the nature of your question. Yeah there's no way to tell if the history is everything they send or just the commands it heard. But at least it's something. Guess you're looking for something more along the lines of this type stuff

https://www.piettes.com/hacking-alexa-the-new-amazon-echo/

http://echo.amazon.com/js/eb25f-app.min.js

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_l...

But who knows. they could still be hiding stuff. time will tell

// TIL about JTRIG. neat! HN wouldn't let me use TravCav. Search that if you're curious.

I'd heard that users can see a complete history of all commands "heard" by Alexa. I was also told that you can "delete" entries from this history (similar to cleaning your browser history). Is that true, and is that the history you're referring to?

Although it doesn't undo the creepyness of an always-on microphone picking up your conversations, it's an interesting way for Amazon to mitigate that.

Yes, you can list (and listen to) your Echo voice command history, and delete them. Frustratingly, there is no bulk delete that I have found - you have to go through them individually.

There was a thread on reddit a while ago about companies that take these logs and parse through them sudo anonymously as well.

http://www.dailydot.com/technology/siri-google-now-cortana-c...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everythi...

I would like to know the ways in which people who already have an Echo use it. I have had one for months now and all I use it for is listening to music while I prepare dinner. Lately, the music has begun to stutter and that irritates me so much that I say "Alexa goodbye" and pull the plug out of the wall.

Alexa is my primary alarm now. It was also common for a time to ask it what the time was or what the weather was when preparing in the morning (our bedroom is our living room).

I use it daily to check the weather forecast, manage my shopping and todo list, and set timers (mainly when cooking) while I'm just walking around my apartment. I also bought the Philips Hue Lux bulbs for the cool factor ("Alexa, turn off all the lights") - but the jury's still out on them. If I had to actually use their Philips Hue android app to turn the lights on and off I would flip out. Echo actually makes them usable.

Once they open up the SDK, there's lots of things I'd love to add which will make my life easier.

It was a great buy at $99. I would have even liked to buy an additional one for my bedroom. At $179 it's a tougher sell - I would have to think twice about it. I also noticed they're selling the remote control separately for an extra $30.

(Disclosure: I work on competing NLP)

I ended up putting mine in the bedroom. The only commands that I've found weekly+ uses for are:

- Turn the lights on/off

- What time is it

And that's pretty much it. Only the latter works reliably.

I would have definitely have used the home automation more, but the Amazon recommended WeMo switch that works perfectly from the WeMo app only works half the time from Echo.

It's a fun toy though. Guests always get a kick out of "Alexa, tell me a joke" and "Alexa, play some party music", and I still enjoy the occasional futuristic feeling when I e.g. listen to something interesting on NPR in my car and have Echo take over when I get home.

However, as much as I enjoy NLP and early adoption, I really struggle to find practical, non-gimmick uses for it.

It's my cooking timer now. Shouting out "Alexa, set a timer for 9 minutes" when putting chicken on the grill is far simpler than walking all the way to the kitchen and using a food timer.

I don't have a cell phone or a stereo, so the Echo is really the perfect device for me. I use it for weather, timers, news, fact look-up, math, music, etc.

I really wish it supported something like json, allowing me to get an audio of anything on the web.

I use mine regularly for listening to music while making dinner and we all use it to add stuff to the family grocery list.

I like it for $99, but not for double that.

I have been using one for a few months. It's still a novelty at this point, but it's a neat device. The voice recognition is great and it works from very far away. I can change songs or adjust volume from 20 feet away with no problems. If nothing else, it works very well as a music player and Bluetooth headset.

The instant answers, unit conversions, etc. are convenient in the kitchen, although they could improve on this front. Alexa doesn't always understand the question and seems to screw up sports scores and schedules pretty frequently. It seems about as good as Siri but not as good as Cortana. I have never used Google Now so I can't compare to that.

Amazon pushes out frequent updates and integrations with third parties - Audible, Pandora, IFTTT and some home automation systems just to name a few. They definitely seem committed to Alexa.

Overall, I like Alexa. I wouldn't say it has changed my life or anything and I'm not sure how much I would miss it if I didn't have it, but I'm glad I do if you know what I mean. It is definitely still an early adopter device. It will be exciting to see where it goes as they add more features. I already feel like I'm in a sci-fi movie from as recent as the late 90's where I talk to the house computer. Neat stuff.

I can't wait for the times when i would ask my wife "where are my sneakers?" and in 10 minutes amazon would send me email for buying brand new sneakers with drone delivery in 5 minutes.

I like my echo a lot.

I mostly use it to ask it the weather forecast and control my Hue lights (Alexa, turn on the living room lights, dim the office lights to 50% percent, etc).

Rather unexpected, I find I like to ask it to tell me jokes too. it has a rather large library of particularly terrible jokes that I like :)

The shopping list feature is nice when trying to keep things paperless (or at least, I never find my notes). It's now possible to have IFTTT email you the list when you ask what's on your list.

As a bluetooth speaker, I don't find myself using it a whole lot, but has a wide range of options from TuneIn to IHeartRadio and there is a lot on Amazon streaming too.

I'm looking forward to seeing them add new features and they come out with new features about every single month.

It's not the most neccessary thing by any means, but it is a nice step towards Jetson-land and it's fun to have around.

It also learns voices better over time and has a nice "training" app in the phone app I'd suggest using 3-4 times. Neat stuff.

Oh - Alexa support is super awesome, most questions get answered by real humans super fast, and then they implement some of those things!

My kids love the jokes too.

And I've not had to answer a single "Dad, how do spell..." question since we received it.

How we use ours:

* "Alexa, what's the weather look like?" (every day)

* "Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes"

* "Alexa, what time is it?" (we don't have any clocks in our living room.)

* "Alexa, play some 80's music." (this works great if you just want some music playing)

Also, it's a pretty good Bluetooth speaker.

Yes, you can do most of this stuff on an iPhone with Siri, but this kind of button-less voice control is just better.

>you can do most of this stuff on an iPhone with Siri, but this kind of button-less voice control is just better

Have you tried the newer Android phones with the same kind of button-less voice control?

No, I haven't. How do they work if you can't look at the screen? Siri tends to be bad about that. Like "how's the weather" gets a response of "Here's the forecast:" and shows it on the screen.

One of the things with Echo is that it doesn't have a screen, so everything has voice responses.

If Google understands the content it's presenting, like weather, it will read it out loud to you. If a wikipedia article is the first result, it will read the entire first paragraph out loud.

google now will try it's best to answer questions out loud if they were asked that way. Your weather example works, but in general it's inconsistent enough that i can't assume it will give me an audible answer, and I usually limit myself to speaking only questions or commands that i know to work.

> google now will try it's best to answer questions out loud if they were asked that way.

And its a fairly amazing technical achievement, but its still got a long way to go -- if you ask when a business opens, it will show you the hours but not tell you the time it opens, even though Google has enough semantic understanding of the open/close times to tell you on the results page with the hours that it is "closing soon" or "closed now" if that is the case.

I have the Moto X 2014 running Andrdoid 5.0, and it does not compare. The X rarely understands anything I say, even after training multiple times. It's also extremely slow to respond when it does understand. The X takes around 15 seconds to tell me the weather, while the Echo has it right away.

I have two at my house and absolutely love them for the simplest tasks: weather, time, timer & shopping list. It's other features are fun, but I haven't found more useful than grabbing my smartphone.

For me, it's a more useful Siri.

Great - an always-on microphone in my home that sends all of my conversations and interactions directly to Amazon for analysis

Not exactly. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...

Let's be fair, the product is designed to specifically not do that:

"Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the Alexa Voice Service to recognize and respond to your request."

yeah, kind of like your cellphone.

What cell phone?

Of course, given that a lot of the HN crowd currently derives their income from surveillance and/or walled-garden based business models ("analytics", "big data", "software as a service", etc), I expect to be down-voted for suggesting that it is a bad idea to trade your future for a few shiny (and sometimes useful) toys.

I hope everybody that uses Amazon's microphone - or, as you say, a cell phone - realize that you're creating the surveillance state. Right now there is a large effort to normalize surveillance socially, and instead of fighting for you right to privacy, we have a threat full of people talking about how wonderful the bait tastes.

We need AGPL algorithms and training datasets for voice recognition, plus user-programmable open-source firmware for on-device wake word recognition.

If we can end the false privacy-convenience tradeoff, then the technology can be applied for goals defined by users rather than select business interests.

Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a mature proprietary product that runs locally on Windows. It has an SDK for custom integration, http://www.nuance.com/for-developers/dragon/client-sdk/index...

Good! I signed up for the beta on a whim and got one just in time for Christmas, so that was a family present to all of us. At first, we spent a lot of time yelling random orders and questions at it, and that was fun. But after a while, it just faded into the background of our living room and became something that Just Works, like the TV and DVR. How much time do you spend consciously thinking about your TV versus taking it for granted? That's how Alexa is for us now.

Our most used apps:

- Alexa, set a timer for 10 minutes. (Our new standard kitchen timer)

- Alexa, play [...]. (Lots of music in Amazon Prime.)

- Alexa, turn the lights on. (Interfaces with the Hue lighting system to brighten the living room.)

I could live without it, but I could survive without a lot of the tech that makes everyday life a little easier. I'm glad I don't have to, though.

I was one of the first people to get an Echo when they were offered to prime members at $99 in November 2014. It has quickly become a great device for our family.

Some of our thoughts:

* The integration with third party services has put it into a new realm of usefulness.

* I am still disappointed I cannot tell it to read me a book from anything but Audible. I would love to say, "Read Hamlet from Guttenberg."

* The connection between Echo and Prime Music is sensational. If you like genres of music over specific artists, it really shines.

* If you have kids, the Echo is a blast for them to interact with. Endless questions from your kids is great to hear.

* It would be awesome if they opened it up more. I could see it being a game master for family games of trivia or spelling contests.

* I'd say we use the Echo for 3-4 hours a day with a majority of the time used to stream music. "Amazon, play Kidz Bop 28" is a common refrain.

* When playing scrabble we use it as a timer.

* We've never used it to order anything from Amazon.

* We do use it to compile shopping lists. I was surprised how quickly this became an essential part of our household. So easy to say, "Amazon, add olive oil to shopping list."

* You can choose between Alexa and Amazon as they wake word. We use Amazon since it is easier for the kids to register with the Echo.

* You cannot change the wake word from those two.

* We use the Android app for non voice control and it has gotten much better recently.

* The news function could use a ton of work. I don't want to hear things I am not interested in from NPR.

* It listens to everything. If you happen to mention Amazon in conversation it'll pick it up, even if you are 2 rooms away.

* At $99 it is a device I'd recommend to almost any family. At $179 I couldn't justify buying one.

Anyway, they have a winner for families if the price point was lower. I am very glad we got ours for $99.

This. We use it in our family mostly as a jukebox with occasional Siri-like fun (I'm now in the habit of asking for news updates from NPR every morning).

As Jack Dorsey said, Echo is the future.

I got one of these for work with my office decorating budget because I thought it would be cool to hack on it. Maybe even set it up to do silly dev-related tasks like "Alexa, how many users are active right now?" and "Alexa, comment 'looks good' on Janet's pull request."

What I found, though, was that it was a divisive product. 50% of the office thought it was neat, 40% didn't care, and 10% hated it with a surprising passion. Privacy concerns were brought up, but the biggest complaint was just that it was "creepy."

We ended up unplugging it and leaving it in a corner because it wasn't worth making people uncomfortable for a largely useless toy.

The first review about a wife buy Echo for her husband with Parkinson's warms my heart. Its so inspiring to see how technology has such a great impact on people's lives! Definitely would recommend reading as a pick-me-up for the day.

An interesting situation would be if one person got the device knowing their room mate was privacy conscious.

The other person has now lost their reasonable expectation of privacy in their own home and might not even know it.

How would they not know it? The device interaction is through voice/sound.

You do not have privacy from your roommate. They could easily set up a bug just like they could set up Echo.

18.543 reviews in 5 days? (19th-23th June) That's a lot.

The customer reviews section was previously hidden during the closed beta test, though the review section was accessible with the right URL and just a few weeks ago there were only 4 mixed reviews.

I wonder how many amazon customers got a free sample as one wrote: "SO happy we got to sample one of these playtoys, first! What a disappointment!"

Amazon sent me an email asking me if I wanted to review it, so I did. They probably asked every single person who bought one of the pre-release Echo devices.

Amazon blasted out an email to early users a few days ago soliciting reviews so that could explain it. I have had Echo for 6 months and I imagine many of the other reviewers have as well. I got a 50% discount for being a Prime member. I'm not aware of any free samples simply for being a Prime member and good customer. My Amazon account is over 15 years old with an absolutely massive purchase history across nearly every product category and I have been a Prime member since the beginning. I'd like to think I would have been in line for a free sample if that was a thing.

Thanks for the info, that explains it.

> My Amazon account is over 15 years old (...)

As a long term Amazon customer too I doubt Amazon cares. They nag me with their Prime subscription opt-in dialog every time like I am a new first time user. Though I couldn't care less about a subscription model - I use Amazon as a online storefront to buy physical and digital goods on demand.

I really enjoy my 99 dollar Echo. I am also not sure I would have bought it at the higher price. I have had it since last November and still use it daily. I love that they keep slowly adding functionality to expand its uses without overwhelming me. After using it so much at home I often miss it at work. I may have to get one for work at my next Prime renewal date.

So how do I get one of these in the UK? :)

product will not work well if you have an Alexa in your family

The Echo is awesome; my girlfriend and I have had it for the last few months and LOVE being able to just play music by telling it to play. It's also an AMAZING bluetooth speaker; seriously, it's so fucking loud and on point. It's worth every penny.

Mostly useless. The AI is really bad. I get the weather and maybe a few music stations from asking. Otherwise, a lot of promise wasted and not convinced it will get anywhere exciting anytime soon. Asking "Alexa" not "Echo" is very silly.

Just out of curiosity, if I want to change the track, Do I need to shout hard the wake word when a song is already playing at full volume?

My first test if I get the device is to change the wake word to "baby" and play Justin Bieber's number.

At full volume, probably. At a normal volume, it's pretty good at picking up the wake word (which by the way can just be "Alexa" or "Amazon") at just a slightly raised voice. It then lowers the volume to hear what else you're saying.

You don't have to shout. With its multiple microphones Alexa is pretty good at hearing you over the music. There is also a remote with a built in mic in case you want to control it from a ways off or there is a ton of background noise.

Sadly you cannot change the wake word. 'Alexa' or 'Amazon' are the two available wake words.

Has anyone analyzed the outgoing connections yet? What TLS cipher suites are being used?

I find their home page design aesthetic for these product announcements very unusual. They make it look like an email, leaving large amounts of whitespace on the page. I wonder how well this converts to purchases for them.

I feel like I need to get with the times. I have an aversion to talking to computers. Though when I try using it once in a while to dictate a text, I'm always surprised and amazed at how well it works.

Imagine what happens when a computer hears everything you say.

And tells you what it thinks you want.

Sorta like: http://theinternetthinks.com/

Sincere Question: Can it do anything my 'always on' Google Now can't? (At least there was nothing in the two promo videos they show on their webpage)

Turn lights/switches/home-automation stuff on/off. Read stuff from Audible. One command music streaming. (Google Now will bring up a link for you to click) Shopping. (Reorders prime items from Amazon)

Coming Soon: Integrates natively with all sorts of apps - (There's an SDK in the works)

Wouldn't it need you to buy compatible devices for the home automation to work (If yes, the phone would do that as well - there are 'app' controlled lights/other fixtures).

And Google Now does do one command music streaming (I do that everyday - "Ok Google, Play Music" - and it starts playing). Audible and Reordering past Amazon orders - Some people may find value in that. I don't listen to audio books or reorder stuff in general from them.

So was it not released before?

It still amazes me that people actually pay money for the opportunity to have one of these things listening to what goes on in their home 24/7.

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