Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville

https://medium.com/@loganhill33/amazon-s-echo-is-the-new-vaudeville-9fd11e80a99#.x1rce5vm4

by steven • 10 years ago

45 30 10 years ago

wwwdonohue• 10 years ago

I thought the subheader was a sarcastic dig. Playing music is virtually the only thing Alexa seems capable of doing, and even then only semi-reliably.

manyxcxi4• 10 years ago

You obviously don't have one, and if you do, you've horribly wasted your money. Even on day one it launched with more use than that.

I can set or check my thermostat, control any light or group of lights in my house, get an Uber to pick me up, have the morning news headlines read to me while I'm making breakfast, check traffic on my way out the door, add notes to my to-do list as they cross my mind, and add things to my shopping list with my face still in the refrigerator.

Those are all things that come out of the box with no custom code. With the additional skills I've personally written I have it tell me releases and showtimes at my nearest theater, I can ask if the garage door is open or closed, and a few other half cocked ideas.

The Alexa skills kit is quite easy to get your head wrapped around and the limit really is your imagination.

gcb0• 10 years ago

pretty much what i could do with a cell phone (had i not disabled voice input), but you lose all that when you leave the house/room?

jgalt2122• 10 years ago

control any light or group of lights in my house

Alexa has nothing to do with that. The hard/expensive part is making all the lights in your house accessible via remote control.

JonRB• 10 years ago

That's not going to get confusing at all! http://www.alexa.com/

eclipxe2• 10 years ago

Good thing Amazon owns both

WA• 10 years ago

"Now you can talk to your website analytics software?" – "No, the other Alexa thing, which nobody has a clue what it is."

harryf• 10 years ago

Funnily enough the articles tag line applies quite well to alexa.com

Amazon’s Alexa is a stupendous novelty act that can play thousands of songs, guess your weight, and conjure a pizza from thin air!

Pretty much applies to how Alexa.com attempts to measure traffic

colincarter41• 10 years ago

Even, I was confused while reading the headline. I was thinking it was about Alexa and Amazon partnership.

puranjay• 10 years ago

Alexa.com is a business service known only to people who work with websites.

Alexa the device is for regular folks

eva19842• 10 years ago

Having Alexa for almost a year now. My daily routine:

Evening -> "Alexa, set the alarm @9:30"

Morning -> "Alexa, stop"

NKCSS• 10 years ago

Uhm, it has no memory?

eva19842• 10 years ago

Don't think so.

rdl• 10 years ago

They added repeating alarms a couple weeks ago. e.g. "Alexa, set alarm for six a m every day"

surrealvortex• 10 years ago

"Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap"

No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's tactic of allowing only those people who already own an Alexa device has backfired, if an otherwise well researched article misrepresents this basic fact.

kondro• 10 years ago

I'm sure Echo is great if you live in the USA.

inopinatus• 10 years ago

I'll echo that gripe. Amazon have hobbled their ecosystem by the bizarre design decision of mandatory configuration by US zip code. This effectively excludes all non-American users, and makes the barriers for overseas developers prohibitively high.

Since I am in Australia, my Echo is good only for parlour tricks and streaming audio: without an accurate time and place, even simple things like checking weather are impossible. Forget about booking a cab, or home automation. So I have not tried to develop for the platform, because I do not develop things I cannot test.

Perhaps Amazon were afraid of diluting their product focus. But failure to think globally means your product cannot be a world leader.

plandis• 10 years ago

It's understandably annoying from a consumer perspective but perhaps there are valid reasons for not being in other markets just yet and Amazon decided to launch early and incrementally roll it out?

texan• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that the author completely looks over Cortana when listing the various voice assistants. Cortana is perhaps the most widespread voice assistant, it being on almost every windows pc.

vr3690• 10 years ago

it being on almost every windows pc

Every PC with Windows 10. I'm not sure how many there are, but it may not be most widespread or most used.

scholia• 10 years ago

Windows 10 is probably on roughly 14%-15% of Windows PCs, which is some way short of "every".

According to Microsoft, more than 270 million devices run Windows 10. However, Cortana voice isn't supported in all countries, and many people have turned "her" off.

Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville

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