Amazon Echo
 

Sort of like Siri for the home.

www.amazon.com/echo

For $99 (the Prime member's price) I might just try it -- Not sure I'd spring for it at the full $199 price

The Bluetooth speaker and the kitchen functions of the demo video are the compelling aspects for me. I do like the idea of not having to use my hands when I'm cooking to play music or add to my to-do list.

Seems like a giant Android Wear device with a speaker and no screen. Might be interested if it tied into some sort of home-automation.

Amazon Echo
 

As mentioned on another forum, this thing is always on always listening in. At least with Siri, you have to hold down a button first. All NSA needs now is to backdoor this thing. Audio monitoring 24/7.

After watching the video, I decided to sign up for it.

This is what happened to me just about everyday when I am just sitting in front of my computer minding my own business:

"Papa, how do you spell "insert word"?"
"Ask Siri"
"Where is my iPad?"
"I don't know go find it."

"Can you turn on the music?"
...walk over to turn it on...

"Can you turn off the music?"
...walk over to turn it off...

"Can you set timer for 45 minutes"
...find my phone and set timer...

"Can you check the weather?"
...find phone and check weather...

I can go on and on... My wife has an iPhone and iPad and both got Siri. My son has an iPad and it has Siri. Somehow I ended up doing all the checking and work. That's it I am quitting.. Alexa is going to take over LOL. ;)

I feel your pain!!!!!

I think I'm going to name mine Bababooey.

Much as the product intrigues me, I'm irritated by the "Request an invitation" golden ticket marketing approach. It implies that only the chosen few will be permitted to pay for the spectacular wunderbox. Will I be one of the lucky ones? Oh please Mr. Bezos, pick me! Pick me!

Will it have a speakerphone function. With the seven microphone feature, it sounds like it could be an impressive speaker phone.

I honestly don't get this device one bit as everyone has phones that can do the underlying functions. I would be slightly more intrigued if it was made by Apple or Google, as I could seem them really integrating it into their own services/devices you already own, but other than that, it is just a bluetooth speaker essentially.

With that said, the one thing I don't find creepy or unsettling is the always listening aspect. If the NSA had a backdoor to your iPhone or Android, something tells me it too could always be listening without your knowledge as well.

Actually... This will be perfect for my very elderly mother who is legally blind. I had tried to acclimate her to an IPad to use the accessibility functions, but it was too steep of a learning curve. Asking someone verbally to look things up for her - now that she is good at.

It is really not that easy to do the same functions on the phone when you are at home. Our iPads are set to not use Siri when they are locked. So to do the same function as the Echo, we have to

1) Find the iPad
2) Click home button
3) Enter PIN
4) Long click home button

If we are watching a movie, my wife always like to ask.."How old is she/he?" I usually have remember to look it up later on IMDB, but now I could just ask right there sitting on the sofa. :p

I am going to rename mine to Hal and change it to male voice. :D

"Hal, play rock music."
"I am afraid I can't do that, Dave."
*starts playing Barry Manilow's songs*

As I think more about it, while there are obviously key differences, I don't see much the Echo does that I can't do with my Android Wear device. I say this because I honestly don't find the Android Wear device that useful around the house. The main difference is the audio feedback from Echo as opposed to the truncated card data shown on the Android Wear (with link to open more data on the phone screen)... this is probably the biggest omission in Android Wear and one that would make it a lot more useful at home (such as to use it as a speakerphone in the kitchen while cooking, even though my phone is docked in the office... or to have texts/emails read to me in whole instead of just the preview).

I haven't traveled with the Android Wear it yet (later this week), but I think around the airport (boarding pass, notifications), walking around a city (turn-by-turn without holding your phone up in front of you like a tourist), and the like is where it'll prove a bit more useful. Right now, around the house, it's a glorified pedometer.

Then again, it could be a smashing success like the "Fire Phone." :)

Signed up for it a few days ago - thinking my parents would get a kick out of it.

I don't know what happened to this product, guess I'm still an invitee. Anyway I recently discovered the handsfree "Hey Siri" thing in iOS 8. Here's how to enable it. I'm sure the speaker on the Amazon Echo would be far superior to my iPad's built-in speaker, but the functionality seems otherwise similar. If the Echo had been available before I discovered this new feature, I would have bought it. Now I'm less interested.

I just received an invitation to order it, which I've done. Estimated delivery is February 23rd.

Ours is due January 20, but not sure I will have time to look at it until early February.

I ordered mine as well. I use the Hey Siri feature all the time at home - mostly to do things simple things such as setting alarms and reminders and getting a view of my calendar while i am in bed but the echo looks compelling because of the music feature that will connect to amazon prime music.

I should have pushed the button faster.

Estimated delivery: April 30, 2015

Maybe if they'd introduced the Fire Phone this way, they would've sold more of them :D

I received an invite, but a ship time of may. I'll pass.

Just got mine - impressed by packaging and instructions. Will set up shortly.

Me too. It said May to July. I am not sure I want to order something that won't get here in half a year....

Hopefully its an under promise, overperform estimate.

Received invite to order email 01/13/15. Ordered one with delivery date:

Wednesday, May 27, 2015 - Thursday, July 2, 2015

I ordered mine about a week ago. I should get it mid Feb.

Amazon must be monitoring my posts ;) . New ETA is 2.4.2015.

I just checked mine a few minutes ago (was actually looking to see if I could pay for the thing with AmEx points instead), and the date is still 2/23.

We'll see . . .

Mine is due sometime in May.

Mine is due in June-July; I hope they will have worked out the problems by then...

I got to use this over the weekend. Seemed pretty awful outside of adding grocery items to a list while in the kitchen.

The music was neat, but it seemed pretty useless overall.

Out for delivery
Delivery estimate: Friday, January 23, 2015 by 8pm :rolleyes:

I am using my Echo as a Bluetooth speaker for my Mac Mini. Sound is awesome! Love the voice control.

I actually just cancelled my order. You can thank me for your moved up delivery date. :D

If it just shipped right away, I probably would have tried it out. As it stands, the delay allowed me to think about it more and realize I don't really have too much use for it.

I thought about the purchase as primarily a bluetooth speaker, with some add ons (the voice operation). I already have two bluetooth speakers that I don't use really all that often. Those two can run on batteries as well, so they are more portable. The voice function could be useful, but this is something I see using a lot at first to try it out and then forgetting it is even there.

Mine arrived this afternoon. So far I'm reasonably pleased, especially with its ability to play music from my Amazon library and to function as a bluetooth speaker. Sound quality is decent for a "casual" music source.

Some deficiencies I discovered fairly quickly, though:

• Its access to information is limited. No flight status information, for example. This is something that Google Now does very nicely.
• No support for "named" timers. For example, I'd like to be able to set a 10 minute timer for eggs, and a 30 minute timer for potatoes. It would be nice if I could say "Alexa, set a 10 minute timer for eggs, and a 30 minute timer for potatoes." At the designated times, the Echo would announce the timer name ("potatoes" or "eggs" in this example) and chime.
• It would also be nice if the timers had an option to count down for the last x seconds, perhaps by fives until 20 seconds remaining then per second to T minus 0.
• Alarms only offer the standard chime. No option to alarm with a different tone or music selection.

EDIT: I had previously stated that Bluetooth audio control, including pause/resume, skip forward/backward, etc. via voice command wasn't supported. That issue was apparently due to the specific app I was using (Doggcatcher, a podcast "podcatcher"). Not an issue for most apps.

On the plus side, It does calculations, unit conversions, provides distance information ("Alexa, how far is it from Portland Maine to Winchester, Virginia?"), looks up facts from Wikipedia, and for anything it doesn't understand, it logs the request to your phone and gives you the option to perform a Bing search (hope they'll provide other options someday).

Definitely worth the $99 price that my Prime membership afforded me. Not sure I would have jumped on it at $199, though.

I like your timer ideas. If you're cooking a meal of any significance having only one timer available on the Echo would be irritating. I have an ancient triple timer on my stovetop and it works fine, but I'm not always 100% positive: did I put the sauce on the second timer or the third?

I'd also like the "shopping list" to be separate for my daily groceries AND my Amazon purchases. Surely they'd love to have some kind of wishlist for Amazon built in...

The future is here ;)

How would you folks say it compares to Siri's recognition rate (which I don't happen to think very highly of...)

So far, quite good. Nearly all fact-based queries, calculations, conversions, music selection and play instructions are understood quickly and on the first attempt. As I mentioned in my post above, though, the Echo doesn't have the same breadth of data access as Siri or Google Now, so the things you can ask for are more limited.

For example, "What's a good place for lunch around here?" returned the following:

• Siri - "I found only one restaurant around here" with a map and link to a local sandwich shop (there are many more places to eat in the same radius, though)
• Google - No verbal response, but a list of web sites that offer restaurant reviews and searches . . . no specific restaurants though
• Echo - "Hmm. I don't understand the question I heard."

The Echo transcribed the question perfectly (based on what I see logged in the companion Android app), but the back-end data store doesn't currently include that sort of location-based data. I'm sure that will change as the feature list is enhanced, though.

Working back through the request log, it appears the Echo's voice recognition is nearly perfect; where it falls down is in its access to relevant data. It will give you a news briefing (pre-recorded from NPR or BBC News), but it won't give you news on a specific topic (Siri only appears to search Twitter, though, while Google will compile a brief list of topical news items along with some general information links on the subject queried).

I think it has tremendous potential to be the information and automation nexus for the home, but it still needs significant work. That doesn't mean I find it useless, though :)

Agreed. Echo could tell me who was playing in the SuperBowl and where it was taking place, but not the time of the game, nor which network was televising the event. I rephrased these questions several times, but the information just wasn't available.