I would love to have something similar as open source software. How can I trust this device if I can't examine the code used for hotword recognition?
Also, it would be great to be able to put the software on different hardware - something with digital audio output for example. The concept of Alexa is amazing, but distributing it as properitary software limits its potential.
They do have something called Alexa Voice Services (AVS), which provides the underlying technology. You could take advantage of that and know that you are only sending along data when you want to.
I'm not entirely clear on the difference between the regular Echo and the Echo Dot. It appears you have to have an original Echo in order to purchase a Dot. Is this simply an extension that proxies all of the requests back to the original Echo?
It's the Echo using your own speaker (it has a tiny one still). The "ordering through your existing FireTV/Echo" is just a stupid marketing ploy. As far as we know right not it does not talk to other Echo's on your network (no proxying/grid/mesh/etc).
Ah, I didn't notice that it hooks up to existing speakers. I'm curious how many people will use that however. My anecdotal experience is that most of the people that actually own an Echo are fairly tech illiterate and benefit from it being an self contained package, but that may change if the Echo API is extended.
You could put a Dot in your car. It's USB powered and you can plug it into your stereo with an AUX cable or some such. You would just need to tether your phone's wifi or have some other in-car wifi solution.
Lots of issues with hacking something together like that, though -- I really want something which ties into vehicle sensors, the can handle calls/mute/etc., mixing nav + voice + music dynamically, etc.
At that point it's basically worth building a car computer. Possibly using Alexa for the voice, but if I'm doing a car computer, I think a hack to work with Cortana or Google or Siri might be easier.
It's amazing no one has done a good job of this yet -- it's been within feasible for 10y, and commercially viable for 5y for big companies, or 2-3y for startups just using existing hw. I think it's because not enough good product/dev/etc. people have 1h+ car commutes.
I would be super interested in Echo in my car, but mostly because I don't have one of the fancy new cars that connects to my phone over bluetooth for that sort of stuff.
Me too -- I love my car (06 Audi) but the electronics were designed by a car company in 2000-2004 and thus very far out of date.
The right choice is probably a replacement nav and head unit. I'd rather have an old but nice car with great nav/ ent/etc, than a new car. I don't think I'm that unusual. I'd like to upgrade the electronics every couple years; happy to keep a car for 10-20y. Somehow those should mesh, but don't.
>It appears you have to have an original Echo in order to purchase a Dot.
Where do you get that? As far as I can tell, this looks like an Echo with minimal speakers.
[Edit: Ah. It's only available through voice shopping on either an Echo or Fire TV--though that would seem to be a marketing gimmick as opposed to a technical restriction]
> Echo Dot is available in limited quantities and exclusively for Prime members through Alexa Voice Shopping. To order your Echo Dot, use your Amazon Echo or Amazon Fire TV and just ask:
I guess technically you don't have to already have an Echo, but it is only available through voice shopping.
Yeah, it looks like it's intended to kinda be an expansion to your existing system. So in a larger house where you can't talk to your Echo from everywhere, you could put a bunch of Echo Dots in different rooms. It looks like it's probably missing the audio quality speakers, I'd guess?
I love my echo! I probably use it 15-25 times a day.
1) Acts as my alarm
2) Turn on my favorite radio station while I make breakfast.
3) Timers for cooking breakfast.
4) Listen to flash news
5) Alarm again if I need a nap.
6) Timers for lunch meal
7) Add item to shopping list.
8) Add todo items.
9) Plays spotify while I work on my computer from across the room.
10) More flash news (its really quite extensive)
11) more naps
12) dinner timer
13) news
14) word definitions
15) Tell it to stop when it starts talking in the middle of a conversation (a bit annoying).
16) more todos
17) Order more dogs treats
18) Play bedtime music
Worth every penny.
Where did the strange sense of "everyone is spying on you" come from? A bloated sense of self importance?
Wow, you need a reality check here with your "A bloated sense of self importance?". Here is some history for you....
My Dad has written a book about Native Americans in the pacific northwest. Part of his research turned up personnel letters from an officer in the US Cavalry long ago (many officers). These letters were very personnel, and only ever meant to be read by his wife. Unfortunately, these letters were passed down in the family many times up until recently a family member got fed up with this box of letters and donated it to the University of Washington where my Dad found the letters relevant to his research, and others of personal nature as I explained.
You can't even begin to imagine what devices (production, backup, test, hacked versions, amazon, nsa etc) that your voice is sitting on now and what those devices and interfaces will look like 100 years from now and who or what will be using them, heck, even 10 years from now is a mystery.
So don't become famous, run for office or try to be big corp CEO or even use any social network because one day something you said while your echo was recording will bite you or your grandkids in the ass!
I would love to use a service like echo, it looks slick, but if I cant verify the source code or trust some community who has then it will never be in my house.
> So don't become famous, run for office or try to be big corp CEO
I don't necessarily disagree, but the vast majority of people will do none of these things mentioned.
The real issue is that of a person's private life seeping into all of their interactions with society. A person could be easily controlled even in private settings if a misstep could land them without a job, ruin a marriage, or cost a person their freedom.
With that being said, the majority of people don't care about privacy. Almost all of us are oversharing (although the demographic on HN are likely more privacy-conscious than most). Either we're all going to get bitten in the ass, or somehow we'll adapt as a society to accept others more deeply (as the alternative is mutual destruction).
I'm quite privacy conscious myself, but when does our habits of privacy-first make us bigger targets than others who are not?
>>Where did the strange sense of "everyone is spying on you" come from? A bloated sense of self importance?
You under estimate how far this can go!
Essentially, this could work against you in a million ways not even imaginable now.
Come to think of it, what if you are denied health insurance on grounds that this gadget was eavesdropping on your health conditions. Or some marketing company spamming you with ads on topics you talk about frequently at home. Or listening to the intimate moments between you and your partner. One could list a gazillion conditions in which a evil mind could use this to their advantage.
Exactly. And this is why surveillance is so difficult to fight. The actions are far removed from the consequences, and the public just isn't very good at long-term planning. But we can't wait for the negative effects to show, because by then it'll be too late.
Where did the strange sense of "everyone is spying on you" come from? A bloated sense of self importance?
Beyond what others have written, there's also a matter of principle. I don't think I'll be personally and directly affected by it, and so I'm kind of sloppy with my use of online services, but I don't want to live in a world where these devices are everywhere, because they are dangerous when ubiquitous and hence unavoidable.
The phrase "vote with your dollars/euros/etc" may be often misapplied, but there's some truth to it, and the corollary is that every time you buy something, you're also making a wider impact on society regarding what is acceptable.
AWS will likely be a $100-$150 billion market value business in five years, with $6-$8 billion in operating income. They're tracking to $3.x billion in operating income in the next four quarters. It'll be valued as highly as Intel and Oracle.
A device that tells you the weather, orders an Uber, or orders more low margin merchandise off of Amazon, is not going to generate that kind of massive financial return. You can look at every lucrative business Echo could touch, and there's no scenario under which it could extract a large amount of monetary value. Ads? Not a chance. Sales referrals? No, the high margin stuff people want to visually browse for. Services? It could be 50 times larger than Angie's List and still not match AWS. Ordering Ubers? Ordering food? Ordering movie tickets? Relatively small sales, small percentage cut businesses.
I agree with you; however I believe the value of Alexa's value will be that it learns about you over time, making Amazon's services more "sticky" to the end-user, and making Amazon a more valuable marketplace to suppliers.
For instance, in the UK, Amazon has very recently partnered with an actual supermarket to sell some groceries[1]. If agents really catch on, what would a business pay to be the default milk provider when someone or their fridge says "I need more milk"?
Alexa requires AWS to run. It's a symbiotic relationship, and Alexa is the consumer-facing AI extension. They've marketed it better than Watson and Siri so far, giving it new hardware to live in and opening it up to developers. But without AWS, there is no Alexa.
It's hard to do worse than a platform that simply does not let third-parties in (Siri). I honestly don't understand why Apple is so opposed to the concept.
Yeah, their super bowl commercial with Alec Baldwin was a huge hit. And everyone who uses amazon sees the thing plastered across the front page every time they use the website. They're also much more active on social media, and have (presumably) paid to get #AmazonEcho trending now on Twitter.
Well, marketed to who is the question. To consumers I think Siri is advertised better (certainly, the vast majority of my non-tech friends know about it, Alexa not so much) but to developers Alexa is, well, actually open, so the advertising writes itself.
While voice assistants are likely to become a big industry, I don't see such a limited solution as Alexa stealing any large spotlight. They are too heavily locked down to be able to gain any traction in the big picture.
They are connecting more and more services, you can train your own "skills" and i am pretty sure they will open the platform up at some point. Could be huge. Remember, the first iPhone was totally locked down as well.
> If by "locked down" you mean able to develop and deploy your own software onto[1], then sure.
That doesn't allow publishing anywhere, which is still behind a paywall and still tightly controlled. It also still requires you to use a Mac, from what I can tell.
> Given what's going on with the FBI, I'm starting to see the absurd security of the platform as more a positive than a negative.
Oh yes, the wonderful mixup between "security" and security. "Security" is just DRM and Tivoization by another name. Actual security would mean a device that doesn't come with horrible RCE vulnerabilities out of the box, which Apple doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation for, as well as allowing the user to choose things like what data applications have access to. The two have absolutely nothing in common.
Which isn't the point the point is you can run what you want on your own device now regardless of whether Apple likes it or not.
The tight control is a feature, not a bug. I'd rather put up with this slight nuisance than have the adware, malware infested dump that is the Play Store. Random hackers and advertisers are a much more clear and present threat than anything Apple can do to me.
I've had less and less reasons to jailbreak over the past few releases, and with good reason, a jailbreak both lessens your security and functions as an exploit all on its own.
> Which isn't the point the point is you can run what you want on your own device now regardless of whether Apple likes it or not.
So they've lightened a tiny bit for PR purposes, while still not giving the average user any practical freedom.
> The tight control is a feature, not a bug. I'd rather put up with this slight nuisance than have the adware, malware infested dump that is the Play Store. Random hackers and advertisers are a much more clear and present threat than anything Apple can do to me.
The Play Store is by no means perfect, but it's never been that awful. And besides, I'm fine with Apple exercising reasonable control over their own App Store, as long as sideloading is reasonably simple.
> I've had less and less reasons to jailbreak over the past few releases, and with good reason, a jailbreak both lessens your security and functions as an exploit all on its own.
The exploit is there whether you use it or not, the only difference is whether it's you or malware authors who gain anything from it.
My point is that the first iphone did not have any 3rd party apps at all and id argue it did change the world of computing in the years after that. If you do not acknowledge that you are blind of hate for apple.
Still too expensive, imo. I've read a lot about "Alexa" and Echo... and beside the privacy issues, in many cases the Echo quickly becomes an expensive speaker (after the kids and everyone else gets tired of asking "Alexa" questions).
$89 is not in my compulsion buy price range. I may be in the minority on that though...
I sorta agree. I got the original Echo for $100 when they had a special deal for Prime members. The timer is handy. The shopping list is handy. It's occasionally vaguely useful to ask it questions about the weather or other things--though it's not like my phone is that far away. I do use it for Amazon Music when I can't be bothered finding something to play on my stereo.
Potentially, the ability to interface with home automation devices will make it more useful but I'm honestly not sure how much of that stuff I will ever use.
I'm happy enough that I bought it but I probably wouldn't buy more to put in other rooms.
[Edit: I think if I lived in a small place and didn't have another music source I'd find it more generally useful.]
I have a $4 dollar multi-function timer that we use in the kitchen and for "turns" on the trampoline in the backyard. I still don't use all the different features available on that silly thing. My GE gas range also has a timer, same with the microwave that sits above it. I bet my fridge has a timer too... lol. I have a literal crap-ton of devices that I barely use to their full extent. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
I still use pen and paper to keep notes/lists. I actually have a Bullet Journal... so maybe I am not the target demo.
The thing is, you can ask Cortana or Google Now or Siri about the weather, shopping (at least Cortana has reminders, not sure about the other two) and the other things you mention.
So, at the moment it's feels like a redundant device that one has to purchase in order to do the same thing I can do with the phone and/or computer that I already own.
I mean, I find it kind of cool (except for the creepy "I'm listening to what you say", which applies to all assistants anyway), but I find it hard to find its place in the world as things are right now. Perhaps is that I do live in a small studio and my laptop or phone or tablet are always at hand.
I don't really disagree which is why I'm pretty ambivalent. The original Echo does have a decent Bluetooth speaker and I find the voice recognition a lot better than Siri's. And it's available in my kitchen/dining area when I need to add something to a shopping list or ask a question with greasy hands. But I certainly wouldn't try to convince someone that it's a "must have."
The single greatest feature of Echo that I use, (and too few others use) is turning on my Phillips Hue lights. You can give each individual light a name, as well as groups of lights their own name. Very convenient to turn on / off lights from anywhere in range of the mic.
I use it everyday multiple times a day. If anyone finds network connected lights useful, then they'll find controlling them through Echo doubly useful as it obviates the need to pick up your smartphone.
Not to pick on you :-), but I have these things called light switches in my house that work pretty well for turning on and off lights. I confess to not seeing much attraction to smart lightbulbs with names.
(To be fair, if I had a lot of lights not connected to switches as was the case when I moved into my current house, I'd probably have put in smart lightbulbs rather than doing as much rewiring as I did.)
Light switches are great, but there is something really nice about laying in bed and dimming the lights by voice.
Or right before going to sleep, you remember you left the living room light on, so you say, "Alexa, turn off the living room light", and watch as the glow under the door disappears.
It's a luxury, but it's a lot of fun if you are lazy.
I also use the Echo to adjust my nest thermostat, control my entire home theater (with 6 different devices), and control my tempurpedic adjustable bed and even remote start my car.
I find the possibilities of voice control and home automation to be intoxicating, and hacking around with the Echo is sort of one of my hobbies right now.
Alexa has come in handy when I forget to turn my computer desk's light off -- it's connected to a power strip -- so I can just yell downstairs and have her switch it off for me.
I can also set individual lights or groups of lights to turn on during certain events, like returning home and it's after sunset and the lights aren't already on, but that's more of a whole-home-automation thing rather than Alexa. :)
Yeah, almost the whole page for the Amazon Tap is just listing its musical abilities. And the price comparison chart at the end is to other bluetooth speakers.
Echo Dot ($89.99) is available exclusively for Prime Members through Alexa Voice Shopping. To order your Echo Dot, use your Echo or Fire TV and just ask: “Alexa, order Echo Dot.”
I noticed that, so I assume they're targeting this as an accessory for existing Echo owners (additional rooms, etc).
But here's what confuses me: The Dot SEEMS like it would work extremely well without owning an Echo, the two don't seem to integrate together, the Dot just uses an external speaker instead of an internal one.
So maybe this is just a promo available to Echo owners and everyone will be able to buy it later for a higher price? But the page could be clearer about what their intentions are and how they justify the Echo-only buying option.
I nearly renewed my Prime membership on reading the first part but then stopped when I read the second part. Holy market segmentation, batman - why actively repel new customers and only make this available to those mini-me-philes who already have an Echo?
Man... I had my audrey doing this in the '90s. I can't believe I missed the boat and somebody else is making a bajillion dollars. It's time to search through the archives of all the cool stuff we did 20 years ago and put it in a shiny new wrapper.
Sometimes I think about this. The old cool stuff not only can have a shiny new wrapper but a whole new set of modern technology that can finally turn them into a successful "new" product.
I still have a couple of X10 lights controlled wirelessly in my house. When I moved in, many of the lights in the house weren't wired to switches but just had pull chains. Over time, most of the house has been rewired and switches added but I still have a couple of lights that haven't been connected to switches and I still use X10 for them.
Years ago... mid to late 90s... I had everything X-10'ed up in my house. What I didn't know is that my house alarm was also X-10 capable.
One night, I couldn't enter the code in time and you could see what house was alarming for miles around. Inside and outside the house, everything that could blink was blinking - to go along with the blaring sound.
I cancelled the alarm service (and kept the alarm) soon after because 1) it would freak anybody breaking into my house out, and 2) if the cops couldn't figure out that there was something going on at my house without somebody having to call them, they just weren't doing their job.
Maybe a bit more, as an echo user I've never ordered anything from my echo... however once I do, i'll probably do it again. The dot could be a gateway drug :D
Hmm. The Dot might be a good addition, but it's too expensive. I want to put several mic & speaker combos around my house, but I don't want to pay $90 per room. Something in the $25-$40 range would do much better, even if it was a simple relay to the main Echo.
My FireTV is also upgraded to Alexa silently recently and it's fun to play with.
Is it possible for me to upload my own content, say an audio book, some music I own etc so I can use Alexa as a voice command to fetch my own data too? be it on the cloud or my local NAS/DLNA box.
For voice activated solutions the hard part is the front end, i.e. voice recognition, which is what Alexa is strong at. Once this is covered, it's relatively easy to cover the rest. Really the core competency of Alexa is its excellent voice recognition performance, which is still hard to find elsewhere these days.
Versus a close field cloud based device in your pocket? I'd be more comfortable if knowing that Alexa is truly not listening unless the blue light is on.
But I hear your point. I think we're all getting lulled into just giving up on totally ruling out our most paranoid considerations. Not that it isn't quite rational to be paranoid given the constant barrage of proof of device exploitation and mass surveillance.
Echo = hub, too expensive and large to buy 10 for every room in the house, used for receiving, processing, routing info from spokes and cloud
Echo dot = spoke, microphone and AI functionality at a lower price point, distributes connectivity network throughout the entire house so that you don't have to walk from your kitchen to your living room to order new paper towels from Amazon
not hub/spoke at all. the dot and the echo are separate standalone products. The only reason you're required to own an Echo to get a Dot is because it's a "limited supply" product, and they want to make sure that only loyal customers get to review the new thing in order to seed some positive reviews.
I don't own one of these devices, yet I'm curious, can you "modify the device's name"? I mean, what if someone in the household has the name Alexa. No, not you Alexa, the other Alexa. Alexa do your homework. Alexa take out the garbage.
Yes, by default you can call it Amazon instead. I have this problem because I have a cousin named Alexis and my Echo gets confused when she comes over. But I still keep it at Alexa.
Any reason why Echoes couldn't communicate with other Echoes? My friend and I own Echoes. I could say "Alexa, call Joe" Joe and I could talk to each other through the Echoes over the internet.
What's stopping people from accidentally ordering things with this thing? Could I go into somebody's house that has one of these devices setup and say "Alexa, order some breast clamps" ?
Make a webpage that automatically starts playing an audio clip of someone saying those things, trick people into visiting the page and hope their laptop isn't muted.
Any reason Echoes couldn't communicate with each other? I envision my friend and I own an Echo. I could say "Alexa, call Joe". We could talk to each other through the Echo over the internet.
This is a better product than the original. They added one of the most requested features (audio out) and didn't remove anything important (unless you don't have a better plug-in speaker system).
The biggest oversight is now the fact that it can't work together with an existing Echo: Amazon is making us order these _using_ an Echo... but the two devices don't communicate at all and require individual wake words. I wanted this as an added mic for my existing system, not as a new independent system.
Connecting them will be as simple as a future software update. Amazon's challenge right now is to get the hardware in place before its competitors (Nest, Apple) - and it seems to be pressing hard to get a wide range of devices in every room of the house.
I agree with you on this, but generally they'd have an easier job of it if they worked as a connected mesh rather than independent controllers. I can't say for certain but it doesn't seem like the added engineering time would be that much greater.
Can anyone else order this through their Fire TV? I'm just getting "Your search did not match anything in our catalog."
I could also be doing this wrong as I literally unboxed my fire tv just for this. I'm using the companion iOS app to access the microphone, but selected the phrase on the Fire TV.
The voice rec also sucked. I had to say the damn sentence like 9 times in an unnatural way. I hope that's not indicative of this experience I'm wanting to order...
>> you need one of the other Alexa products to order it.
It likely that DOT uses the Echo as a parent device to do all processing of things like sending the voice requests to the servers and back and the DOT just works as a microphone slave device with some basic synchronization to determine which device heard the wakeword first. If DOT hears it first it sends the voice data to Echo and Echo does it's normal thing and sends the response back to DOT. (At least that was the intent when I worked on early versions of the project.)
I would buy the Tap if it was always on listening while on the cradle but then push button while portable. Doesn't look like it works that way from the description. I get that it takes too much battery to have 7 always listening microphones on, but while on the cradle, this should be a non-issue.
The dot sounds great but I cringed when I read about the tap. Its increasingly common for people to play cell phone audio in enclosed places without consideration of others. The tap seems to be designed to make it even easier to do so.
I absolutely adore my Echo. But I live in a small apartment, so I really don't see a need to buy a Dot as a second Echo device, even if the size and price make it a more attractive option than the original Echo.
I'll always be a bit bitter toward the Echo project. I had a really great manager transfer to that project when I worked at Amazon. It's part of the reason I left. Glad to see them do well though.
I'm wondering why it took the product being from Amazon for geeks to finally be ok with a device that silently listens to everything you say in your home and sends that data to Amazon's servers.
I think the number 1 use for voice control is the car. The current (Apple Car/Android Auto) are good but I would be interested in a better experience. Would like for Amazon Alexa to work in auto.
If Amazon gains by providing this service to prime members then why don't they have a voice control app for iOS/Android to connect with Alexa? (not just the setup Alexa app)
This solves a huge pain point I have with my Alexa. That being said, it will still understand any man's voice in my home better than my own. Decisions decisions.
TensorFlow, open sourced by Google, would allow you to implement the latest in voice recognition research relatively quickly. Recently they released TensorFlow Serving which lets you run your tensorflow models on the cloud.
Also, it would be great to be able to put the software on different hardware - something with digital audio output for example. The concept of Alexa is amazing, but distributing it as properitary software limits its potential.