I don't find this convincing in the least. Just looking through many of the 5-star reviews, several of them come from people who actively contacted Amazon to re

I don't find this convincing in the least. Just looking through many of the 5-star reviews, several of them come from people who actively contacted Amazon to request to purchase Alexa, which gives a clear bias in favor of a positive review (someone actively looking to like it, or an active reviewer of newer tech, not really representative of mainstream users). Many others come from the pool of "Top 50 Reviewer" or "Top 500 Reviewer" which again suffers the same problem. It's an Amazon product, so it's obviously not OK with Amazon to deride it, and top reviewers are unlikely to jeopardize their affiliation-with-Amazon status to give it a significantly negative review. The problem is I don't know the underlying population these reviews were drawn from, and at a cursory glance it looks highly different than the kind of population whose reviews I care about. However, I will say that one substantial sub-population within the reviews, the sub-population writing reviews related to the way Echo can be used by differently abled people, does seem to present some compelling information about that particular use case. Other than that, the reviews don't give me much of a reason to care (about the reviews themselves, not Echo), and this is not yet even taking into account what surely must be armies of sponsored reviews discreetly coming from Amazon itself.