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As an owner of four Echo / Echo Dots in my house, I can say that Alexa is terrible at answering questions outside of a few common areas (weather, store times, e

As an owner of four Echo / Echo Dots in my house, I can say that Alexa is terrible at answering questions outside of a few common areas (weather, store times, etc). With that said, I think the true power of Alexa's ecosystem is it's smart device integration. I'm sure Google will catch up soon enough, but at the moment I feel like Alexa still has a sizable lead.

hbosch 9y ago
In reference to the OP topic, I'm curious... How often do you use your echo as a Q&A device? Or is it just for media and assistant like functions (alarms, shopping, etc)?
garblegarble 9y ago
>at the moment I feel like Alexa still has a sizable lead. Do you really? I have 4 Echo & Echo Dots too and I love them, but the level of smart home integration is incredibly basic... "turn on the X (light)", "set the X (light) to 50%", "set the heat to 20" and "trigger find my phone". (edit: this post sounds pretty negative, it's mostly frustration because the speech recognition is actually really good, so when it fails it's really noticeable & the shallowness of comprehension of what I'm actually saying to it is so shocking when the speech recognition tech is that good) It will fairly often mishear light names (like my bedroom light, it confuses my name with "Theatre"), the integration will fail to contact a light (and instead of retrying the echo just says "I couldn't contact light X". It doesn't understand the room it's in (so I'm constantly having to name lights, rather than just tell it to turn on the light, or dim it). I feel like the level of integration needed from people like Hue and Nest is so simple that even the most basic integration into a competitor (with just as good / better mic+voice tech) could blow Alexa away overnight... it actually feels like something you could build in a few hours with access to the Alexa processing repo. ...which really kills me, because as you say Alexa is better than anything out there, but it feels like all they're doing is adding funny responses to pre-canned phrases rather than trying to seriously improve their smart home proposition or trying to tackle the context/discoverability problem
- supergeek133 9y ago
  > It will fairly often mishear light names (like my bedroom light, it confuses my name with "Theatre"), the integration will fail to contact a light (and instead of retrying the echo just says "I couldn't contact light X". It doesn't understand the room it's in (so I'm constantly having to name lights, rather than just tell it to turn on the light, or dim it). We tell our customers to put their alexa devices into groups in the alexa app. It tends to help your situation quite a bit. For instance for our Lyric thermostats the default name assigned is "Lyric". So you can imagine the things that happen when telling your Alexa to "Make Lyric Warmer". Haha. That being said, the challenge for them is "Making a light a light, and making a thermostat a thermostat" and knowing every time when someone says "turn on X" they're talking about that thing. I've noticed my Google Home does a better job at being 'fuzzy' in that regard.
  - garblegarble 9y ago
    >We tell our customers to put their alexa devices into groups in the alexa app. It tends to help your situation quite a bit. For instance for our Lyric thermostats the default name assigned is "Lyric". So you can imagine the things that happen when telling your Alexa to "Make Lyric Warmer". Haha. I'm not sure I understand - are you saying there's a way to put an Echo into a group so it understands where it is in some way? I don't see that option in the app anywhere, but maybe I'm just missing it! If you mean to put the devices into groups so you can control multiple devices at once or come up with names that the speech recognition doesn't misunderstand, I do that - but at a certain point I gave up because the names would have no connection to the actual lights (my bedroom light is my name, which is a pretty common name - but the Echo mishears it pretty regularly). I can't help but think that for my case when Alexa knows I'm talking about a device & no device matches the understood text it should look at the other possible interpretations of the voice data to see if any of the likely ones. The majority of my problems come from the lack of basic contextual understanding of where the Echo device exists in the house, which is a much more solvable problem than trying to consider multiple alternative interpretations of a device name!
    - PKop 9y ago
supergeek133 9y ago
Speaking from experience, the integration model for Smart Home into Google Home was a really time consuming experience up until recently. Now it compares to Alexa from a level of effort perspective. So they'll catch up pretty quick.
pound 9y ago
Maybe I'm an outlier, but turned out I don't care at all for asking home assistant various questions. I have GH and my usage is mostly limited to "turn on/off lights" and "set timer". It's just that moments like "we need to ask what movie someone also starred at" are not really a part of any conversations we have at home, and if we really need to look some info up we will do it looking at screens. Google Home being ridiculously bad at how it works doesn't help either - it feels like it's getting worse every week. I hate it how it understands me from fifth attempt now, I'm tired of hearing "I cannot help with that" 3/4 of the time for the same command or just listening for a minute and then do nothing. And it's not a matter of dusted mics. And not even starting on all that nonsense as declaring company name many times a day as a wake word, still absent reminders and frigging fiasco with shopping lists. Yet another "let's start with first iteration of product and then move to something else leaving it half-baked, because ADHD and we can" (edited typo)
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  Exactly the same with my Echos. The problem with asking these things questions when you are in a group of people is that now the whole conversation pauses to hear the damn answer. And then there is the 5-10 second processing time and the very slow non-interactive answer. It's just so much more efficient to have one of the people in the conversation whip out their phone and use Google, then say the answer when it's ready. Especially if the answer is not "Who was the start of The Martian" but something like "How closely was Lincoln the movie based on historical events?" I will say, I also use my main Echo to play music. It is really nice that way, though song, artist, and playlist name recognition is atrocious. "Play Top Hits" and "Play Today's Top Hits" produces completely different result. Don't you know what I mean Amazon? Don't you know what I mean? My kids (turning 4 soon) have figured out how to use it too, which is kinda neat.
  - giobox 9y ago
    > and then there is the 5 - 10 second processing time Almost everything you've described matches my experience with the Echo exactly, but if there is one thing that it is consistently good at for me anyway, it's seriously low latency in responding. I've never observed anything like 5 seconds to process my input, let alone 10. It's been way better than Siri in this regard.
RodericDay 9y ago
Why did you buy four if they're not very good?

hbosch 9y ago

In reference to the OP topic, I'm curious... How often do you use your echo as a Q&A device? Or is it just for media and assistant like functions (alarms, shopping, etc)?

garblegarble 9y ago

>at the moment I feel like Alexa still has a sizable lead. Do you really? I have 4 Echo & Echo Dots too and I love them, but the level of smart home integration is incredibly basic... "turn on the X (light)", "set the X (light) to 50%", "set the heat to 20" and "trigger find my phone". (edit: this post sounds pretty negative, it's mostly frustration because the speech recognition is actually really good, so when it fails it's really noticeable & the shallowness of comprehension of what I'm actually saying to it is so shocking when the speech recognition tech is that good) It will fairly often mishear light names (like my bedroom light, it confuses my name with "Theatre"), the integration will fail to contact a light (and instead of retrying the echo just says "I couldn't contact light X". It doesn't understand the room it's in (so I'm constantly having to name lights, rather than just tell it to turn on the light, or dim it). I feel like the level of integration needed from people like Hue and Nest is so simple that even the most basic integration into a competitor (with just as good / better mic+voice tech) could blow Alexa away overnight... it actually feels like something you could build in a few hours with access to the Alexa processing repo. ...which really kills me, because as you say Alexa is better than anything out there, but it feels like all they're doing is adding funny responses to pre-canned phrases rather than trying to seriously improve their smart home proposition or trying to tackle the context/discoverability problem

supergeek133 9y ago
> It will fairly often mishear light names (like my bedroom light, it confuses my name with "Theatre"), the integration will fail to contact a light (and instead of retrying the echo just says "I couldn't contact light X". It doesn't understand the room it's in (so I'm constantly having to name lights, rather than just tell it to turn on the light, or dim it). We tell our customers to put their alexa devices into groups in the alexa app. It tends to help your situation quite a bit. For instance for our Lyric thermostats the default name assigned is "Lyric". So you can imagine the things that happen when telling your Alexa to "Make Lyric Warmer". Haha. That being said, the challenge for them is "Making a light a light, and making a thermostat a thermostat" and knowing every time when someone says "turn on X" they're talking about that thing. I've noticed my Google Home does a better job at being 'fuzzy' in that regard.
- garblegarble 9y ago
  >We tell our customers to put their alexa devices into groups in the alexa app. It tends to help your situation quite a bit. For instance for our Lyric thermostats the default name assigned is "Lyric". So you can imagine the things that happen when telling your Alexa to "Make Lyric Warmer". Haha. I'm not sure I understand - are you saying there's a way to put an Echo into a group so it understands where it is in some way? I don't see that option in the app anywhere, but maybe I'm just missing it! If you mean to put the devices into groups so you can control multiple devices at once or come up with names that the speech recognition doesn't misunderstand, I do that - but at a certain point I gave up because the names would have no connection to the actual lights (my bedroom light is my name, which is a pretty common name - but the Echo mishears it pretty regularly). I can't help but think that for my case when Alexa knows I'm talking about a device & no device matches the understood text it should look at the other possible interpretations of the voice data to see if any of the likely ones. The majority of my problems come from the lack of basic contextual understanding of where the Echo device exists in the house, which is a much more solvable problem than trying to consider multiple alternative interpretations of a device name!
  - PKop 9y ago

supergeek133 9y ago

Speaking from experience, the integration model for Smart Home into Google Home was a really time consuming experience up until recently. Now it compares to Alexa from a level of effort perspective. So they'll catch up pretty quick.

pound 9y ago

Maybe I'm an outlier, but turned out I don't care at all for asking home assistant various questions. I have GH and my usage is mostly limited to "turn on/off lights" and "set timer". It's just that moments like "we need to ask what movie someone also starred at" are not really a part of any conversations we have at home, and if we really need to look some info up we will do it looking at screens. Google Home being ridiculously bad at how it works doesn't help either - it feels like it's getting worse every week. I hate it how it understands me from fifth attempt now, I'm tired of hearing "I cannot help with that" 3/4 of the time for the same command or just listening for a minute and then do nothing. And it's not a matter of dusted mics. And not even starting on all that nonsense as declaring company name many times a day as a wake word, still absent reminders and frigging fiasco with shopping lists. Yet another "let's start with first iteration of product and then move to something else leaving it half-baked, because ADHD and we can" (edited typo)

IgorPartola 9y ago
Exactly the same with my Echos. The problem with asking these things questions when you are in a group of people is that now the whole conversation pauses to hear the damn answer. And then there is the 5-10 second processing time and the very slow non-interactive answer. It's just so much more efficient to have one of the people in the conversation whip out their phone and use Google, then say the answer when it's ready. Especially if the answer is not "Who was the start of The Martian" but something like "How closely was Lincoln the movie based on historical events?" I will say, I also use my main Echo to play music. It is really nice that way, though song, artist, and playlist name recognition is atrocious. "Play Top Hits" and "Play Today's Top Hits" produces completely different result. Don't you know what I mean Amazon? Don't you know what I mean? My kids (turning 4 soon) have figured out how to use it too, which is kinda neat.
- giobox 9y ago
  > and then there is the 5 - 10 second processing time Almost everything you've described matches my experience with the Echo exactly, but if there is one thing that it is consistently good at for me anyway, it's seriously low latency in responding. I've never observed anything like 5 seconds to process my input, let alone 10. It's been way better than Siri in this regard.

RodericDay 9y ago

Why did you buy four if they're not very good?