>I have an Echo in my kitchen that I mainly use as a voice-activated timer and to play music or podcasts as I cook. Same here. I use it to play the radio while

>I have an Echo in my kitchen that I mainly use as a voice-activated timer and to play music or podcasts as I cook. Same here. I use it to play the radio while I'm washing the pots. As I can change channel without having to dry my hands. >When I want to set a timer I have to walk over to the device and unmute it because I refuse to leave it unmuted Again, ditto. The longer I have the Echo Dot, the more I realise just how monumentally far from any kind of "intelligence" AI currently has --especially in Alexa form. Classic example. Tonight the missus was cooking and asked Alexa to play some Christmassy tunes [I know! I know!]. Alexa played a couple we recognised and then something quite bluesy that sounded a bit like Chuck Berry. So, we wanted to find out what it was. "Alexa, what was that tune you just played?" "I'm sorry. I don't know that one" "Alexa, list the tunes you've played tonight" "If you give me a list of tunes, I can play them" "Alexa. What was the song you have just finished playing?" "Did you know you can..."* etc... etc.. til she gave up. There is absolutely no "intelligence" behind this at all. It really irks me that people keep banging on about Alexa [and similar voice assistants] and things like online chatbots as if they were displaying some kind of intuition. All's they are is pretty good speech recognition [credit where it's due for that, at least] welded to a menu of prepared answers based on what keywords the thing picks out in what you say. Wake me up when an AI can tell me it's depressed and has a pain in the diodes all down its left-hand side.