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I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years. But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and

I ordered the first echo the day it was announced, and was excited about the possibility for years. But that "possibility" never turned into reality for me and I ended up only using it to start timers and play music. I've since abandoned the product line and do not have faith that Amazon will develop this into something actually useful, rather than something that is used to sell me products and surveil on me.

dlcarrier 2y ago
That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not. Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
  - sixothree 2y ago
    A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
    - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
      Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
      - Marsymars 2y ago
        "Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.
  - dlcarrier 2y ago
    Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval. As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible. I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
- taeric 2y ago
  Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.
Mistletoe 2y ago
It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.
- daveguy 2y ago
  Personally, I think they'll move some of the Alexa+ functionality to prime subscribers and increase the prime rate again to subsidize.
- nunez 2y ago
  It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.
- colordrops 2y ago
  It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    We all make the calculation whether it is worth it and for me it is worth it. I'm not a head of state or someone with great secrets to keep. Alexa just hears me talk a lot about Elden Ring or whether we need to buy milk. I'm just a normal guy talking to his girlfriend and for me it is worth it. I completely respect the opposite view though. For me the pros outweigh the cons. I have good reason to believe that they are being truthful when they say it only hears me talk when I give the wake word. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-jailed-life-voice-recordings-Amazon-device-helped-bring-justice.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j... I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.
mikeInAlaska 2y ago
I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.
- blueflow 2y ago
  I'm morbidly curious about your questions.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
pflenker 2y ago
Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.
- goosedragons 2y ago
  I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
- taeric 2y ago
  The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
- Marsymars 2y ago
  I've found it easiest to just leave a lightweight, compact umbrella as a permanent fixture in my everyday-carry bag!
stronglikedan 2y ago
Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.
- bb88 2y ago
  I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list. A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy. While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list." And it did!
PaulHoule 2y ago
I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center. [1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca-talk-dec-6/69926712 https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...
rockbruno 2y ago
Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dlcarrier 2y ago

That's all moat users ever do with an Echo. Amazon thought that users would trade the benefits of comparison shopping for convenience and use the Echo to order products chosen by Amazon, but they did not. Outside of providing the time and whether, and turning lights on and off, Amazon severely limited the ability for third parties to add features, and even reduced it it further well after launch.

crooked-v 2y ago
I could see users absolutely doing that if it was with, say, the extensively tailored product selection of Costco, where you can order a Kirkland brand item in any category and generally be satisfied with the results. But Amazon shot themselves in the foot by flooding every category with brands like XGYSZY and KWYBLPOP. No one is ever going to trust ordering off Amazon without actually seeing what they're buying. It's kind of baffling that they apparently never understood that themselves.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  They probably understand, but the Alexa team are powerless to make the necessary changes without higher level executive initiative (as the way things go in big orgs like Amazon). Even something pragmatic like "why not restrict the available options to known brands" can have more nuance and can be far more complex than just coming up with a list of brands to whitelist.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Nailed it. If I could say "Alexa, order AAA batteries" and I'd get something generally recognizable as a legitimate brand at a reasonable price, I'd do it. If I were today to say "Alexa, buy milk", I'd fully expect to get a gallon of "Doctor Methy's Cow Juice" in a ziploc bag. There's no way I'd trust it to get me what I actually wanted.
- sixothree 2y ago
  A curated list of "household essentials" would go an extremely long way to making this useful. But as far as I know, they never really did anything of the sort.
  - cruffle_duffle 2y ago
    Even with that you have like 20 different configurations of the same toilet paper with various prices per foot and shipping speeds. I think that was what “amazons choice” was targeted at solving but I could be wrong.
    - Marsymars 2y ago
      "Amazon's choice" is algorithmic. It's will often be two different products if you look at two different regional Amazon sites, even if both products are available on both sites at comparable pricing.
- FredPret 2y ago
  What are you talking about. KWYBLPOP makes the finest plastic knockoffs on the planet and has done so for the last five minutes straight.
- dlcarrier 2y ago
  Those weird brand names come from an odd method that Amazon uses to reduce counterfeit products. They require some sellers have a brand name filed with the US patent and trademark office. It can be difficult to get a trademark for something too generic or common, but if it's just a garbled string of characters, it's really easy to get approval. As far as those cheap imported products go, for any given type of product, they all come from the same handful of manufacturers, so which off brand doesn't really matter. Once I figure out which variation I want, I just want to be able to sort by price, and get the cheapest version. Amazon's maliciously broken sort-by-price feature already makes it difficult, but ordering through an Echo makes it impossible. I've ended up using eBay more than Amazon, as well as the occasional exporter like ALiexpress and TVCmall.
rchaud 2y ago
Back in 2019, every marketing conference was abuzz with hype for the latest in tech innovation: "voice as the primary interface for search". Hopefully those attendees diversified their plans with something timeless and battle-tested like "pivot to video".
taeric 2y ago
Amusingly, I hazard users probably were willing to forego comparison shopping for those little "refill buttons" that they made. Far more so than they do the ability to get frustrated with a talking assistant.

Mistletoe 2y ago

It’s really awesome for starting timers and playing music though. I also ask it questions and it does pretty well at answering them. For once we get to be on the opposite side of the exploitation curve here. They can provide this service to me for free in perpetuity I hope. I think my Dots were maybe $19 or bought on eBay.

daveguy 2y ago
Personally, I think they'll move some of the Alexa+ functionality to prime subscribers and increase the prime rate again to subsidize.
nunez 2y ago
It's not great for playing music if you're on Sonos, especially if you have multiple systems associated with a single account. The skill it integrates it to the speakers deauthorizes after some time, but instead of failing when you ask Alexa to play music, it acknowledges your request (Playing "whatever" on $MUSIC_SERVICE) and proceeds to play nothing.
colordrops 2y ago
It's not free though. They are collecting a massive amount of data on you, and exposing you to liability as well with recordings kept on file. If you don't value your personal data then I guess it's "free".
- Mistletoe 2y ago
  We all make the calculation whether it is worth it and for me it is worth it. I'm not a head of state or someone with great secrets to keep. Alexa just hears me talk a lot about Elden Ring or whether we need to buy milk. I'm just a normal guy talking to his girlfriend and for me it is worth it. I completely respect the opposite view though. For me the pros outweigh the cons. I have good reason to believe that they are being truthful when they say it only hears me talk when I give the wake word. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-jailed-life-voice-recordings-Amazon-device-helped-bring-justice.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11899217/Murderer-j... I think you would have a lot more cases than this if it heard you at all times. It seems the police only have access to the times the word Alexa was used.

mikeInAlaska 2y ago

I enjoy coming up with questions deemed so politically incorrect that alexa responds with a BONK noise.

blueflow 2y ago
I'm morbidly curious about your questions.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

pflenker 2y ago

Part of why people only use it for timers is because of its limited capability to understand. „Do I need an umbrella today?“ results in Alexa telling me what the weather will be like without mentioning chance of rain. Asking a trivia question leads to it reading out a response that is wrong 50% of the time. If I ask Alexa to remind me at 8, it asks me whether am or pm though I expressed it unambiguously in German. If I don’t use the right phrasing to snooze a reminder it asks me what I want to be reminded of. And so on, and so forth.

goosedragons 2y ago
I like it when I ask it for the hours of a shop near me, it gives me the hours of some store with the same name literally thousands of kilometers away every time despite knowing my exact address.
taeric 2y ago
The other part is that timers are ridiculously immediately useful. Other questions require far more context. Do you need an umbrella? In the next hour, or the next 6 hours? To walk around town, or just to your car? Do you actually have a handy working umbrella?
Marsymars 2y ago
I've found it easiest to just leave a lightweight, compact umbrella as a permanent fixture in my everyday-carry bag!

stronglikedan 2y ago

Just because it's not useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful. It has the best shopping list of any assistant (non-Apple-walled-garden), it's the only one that can text me my reminders, and the skills are killer - sprinklers, remote car start, the possibilities with skills are limitless. I've never felt compelled to buy a product it has offered me, but it did offer me a really good deal once on an item I had been looking at, which was useful.

bb88 2y ago
I have a funny story speaking of the Alexa shopping list. A few years ago before I was Amazon Prime and committed only to the google infra at the time, I was over at a friends house who had recently gotten an Alexa assistant thingy. While he went out to the garage to get some beer, I said, "Alexa, Please add Hemorrhoid Suppositories to my shopping list." And it did!

PaulHoule 2y ago

I was excited about them too and gave this "way ahead of its time" preso [1] on those kind of interfaces. Some how I wound up with five of them, I think I got a lot of them at Best Buy when I bought something else, but they weren't that useful and my family is very privacy sensitive so I removed them my my AMZN account and gave them all away to the reuse center. [1] https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca-talk-dec-6/69926712 https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

rockbruno 2y ago

Paired with Home Assistant and the Hue emulator, Alexa gets a lot more useful as you become able to expose to her whatever crazy script you'd like her to toggle via voice

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]