
Amazon's Alexa is the new Vaudeville - steven
https://medium.com/@loganhill33/amazon-s-echo-is-the-new-vaudeville-9fd11e80a99#.x1rce5vm4
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surrealvortex
> "Dot, a hockey-puckish satellite, extends the range of an Echo or Tap"

No. The Dot is standalone, and is not a range-extender. I think Amazon's
tactic of allowing only those people who already own an Alexa device has
backfired, if an otherwise well researched article misrepresents this basic
fact.

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kondro
I'm sure Echo is great if you live in the USA.

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inopinatus
I'll echo that gripe. Amazon have hobbled their ecosystem by the bizarre
design decision of mandatory configuration by US zip code. This effectively
excludes all non-American users, and makes the barriers for overseas
developers prohibitively high.

Since I am in Australia, my Echo is good only for parlour tricks and streaming
audio: without an accurate time and place, even simple things like checking
weather are impossible. Forget about booking a cab, or home automation. So I
have not tried to develop for the platform, because I do not develop things I
cannot test.

Perhaps Amazon were afraid of diluting their product focus. But failure to
think globally means your product cannot be a world leader.

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eva1984
Having Alexa for almost a year now. My daily routine:

Evening -> "Alexa, set the alarm @9:30"

Morning -> "Alexa, stop"

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NKCSS
Uhm, it has no memory?

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rdl
They added repeating alarms a couple weeks ago. e.g. "Alexa, set alarm for six
a m every day"

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JonRB
That's not going to get confusing at all!
[http://www.alexa.com/](http://www.alexa.com/)

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eclipxe
Good thing Amazon owns both

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WA
"Now you can talk to your website analytics software?" – "No, the other Alexa
thing, which nobody has a clue what it is."

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texan
I find it interesting that the author completely looks over Cortana when
listing the various voice assistants. Cortana is perhaps the most widespread
voice assistant, it being on almost every windows pc.

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vr3690
> it being on almost every windows pc

Every PC with Windows 10. I'm not sure how many there are, but it may not be
most widespread or most used.

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scholia
Windows 10 is probably on roughly 14%-15% of Windows PCs, which is some way
short of "every".

According to Microsoft, more than 270 million devices run Windows 10. However,
Cortana voice isn't supported in all countries, and many people have turned
"her" off.

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wwwdonohue
I thought the subheader was a sarcastic dig. Playing music is virtually the
only thing Alexa seems capable of doing, and even then only semi-reliably.

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manyxcxi
You obviously don't have one, and if you do, you've horribly wasted your
money. Even on day one it launched with more use than that.

I can set or check my thermostat, control any light or group of lights in my
house, get an Uber to pick me up, have the morning news headlines read to me
while I'm making breakfast, check traffic on my way out the door, add notes to
my to-do list as they cross my mind, and add things to my shopping list with
my face still in the refrigerator.

Those are all things that come out of the box with no custom code. With the
additional skills I've personally written I have it tell me releases and
showtimes at my nearest theater, I can ask if the garage door is open or
closed, and a few other half cocked ideas.

The Alexa skills kit is quite easy to get your head wrapped around and the
limit really is your imagination.

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jgalt212
> control any light or group of lights in my house

Alexa has nothing to do with that. The hard/expensive part is making all the
lights in your house accessible via remote control.

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TheOtherHobbes
From the user pov, that's just engineering.

Users want stuff to work. They don't care about the engineering behind it. In
fact they want to see as little engineering (friction) as possible.

Alexa is the part that makes the engineering fun and useful. And it's _much_
harder to build a system like Alexa than it is to build a 433MHz dimmer system
for your lights.

Alexa is actually the new Windows. MS, Apple, and Google are following not
leading now, and they should all be worried Amazon got a successful and
popular consumer hardware product into this space first.

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jgalt212
> Alexa is actually the new Windows.

That's one of the bolder and inherently unprovable statements I've heard in
quite a while.

