
Ask HN: Best uses for Amazon Echo? - leesalminen
I got an Amazon Echo and some wifi enabled light bulbs and electrical outlets for Christmas.<p>What are your favorite uses for it? Any cool &quot;skills&quot; you&#x27;ve made?
======
lkrubner
The best use of an Amazon Echo is to connect it to your company's Salesforce
account and allow high level executives to ask questions such as "Who was the
best salesperson last month?" or "How many deals do we have in the pipeline
with a 90% chance or better of closing?"

Or so I thought.

Me and a friend started a startup a year ago to do this, but we found the
Amazon eco-system difficult to work with.

I wrote about this a lot a year ago:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/i-believe-in-
enterprise...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/i-believe-in-enterprise-
software-for-the-amazon-echo)

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/how-to-enable-the-
sal...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/how-to-enable-the-salesvoice-
skill-for-the-amazon-echo)

But I eventually became a sceptic, for all the reasons I wrote about
previously. You can see a recent comment of mine here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13214911&goto=threads%...](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=13214911&goto=threads%3Fid%3Dlkrubner%2313214911)

I now believe that voice interfaces for sales database could be useful, but
the Android phone might be the better platform to target, and IBM Watson is
likely to be the best service to use in the background.

~~~
cercatrova
This exists: [http://www.tactile.com/](http://www.tactile.com/)

------
timfrietas
Right now Echo/Alexa is still surprisingly bad at NLP(1), so its strength
seems to be in simple integrations with platforms that have done the heavy
lifting.

I can't, for example, have Echo give me travel times to work by subway or even
schedule anything beyond a simple timer.

However, I have converted entirely to Phillips Hue bulbs, a Kasa wifi plug and
a Beme eRod curtain rod, with a Logitech Harmony Hub as a bridge for IR
devices (like the eRod). With this I can do things like tell Alexa to open and
close my curtains (well, "Alexa turn curtains on" since it is bad at NLP so it
can't understand "Alexa, open the curtains"). I also have it turning on my
Christmas tree lights at sunset and off at 1 am (thanks to the Kasa plug).
It's nice to have it turn some lights in my house off and others to 50% with a
couple quick verbal commands.

If I had cable and cared I could use the Logitech Harmony to tell Alexa to
turn on ESPN, but I've been cordless for a long time.

I still really wish some things were first order operations: it is absurd I
can't schedule the Phillips lights to turn on and off at a given time, every
day, for example.

I'm still pretty new to everything given I held out for the Echo Dot so I
could have something with a 3.5mm out to stream Spotify via my receiver, so
I've only had a couple months to dive in. I can see it doing more for me, like
watering my plants by hooking up another Kasa plug to a reservoir of water and
a fish tank pump.

For now it is better than anything else I've tried (haven't seen/tried Google
Home yet), but it is still bad enough at just recognizing my actual voice
commands I am hestitant to build more on it until the platform has matured.

(1) When I left Amazon they seemed one of the stronger technical teams and I
expected then to have been much farther by now.

~~~
crooked-v
You may want to see about running Home Assistant ([https://home-
assistant.io](https://home-assistant.io)) locally. It can do recurring
schedule stuff (as well as more complicated condition-based triggers), works
to make custom commands ([https://home-assistant.io/components/alexa/#i-want-
to-build-...](https://home-assistant.io/components/alexa/#i-want-to-build-
custom-commands-to-use-with-echo)), and can pretend to be a Philips Hue bridge
to get first-class integration with Echo ([https://home-
assistant.io/components/emulated_hue/](https://home-
assistant.io/components/emulated_hue/)).

------
CptJamesCook
"What time is it" \-- being able to find out what time it is without looking
at my phone makes it a little easier to go back to sleep. My voice is so
mumbly when I am 90% asleep that I usually have to repeat this 2-3 times,
though!

"Play NPR News"

"Set an alarm for x time"

~~~
RodericDay
my cellphone does these

~~~
err4nt
So does mine! Have you ever met anybody else with a phone that can do these
things? Maybe we should start a club where we can share tips and tricks!

------
alphonsegaston
If you want to build your own, check out this library:

[https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-
ask](https://github.com/johnwheeler/flask-ask)

Found it while browsing HN/new the other day, and it's been fun to play with
so far.

~~~
johnwheeler
author of lib here. thanks for plugging it. glad you enjoy!

------
antoniomika
I made a smart home skill for my dorm room. I didn't have any wifi enabled
lights, but I created a little IR adapter for some RGB LEDs around the room,
and the TV. Ultimately, I was able to ask for the lights in different
settings, control the TV (including setting the channel and changing inputs).
I eventually want to make it able to control some simple aspects of the
Chromecast like the Google home can.

~~~
ReverseCold
I'm emulating Belkin WeMo instead for my lights with a raspberry pi. No Amazon
dev account required and it has native support.

[https://github.com/n8henrie/fauxmo](https://github.com/n8henrie/fauxmo)

(Not my project.)

The one thing I've learned about smart home is if you come up with a cool idea
of how to do it DIY, someone's done it similarly and better. Wrote my own code
for everything and ended up ditching it all for HomeAssistant.

~~~
antoniomika
I wish I would've known about that before I started... I went into it with the
idea of creating a web interface to control everything, and adding in the
voice control was easy because I was already using Google auth for the web
interface. If I end up adding support for more things (buying some cheap RF
controlled switches and creating a module for that), I might go the route to
port everything over.

------
joshuak
Checking my credit card account. Reading my audio books. Playing music.
Listing to Radio. Setting reminders. Calculating things, while doing them.

Telling a bad joke, and then saying "Alexa, start my applause."

------
untog
I own a Google Home and I struggle to answer this question. It can do lots of
simple stuff _sort of_ well. Activating light switches by voice feels
hopelessly inefficient to me when you compare it to just using a light switch
- especially when you factor in the cost of the hardware involved. Playing
music is also fine if you know exactly what you want, but browsing is pretty
terrible. Video is kind of cool ("play show X from Netflix on my TV!") but
controls like pausing, rewind etc are also very difficult without reaching for
the remote you could have used in the first place.

When it's useful it's great. But it feels like a tool trying to find a purpose
still.

~~~
Eridrus
Why is pausing difficult?

~~~
untog
Because I'm then talking over a video I'm supposed to be watching. Volume is a
better example - I'm talking over the video and it isn't even about to stop.
Worse, I'm likely making the request _because I 'm struggling to hear_, and
issuing the voice command only makes it worse.

------
mplewis
Echo is great for info that you need kind-of-right-now, but info that isn't
detailed enough that you need to read it.

My favorite uses are:

* Flash Briefing: Weather and NPR news while I make the morning coffee.

* Weather: How cold is it? I'm about to leave and I need to know if I need a sweater or a coat.

* Set a timer: I'm cooking, and I need a reminder in 10 minutes, but my hands are dirty and my phone is on the table in the other room.

~~~
1_2__3
So I don't mean to be snarky, but what it's useful for is apparently exactly
the same things every other device like this has always been useful for,
nothing more. What you said is 100% identical to what someone with a Chumby
would have said in 2007.

This just kind of fuels. Y skepticism about this kind of product. It's looking
for a problem to solve.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
When I look at the technologies I've dismissed and that then went on to become
big, there's a similar pattern: I didn't adequately weight the firm as well as
the function.

You're right. These are the easy examples because they're kind of universal.
But what _feels_ very different about this is how well and quickly it works.

My wife's 72yr old (and her heavily Tagalog accented English) used Alexa
properly on her first attempt. My 5 yr old daughter wanted one for her room
because she loves playing it so much.

Ease of use and actually freaking working seems like a game changer.

~~~
Nadya
_> Ease of use and actually freaking working seems like a game changer._

I was honestly surprised that Alexa could recognize my voice from across an
entire room, me standing in the hallway, _over_ the music I had playing at
full volume over the built-in speaker with me speaking at a normal level. That
was impressive.

I hate voice technology because it's always been unreliable and shoddy,
meaning I could check things faster myself rather than trying to ask a
computer to check it for me. "What time is it?" \- "What is the time?" "Time
now" "What is the time now?" "Give me the damn time!" Ah forget it. _pulls out
cellphone_

The only issues I've had with Alexa is trying to Wikipedia Japanese-related
things. Alexa seems convinced I'm speaking Spanish - as any attempt to Wiki
something in Japanese gives me a result related to Spain or Mexico.

So we're in complete agreement here. "Actually working" is the game changer.
Coupled with an affordable price (the Echo Dot was like $40 on sale? Back-in-
the day the same device would hardly work and be worth $200~ and had an Xmas
sale of maybe $160~)

------
fake-name
Teach yourself hardware reversing by figuring out how to get shell on the
echo, and (ideally), replace the linux install with your own.

You'll learn a huge amount, and you get the bonus of actively helping subvert
amazon'd horribly creepy surveillance infrastructure.

------
framebit
I'm jumping onto a stale thread here, but to me the best use of the Echo (or
Google Home, etc) is as an accessibility device for the sick and/or disabled.
I got a Google Home for a relative with ALS who is fast losing dexterity in
their hands. It's getting harder day by day for them to operate TV remotes and
touch devices, but now they'll be able to turn the radio on, get news, get
weather, control Chromecast-connected devices, add yogurt to the shopping
list, etc. Lots of little things that they would otherwise need somebody else
to do for them.

------
inthewoods
Linked it to common calendar that my wife and I use for ourselves and the kids
- wonderful for when you get that notice about a doctor's appointment and
don't want to pick up your phone.

Also use it for capturing a shopping list while walking around the kitchen.

------
teddyc
set a timer

ask weather

ask for hours of a local business

play music from Amazon Prime library (asking by album name or playlist name
usually works)

playing audible audio books (my son can control this without any other device
which is cool)

telling knock knock jokes and other kids entertainment

------
bem94
Surveillance capitalism.

~~~
netsharc
I wondered the other day if the Echo could track people who pirate their Prime
shows (e.g. The Grand Tour, which became the most pirated show ever). The show
begins with a "Amazon originals" banner with a particular chime. So all the
Echo needs to do is listen to that chime, and listen for another few seconds
to determine which show it is. Since it's connected to your account, it can
see if you have Prime and if you just started watching the show. If it's not
the case, it can flag you as presumably pirating the show. Even if they don't
do anything evil with it, they can also do metrics of "favorite shows among
pirates".

~~~
konspence
This wouldn't be reliable, it's very plausible it's somebody else's account
being used.

------
RossM
My morning routine consists of asking Alexa:

> Stop

To cancel the alarm

> Ask National Rail to get my commute

The clunkiest of commands - the built-in "get my commute" skill only works for
road commutes. My journey involves an overground and an underground train. The
National Rail skill is good, but has this weird (I think, platform dictated)
trap where you have to tell it "No [I don't want any more info]".

> Do I need an umbrella? / Is it going to rain today?

My experience with the weather skills is hit/miss - I'll get a weather report
but not an estimate answer to "do I need an umbrella" (probably/unlikely would
be fine).

> What time is it?

I don't have a visible clock at the moment, so I ask this repeatedly to keep
track of time.

\--

Overall, the conversational interface feels a bit clunky, and I'll be building
a smart mirror in 2017 because I feel it's a better way to communicate
status-y information. That said, having to ask for info has been a great way
of discovering what information I really want in the morning.

------
wcummings
Playing music. It's still kinda shit for that because search / discovery is so
awkward but it's the only thing I use it for.

~~~
RickS
I was very surprised by this, but had the same experience. The sound is great
for what a small device it is, and the stop/play/volume works great, but it
can't find songs to save its life.

It struggles with words that are very custom (like the group "rae sremmurd")
or that are less common alternates ("clique" is interpreted as "click" and
skews the perceived best match)

It also struggles with abstract instructions like "play the first song from
this album". It doesn't seem to have the context of "this album" and just
starts playing something at random.

~~~
tedmiston
To be fair, the way _Rae Sremmurd_ pronounces Rae Sremmurd isn't even
phonetic. It'd be content if it could get something like The Weeknd.

------
jc4p
Splitting this up comment into my common use cases.

IoT:

All my lights are Phillips Hue. Outside of the Echo I have HomeKit set up to
take care of automatically turning the lights off when I leave my apartment's
geofencing zone. When I arrive home from work, I really enjoy opening my door
and saying "Alexa, all lights on" followed with ripping my headphones out of
my phone and saying "Alexa, Play Spotify" to have her transfer the Spotify
session over (more on this in the next section).

It sounds really silly when I look at it now, but honestly when I'm traveling
and I stay at a hotel or something, I definitely miss not having to think
about turning all the lights off. It's an extra task that's very lightweight,
but it feels good to not have to think about. Before I had the HomeKit
compatible Phillips Hue bridge I said "Alexa, all lights off" when leaving my
apartment every day. That too is a lot easier to do than recognizing that one
of my lights is on and needing to go to the room to turn the switch manually.

Music:

I have a real sound system in my apartment but it's so much easier to just
have the Echo play music, and it sounds pretty good.

If you use Spotify, you can use the Spotify app to directly stream to your
Echo. You can also just be listening to an album or playlist on your phone or
Spotify on your computer, say "Alexa play Spotify", and it'll pick up on the
same part of the same song with the same queued up next songs. The Amazon Echo
competitors I've tried don't do this, they start a new Spotify session and
play whatever they feel like (e.g. Google Home defaults to the first playlist
in your playlists list.)

Cooking:

I rely on the Echo while cooking a lot. Everything from "Alexa set a timer for
20 minutes" while roasting some potatoes to having it do the calculations for
reducing the recipe's ingredients by 1/3 since I'm cooking for one and it's a
recipe for three. I like cooking with the Echo a lot more than with the
competitors because on the Echo you have a giant blue ring that shows you if
it heard you or not. I burnt my sweet potatoes the first time I tried cooking
with the Google Home because it has a "face" that faces a specific direction
and my oven is outside of that field of view, so I didn't know that it didn't
hear my "Okay Google" and set no timer.

API wise:

The "Skills" themselves are really easy to make, but I wish the communication
for using your custom skills wasn't so clunky. The only thing that I've
actually made with their real API is a simple interface for Halo achievements.

My xbox is in my living room near my Alexa and my friends and I routinely
would see an achievement pop up like "Top Gun" and want to know what it meant,
but since we're in the middle of the game we can't check now and we'd forget
after the game.

In less than 30 minutes I was able to write some JavaScript in the Chrome
console to scrape the list of achievement name and descriptions for the Halo 5
website, then make a Skill out of those. Since the list of medals is pretty
static, this is a set-once and forget operation.

Now when I'm playing on my Xbox, if an interesting achievement pops up I can
say "Hey Alexa, Ask Halo what's Killtacular?" and it responds with the
description. The "Alexa, Ask Halo" is the clunkiness I mean. I wish I could
just say "In Halo, whats Killtacular?"

For what it's worth, the Skills editor has a really decent flow. Here's what
the Skill I'm describing looks like in the interface:
[http://i.imgur.com/8VPbt0v.png](http://i.imgur.com/8VPbt0v.png)

------
TYPE_FASTER
I hooked it up to my Logitech Harmony remote, so we can tell Alexa to "turn on
the TV" and it turns on the TV and amp. When Sonos integration is completed,
2017 is the plan I think, we'll use it for that.

------
damon_c
How much does Jupiter weigh? How tall is Kareem Abdul Jabaar? How far is it to
Los Angeles? Set a timer for 15 minutes. Set another timer for 8 minutes. Play
my discover weekly playlist on Spotify.

------
allard
Every few months I ask it the mass of a proton.

~~~
YCode
That's hilarious, especially when she said it again in kilograms.

------
ww520
"Schedule and set up a webex meeting with Jack, Jane, Janet, and Joe."

------
ausjke
just a timer and alarm clock, that's about it.

------
wagecuck
Allowing corporations and governments to spy on you.

~~~
ripken
So you use a flip phone then?

~~~
CodyReichert
More like, so you don't use a phone then?

------
Tmp_login
Thought Police. Doubleplus ungood investigation of thought crimes.

