My father picked one up via Prime a couple of months ago, and I have been impressed with its ability to recognize different voices - mine, but also my five year old son's.
Likewise. The voice recognition is the best by far. 100x better than Xbox One (well, it isn't hard to beat Xbox; it's voice recognition is useless), and I felt it's even better than Siri. My wife doesn't speak to it (her?) much, but the few times she tried it didn't have any problems. Will explore more.
The real potential will happen if/when Amazon opens its API. The ability to plug Echo natively to other systems and services (household appliances, websites, trello, x.ai, etc). They just launched integration with IFTTT, which is a first step, but there's so much more that could be done with a true open API.
