I have an Echo and I love it. The skills SDK is one of the best parts about it. The most common arguments against Echo though are that it's just your phone's voice service, but with less features and in a fixed location.
I have no doubts the tech could facilitate something similar on Google and Apple's platforms but, afaik, building comparable functionality isn't currently possible (at least with Siri)—can you add arbitrary commands to either?
EDIT: the quickest interaction I could get away with was, "Alexa, start a phone call with {name}". No back and forth. One statement and the echo simply confirms (which was optional).
I agree the ability to add arbitrary commands into Echo is a great feature, reminds me of ifttt quite a bit, which is usually a bit clunky yet very powerful.
I pay ~$0.50/day for the peace of mind that I can call the police from any major room in my house, whether or not my cell phone is near me, or even has a charged battery for that matter. Also, that emergency services would immediately know my address when calling from my landline, so I could do as little as just call and hang up to get them there in an emergency. There are many benefits to maintaining a landline, and (cheap) cost is one of them.
You know you can cancel your phone service and still call 911 in many states (including the most populous ones)?
But yeah, in this case, there are big-button landline phones with speed dial.
In this particular case, we've tried a big button phone. The problems with it are two fold: first, cataracts impact her straight forward vision and she's not able to remember button placement. Second, it's not uncommon for her to forget what she intended to do before getting there. The simple act of walking to the phone to initiate a call is enough time for her to forget who she wanted to call in the first place. At least in this case, she can act on the thought immediately and be reminded when she gets to the ringing phone.
[^1]: full disclosure: I can toggle my lights with my Echo. I use z-wave light switches though so people that aren't nerds like me don't have to personify the appliances in my apartment.
> Shopping lists, weather, home automation
Siri is not working so well when music plays, and I wish I could easily add skills to it, so if they've cracked that then it's something.
All the big players have done a good job of speech to text (at least for USA English—saw an Englishman have to break into his best John Wayne impression for an on-stage demonstration about a month ago). But the Echo hardware does a great job of isolating your voice and the platform allows us to write skills for it quite easily.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the other guys make steps in a similar direction if the Echo continues to succeed.
The Echo is still pretty "dumb" as soon as you deviate from fairly precise commands that it understands but the voice recognition itself is far and away the best I've seen.
The platform aspect is interesting even if I find it mostly still pretty gimicky. But it's got potential.
I think that's really its killer feature. You are in the pantry and notice you're out of basil, you say "Alexa, add basil to my shopping list" and it's done. No pulling out your phone, no unlock screens, you just say what you want to happen and it works.
[EDIT: I have an iPhone 6. Apparently the latest models don't need to be plugged in.]
Haven't tried it myself, so can't comment on the range.
That said, that's enough of a kick for me to actually clean it up and publish some stuff. I'll email you when I throw pieces of it online (in the next day or two). At the very least, I wasn't able to find a lib that performs all the steps Amazon asks of you to validate the request so I wrote a utility library and hapi auth plugin for that. I'll release those.
Made a quick demonstration video: https://youtu.be/TkVnhp4F1xk
The thing is, it's a natural interface with a decent interaction model. Keyboards, mice, etc, have all become second nature to most of us but they're still not truly natural. The Echo feels like one of the first voice-based interfaces that isn't a complete gimmick. And the hardware does an amazing job of perking up when I say the wake word and picking me out of a room full of noise.
What really convinced me of it's value was when I started digging in to writing a skill for it. My grandfather passed recently and my grandmother has horrible eyesight. I wrote a skill that enables my grandmother to ask to start a phone call. She is then asked who she would like to call. Once she says a name, she receives a call on her landline, is greeted, and the call is forwarded to the intended recipient. There was a small learning curve ("you can't just say, 'call John,' you have to ask her to 'start a phone call'") but it has worked and has provided an often confused elderly woman with poor eyesight a straightforward way of connecting with her loved ones.