Those are the two biggest differences, for sure.

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.

It's impressive how some Google services are worse for other languages. It is better understanding my poor spoken English than my native language. Even the simple dictionary doesn't a lot of basic conjugations that doesn't exist in English, like the for the pronoun "We". These subtle differences in technology are a great lever for English speaking countries.

There can be music playing and I can shout across the room to my Echo to add something to a shopping list and it gets it right most of the time. I use an old iPhone to play music on my stereo system. I'm lucky if I can get "Hey Siri, STOP" to work when music is playing even if I walk right up to it.

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 haven't used an iPhone in a while, does Siri have a wake word? Does it work when the phone is in standby? Android has "Ok Google" but it doesn't work when in standby and doesn't work from the distance that Echo does.

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.

As of the latest iPhone 6, you don't even need to have the iPhone plugged. You trained Siri a few times by saying a few sentences and later you can say "hey Siri" and it will start listening. Apple added some new chip which will be listening for that key sentence and will only react to your voice, not someone else. So no more funny joke from co-worker nor Podcast and in addition low battery impact.

As much as I want to like this feature, I've found it less than impressive. It rarely picks me up on the first try, so I find myself shouting a very clearly-enunciated "HEY SIRI" a few times, which kind of kills the magic. About 50% of the time I just end up walking over to the phone and using my hands to accomplish whatever I was trying to do. I'm not trying this from far away or in a noisy environment, either. Admittedly an anecdote, but still frustrating.

If it's plugged in, you can enable an iPhone to respond to "Hey Siri" as a wake phrase.

[EDIT: I have an iPhone 6. Apparently the latest models don't need to be plugged in.]

It does ("Hey Siri"), but it doesn't work from far away or when it's in your pocket. Echo definitely has the edge in that respect.

"Hey Siri" on iPhone 6s according to http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/206240/why-is-alway...

Haven't tried it myself, so can't comment on the range.

Prior to the 6S the phone had to be plugged in for the wake word ("Hey Siri") to work, but as of the iPhone 6S you can do it when running from battery. As you say, the microphone is not particular good at distance.