Re:Ask HN: How do you use Amazon Echo?
by echelon on Sunday May 15, 2016 @01:14PM
(#11701722)
I use it to set alarms, control my lighting, and check the weather. I find it kind of useless for music since it doesn't have a lot of the bands I listen to (it only plays "samples"), and it usually cycles the worst tracks first for some reason. I wish it would integrate with Google Play or have a non-Cloud (ie. local network) API. I've written my own home automation gateway (turn on the tv, set mood lighting, control blinds), but I'm unwilling to open it up to Amazon's cloud.
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Do you have Amazon Prime? My Echo automatically plays from the Prime Music library which seems to have all the music I listen to (full songs, not samples). I've also integrated mine with Spotify though since that's where all my playlists are.
I do. It can't find "Django Django", "Cloud Control", etc. There are dozens of others, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
Even if it did have a full library, it nearly always picks terrible, garbage songs from artists when shuffling them. I just told it to shuffle "Foals", and I don't think I've ever heard this song before. I don't like it, whatever it is.
How do you control your lighting with Echo?
A number of my devices are on WeMo switches, and Echo integrates with the product line. I can tell it to "turn <device or group name> on/off".
I wrote a Rust library for controlling WeMo devices as well. It's in a rough shape, but it does what I want. I use it for more fine-grained control.