The ad-hoc instant intercom is also a HUGE win. In the 50s and 60s, all the fancy houses on TV had an intercom (didn't the Brady Bunch?). The intercom seemed to just fade away.

However, I would MUCH rather say "Alexia, tell upstairs that 'its time for dinner'", and it to be replayed upstairs. Rather than walking into the next room and yelling up the stairs like a neanderthal.

>However, I would MUCH rather say "Alexia, tell upstairs that 'its time for dinner'", and it to be replayed upstairs. Rather than walking into the next room and yelling up the stairs like a neanderthal.

I struggle to find to the words to express just how absurd this sounds to me. I must be getting old.

Not old enough. I live in a house with a dumbwaiter so late night snacks can easily be sent back to the kitchen with a click of a button.

Other things that were great, and I now miss---vaccum tubes in offices. Sure you don't need them to send messages, but if you want to send anything physical, however small, now you have to walk.

Oh and I certainly miss the bell system, where you could stand in the living room and ring a bell in any room in the house to tell the occupants that dinner was ready.

So what you are saying is you prefer a dumbwaiter over a smart home.

I have to agree with the grandparent -- intercoms were quite common in houses in the 60's and 70's. Then they fell out of fashion, possibly because of cordless phones?

Most multi-handset cordless phones have a built-in intercom that will ring all the other handsets and establish a loopback call. But I bet not many people even have those any more ...

So, I would say this is not so much new as retro. True old-timers would recognize this use case right away.

My house in Japan has an intercom system that connects to the front doorbell camera and the shower water temp control panel. There are portable audio/video monitors that you can use to speak to any of these nodes. This is pretty common in new homes here.

> Rather than walking into the next room and yelling up the stairs like a neanderthal.

The main use case I had in my mind is when my son is sleeping, shouting is undesirable. It would just be really convienent.

It doesn't support ad-hoc networking, so although it would be technically possible I imagine the only way for a third-party to implement it would be to record & store on one; download & play on the other.

That said, I think the bigger problem would be triggering it to playback the recording - unless I'm missing something, they just respond to spoken commands.

Which would mean at best you could use it like a voicemail service: "Alexa, play me any messages sent from downstairs".

there are rumors about spoken push notifications http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/9/8/12848586/ama...

FYI: I wrote an app that does that on a Raspberry Pi / Mac: https://github.com/i2shar/express-text-to-speech

A simple tip to improve your life and those close to you (just a little); Never shout in this situation. Take the time to walk up the stairs and impart the message with normal volume, courtesy and kindness.

Growing up, my parents' house actually had a small business telephone system installed, including intercom functionality. We used it all the time. Definitely for things like "dinner time!", but also for things like my mom telling my brothers and I that it's time to get up without her having to get up first.

>Rather than walking into the next room and yelling up the stairs like a neanderthal

'My Cave is so big I can't even shout to the end. . . '

The question is not can I shout, rather should I shout. I shant hazard a kerfuffle in the nursery, or disruption in the conservatory.

My house is nearly 120 feet wide end to end, split across three levels. My wife & I use IM/SMS to communicate from the extremities. The struggle is real.

In my parents house we had an intercom - it was just a dumb telephone switch which my dad bought second hand for cheap, and then few telephones around the house - so he would actually call me from downstairs for dinner(it was very annoying at the time :P)

My parents fancy phone had an intercom in the early 2000s and god it was handy. I truly miss this but not enough to justify setting up a house phone.

You can even do some very low level security that way right? Like "Alexa tell me if you hear a loud noise in the basement while I'm at work"

This could be extremely useful:

"Alexa, if you hear my wife and the neighbor having sex, file divorce paperwork, and get me on the next flight to Barbados."

If you can figure out how to pipe commands together, this is maybe not impossible.

<Some pattern recognition app> | <docusign> | <priceline app>

Don't forget to add at the end:

| <gym online registration> | <facebook api delete>

The trick is getting your neighbor to call your wife Alexa, to trigger the Dot to wake up and listen.

Oh Alexa!!!

Wait, why isn't it possible? Isn't one of the features of the new Dot that it can recognize which room you are in and only respond with the one in that room? Even if it doesn't work as an intercom, something as simple as "Alexa, tell my wife in room X it's dinner time", then it just records it and plays it like a voicemail up there would be great.

awww snap! that is a great idea! "Alexia notify me when my instant pot beeps"

That my friend is the next level!

I don't think you're going to get that functionality until your instant pot has Wi-Fi.

Actually most of my requests can be accomplished with a generic system. My instant pot makes a beep, my washer makes a beep, my dryer makes a beep, my dishwasher makes a beep, my oven makes a beep when it's at temp. It's like a universal signal in appliances. If alexia can understand a range of electronic beeps, then it can work. There's no need for a complex protocol and new appliances.

Ironically this is a poster for complex protocol that seems easy. Consider the difficulties in distinguishing beeps.

There's important contextual information here. If I ask Alexa to tell me when the oven is preheated the next beep is probably going to be the oven.

If she's wrong it's not the end of the world. You don't need 100% accuracy for the solution to be useful. In fact you probably need to attend to whatever else was beeping anyways.

It's crappy UX.

1. You tell Alexa to let you know when the oven is preheated.

2. She hears the washing machine beep and tells you the oven is preheated.

3. You come back, find that the oven is still not ready.

4. You conclude it's probably the washing machine and go check it out, forgetting to tell Alexa to let you know when the oven is preheated.

If you simplify it to just "An appliance beeped in {room}" you avoid that problem as the laundry and kitchen would be different rooms at least, in many cases.

Often in Europe they are in the same place. YMMV

Sure not every home is the same, but I was particularly responding to the concern about running to the wrong room first.

It's the same UX I have with my visiting aunt. We've managed with it just fine for a long time.

It's a case of different expectations. You expect an "intelligent machine" to get it right and you're exasperated when it gets it wrong.

It's kind of like saying that using a rotary phone UI on your smartphone would have been okay, because we've managed with it just fine for a long time back when we had rotary phones.

Even in a limited form its still something new that we've never had before. For people that lived alone there was simply no other option but to be nearby to hear the beep. The whole point of Alexa is to have something that can take over some of the things another human would normally have helped you with.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

What if the audio pitches were outside human detection and distinct enough patterns?

Then it would work better, although you could still get false positives from neighbors' appliances when your windows and their windows are open. That, however, is completely beside the point.

The point is that the audio pitches aren't outside human detection and don't have distinct enough patterns right now. Changing pitch and patterns would require appliance manufacturers' support, at which point you might as well go with mature, well-defined and well-implemented solutions, such as WiFi connectivity, rather than defining and implementing your own protocol based on audio pitches and patterns.

I understand that, but wouldn't a pattern generator that selects from a series of pitches and a larger series of patterns produce sufficiently unique enough items to ensure that the probability of overlap to be virtually null?

It's just a thought, like I'm against the whole thing in general, but it seems like this is doable without needing a lot of support

To be clear. I was not trying to say this is not something that should or could be done. Just that it wasn't as simple as it sounded. The "simple protocol" of listening for the correct beep is actually fairly complicated.

Maybe not the end of the world, but surely a fire hazard?

An appliance's timer is not a safety feature. They are required to have their own fault detection and automaticity shutdown.

Probably only for a false negative, rather than a false positive; and surely the probability of the former can be minimised by cranking up the sensitivity (and not being picky about what counts as a beep).

A major amazon echo marketing component is seven directional microphones. It should be easy to stick an echo on the wall such that left is the washer and right is the dryer or whatever.

Also despite sounding similar to tone deaf humans one probably runs at 4001.342 Hz and the other at 3999.114 Hz which likely sounds the same to me, but to a computer is likely very obvious.

Sounds like a problem that would lend itself well to machine learning

I would think manually training your Echo would be easier than waiting for it to learn by amassing a large number of beeps (and trying to infer patterns from timestamps and your presence/absence). I would rather say something like "Alexa, listen to this notification sound, save it as 'oven done'." Then in future to be able to just say "Alexa, do VERB when 'oven done'".

Alternatively, Alexa could ask "I just heard a ding, was that your dishwasher?" and maybe compare against a database of known devices.

Not easy, but do you think it's more difficult than speech recognition?

And also the difficulties in distinguishing an appliance beep from what only sounds like an appliance beep, such as a truck reversing in front of your home.

I'd think a computer would be great at distinguishing unique beeps from each other. It'd just have to know which ones come from which named appliances, and that's something that could easily be crowdsourced.

They make a bluetooth one, IIRC, so that's not as crazy as you might think.