Off the top of my head from last night while cooking dinner:

* "hey google, add olive oil to the grocery list"

* "hey google, set a timer for 15 minutes for rice"

* "hey google, play some Christmas music"

* "hey google, how much time is left on the rice"

I could have fumbled with pulling out my iphone for all of these, but I would have had to stop prepping dinner, wash my hands, and then mess with the phone. Instead, it just fits in the flow of what I am doing.

"play some Christmas music" doesn't work so well if you want to use Spotify -- it has to become "play some Christmas music from Spotify", which feels awkward.

"order X" defaults to Amazon, where I might want to voice-order groceries using Instacart or order a pizza using GrubHub/Uber Eats/whatever.

Also, your phone may be deep in a pocket, in a coat, or in your purse in the other room. Echo/Home is right there in the kitchen waiting for you.

Lastly, you have no battery worries. Want 12+ hours of music in the kitchen? No problem.

In Canada this just doers a google search, whereas "play Bruno Mars" fires up Spotify as expected.

I think older people love the idea of interacting with a computer with voice - it's way easier for someone to get a quick answer with voice if they're otherwise unfamiliar with navigating a smart phone or laptop (plus the added Star Trek "Computer, locate Commander Riker" aspect - with that added feeling of nostalgia, maybe).

EDIT: changed words for clarity

I do find it funny that the tech from a fictional post-scarcity society is being pioneered in the real world by a merchandise company (Amazon) and an advertising company (Google). Meanwhile, Microsoft is lagging behind despite Cortana (in my experience) having the best voice recognition of all the services, Siri included.

Most of the 'skills' (an appstore with absolutely zero quality control) are useless or extremely limited shovelware hidden behind archaic verbal rituals. I say verbal rituals because what you might consider a normal request, such as "Alexa, how much is Tesla stock selling for?", turns into the complex "Alexa, ask Cool ACME Stock Master what the current buying price of Tesla stock is".

It very much appears that instead of being able to infer what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely specific strings to extremely specific corresponding processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely frustrating as a user.

Using Alexa becomes natural. Re-phrasing the same thing thirty times until you get the intended result with the required phrasing moreso.

Really the only reason to buy it is so that you can control your Lifx lights and listen to streaming music on demand. The latter is quite good as long as you don't mind mediocre speakers or sound quality.

All of that said...there is, however, something to be said about the novelty factor of being able to ask for very basic dictionary / wikipedia lookups.

  It very much appears that instead of being able to infer
  what you mean, Alexa mostly just matches extremely
  specific strings to extremely specific corresponding
  processes. Understandable as a developer, extremely
  frustrating as a user.

If someone says "Alexa, we need more bread" how do you figure out which skill to delegate that to when the 'amazon', 'ebay', 'ocado', and 'asda' skills all report they can order products matching that query, the 'music' and 'video' skills report they can stream content matching that query, and the 'grocery list' skill reports it can add that to a grocery list?

If I say that, what I really mean is "Look at Ocado and Asda, if I have a delivery coming in the near future add my most-ordered full size loaf of bread to the order if it's not already present, otherwise add it to my grocery list and remind me when I'm leaving work tomorrow"

And that behaviour is bread-specific. If I'm ordering beer I want different behaviour - and if I'm ordering something personal, maybe I don't want my search broadcast to every retailer just to check if they can help with it.

> Alexa, we need more bread

< Should I order it through Ocado, Asda, Ebay or Amazon?

> Always use Asda for bread ("unless I tell you otherwise" is implied)

So I don't think we can really generalize Alexa's failings to the entire space.

The answer to this is: No.

The Echo and Google Smarthome don't require you to take it out of your pocket to interact with it. Walk in the door and it's listening. It sounds like a small difference but it is huge.

I think voice interfaces are very easily dismissed as for the lazy people, or a gimmick. Until you start using it on a daily basis. Then you start to realize how stupid it is to not be able to turn on your lights while both hands are overloaded with grocery bags (because two trips to the car is just never done!)

Stumbling in the dark waiting for Echo to process your command versus just having the lights turn on when you enter a room.

I suppose if the motion sensors had some extreme AI and could detect when I would want the lights on or off and make that decision before I verbalized it. But I'd probably want the voice interface as an override when the AI gets the wrong answer.

I resisted for a long time, then bought an Echo, and I loved that so much that I bought a dot, then another, then a 3 pack for my kids for Christmas. It's great for timers, alarms, playing music, news, browsing Amazon, and so much more.

Being portable helps, especially with speakers that work so much better than phone speakers do.

FWIW, I'm a 38 year-old father of 3. I think that if you bought one, you would find yourself delighted (and surprised) by how fun it can be.

"Alexa, order a _____."

"I found 7 items matching ___..." and proceeds to go through the list.

Last night's tasks:

- Got into a dark house with my hands full of bags, "Hey Alexa turn on the living room lights. Play blues music."

- Taking my shoes off, "Hey Alexa what's the news"

- Cooking, "Hey Alexa what's 12 fluid ounces in cups. Add garlic to my shopping list."

- On the way out the door, "Hey Alexa ask NYC Transit what's the status of the 4 train"

- Going to sleep, "Hey Alexa turn off the bedroom light. Play white noise. Loop."

- Wake up in the middle of the night "Hey Alexa what time is it? What time is my first meeting tomorrow? Cancel my alarm for 7:30AM. Set an alarm for 8AM.". All without shining a screen in my face, which can disrupt sleep cycles.

There's a few glitches (sometimes the speech clips, had to reboot it once or twice) but speech recognition is decent (I have a soft-spoken English accent which challenges some systems). Also it's great when alone but kind of awkward talking to the machine when you have company.

I can see a lot of mundane tasks switching over to ambient, speech-based interfaces in the future. I'll be adding Alexa Skills development to my skillset over Christmas.

I've seen a bunch of people mention use cases in their bedrooms, which is great, but they seem to fall apart when you're not single since you don't want the speaker waking your partner up, which is sad since I would like to know what time it is without shining a light in my eyes.

Most of those devices just don't have speakers/microphones cable of working reliably at room scale in real world conditions. They've certainly gotten better over the years but I doubt they will ever match the reliability of physically larger devices purpose built for the task.

> how many people have 50$ wifi connected bulbs? and isn't the most convenient way to turn on a light switch still just physically flipping the switch?

I don't think this is the killer app for the Echo but home automation is becoming pretty mainstream these days. Enough so that stores like Lowes, Home Depot, Target, etc stock bulbs, switchable outlets, starter kits, etc.

> isn't the most convenient way to turn on a light switch still just physically flipping the switch?

Not if you have your hands full or the switch happens to be on the other side of a dark room. Home automation is a novelty at first but once that wears off it becomes just another tool not very different from a light switch

Given I gave the Echo I had away, I'm hoping the next iteration of the Echo or Google Home device has the $2 of components required to implement this functionality so that it just works out of the box.

It's crazy how quickly you get used to having it there. When I'm at a hotel or a friends house I almost get annoyed that it's not standing by for simple stuff like just reminding me to decouple from a task in a half hour - "Alexa set a timer for 30 minutes"

Lastly its super convenient if you are super engrossed in something but also want food. You can just yell "Alexa tell dominos to order my favorite". No going to the site or anything just one sentence and 20 minutes later you have pizza.

The echo is always in the same exact spot, so there's no hunting for it, never a need for hands. It just works

Lights are still a gimmick.

I also like the idea of "authenticating" via being present in my home. If my in laws are watching my son while I step out for a few minutes - they can talk to Alexa as easily as I can.

I was most excited to hook the Echo up to home automation, but I haven't yet because the special bulbs and plug adapters are too expensive.

Instead, my wife and I use it heavily for:

* Music: Playing music immediately to get kids jumping around, when hosting people over for dinner, whatever. We have a portable Bose speaker, but it's not nearly as convenient.

* Timers: We set these a lot to multitask. Filling the bath, cooking, whatever.

* Weather: While getting ourselves and the kids ready in the morning, we usually ask about the weather for today to figure out which sweater/coat combinations need to happen.

* Shopping: We are constantly running out of things. We can quickly say "Add ___ to the shopping list." Even if we don't actually order from Amazon, later I can pull up the list on my phone. Plus, using IFTTT, the items get copied to my iOS Reminders list, which is shared with my wife.

where does the music come from when you ok google it? I don't have a sonos or whatever set up in my house, so I use my Echo for this (the speaker is excellent) and playing spotify, playing tunein radio, playing pandora, setting kitchen timers when cooking and getting weather reports.

yeah you can get these in a million other ways, but it's just convenient to have in the kitchen.

I have truly no idea why people buy these. I'm a tech nerd, I usually am an early adopter of newfangled technology. But this? I literally couldn't justify spending $5 on it.

I think these type of products may end up being better for the less tech obsessed. I'm thinking of getting one in the next year or so because I don't have my phone on me at all times when I'm at home and and I think that's true for a lot of people who aren't hyper-connected and attached to their phones all the time. It's nice to have access to all that stuff just in the house but without feeling like you're attached to a device at all times.

Also binary thinking, people in the ankle bracelet tribe literally cannot comprehend people who don't carry their phone with them everywhere 24x7 and vice versa, and echo is incredibly useful to members of the non-ankle bracelet tribe.

(ankle bracelet as in giant house arrest GPS tracker thingie, not shiny gold high fashion)

I have another interesting problem in that I have a newer phone that uses huge amounts of power to do the simplest things, and aftermarket wireless Qi charger, and Qi only provides USB1.0 slow charging rates of power, so even with my phone laying on the charger (s, I have multiple chargers) the battery slowly dies if I play music or podcasts or anything, whereas the echo is ac powered and I don't feel like I threw out $1 into the battery replacement fund every time I charge it because the echo is always plugged in. It feels cheaper to use the echo, less hassle. I can afford to replace my phone battery but its a huge inconvenient PITA.

Powered on 100% of the time is the difference. The listening takes too much power for most devices still whereas echo's are always wired and listening. There are probably differences in the software as well but thats a big one. I guess the speaker is larger as well. Kinda like a beats pill audio quality (limited by size) with n always on mic.

But I think you are right, it's the small improvement over the phone, you always know where it is, and the microphones are designed for large area reception over phone microphones which are generally optimizes for closer sound sources. These small differences are valuable, even though you can get 90% of the functionality by just keeping your phone in the open.

I have Echoes in the bedroom and kitchen/living room and a Tap that floats.

NB: I work for AWS but am just an general Alexa fanboy (and I am definitely a lot older than 27).

Other than that, I don't know. I tried to get it to play a podcast today, but it wouldn't.

Only if you have your phone on you, and at least I don't carry mine around at home.

I like to ask Alexa what time it is without turning on the tv or looking for my phone. Whem I'm going to the bathroom, I'll tell Alexa to play the news. I add things to the shopping list, check the weather, set alarms for certain times...

For $40 (the dot) it's worth it. I'm hoping to save some money with a smart thermostat. And I'm hoping Google will put out something like the dot because I hear it's much more conversation (I just don't want to plunk down $140 or whatever it is for the Google Home right now).