>you can do most of this stuff on an iPhone with Siri, but this kind of button-less voice control is just better

Have you tried the newer Android phones with the same kind of button-less voice control?

No, I haven't. How do they work if you can't look at the screen? Siri tends to be bad about that. Like "how's the weather" gets a response of "Here's the forecast:" and shows it on the screen.

One of the things with Echo is that it doesn't have a screen, so everything has voice responses.

If Google understands the content it's presenting, like weather, it will read it out loud to you. If a wikipedia article is the first result, it will read the entire first paragraph out loud.

google now will try it's best to answer questions out loud if they were asked that way. Your weather example works, but in general it's inconsistent enough that i can't assume it will give me an audible answer, and I usually limit myself to speaking only questions or commands that i know to work.

> google now will try it's best to answer questions out loud if they were asked that way.

And its a fairly amazing technical achievement, but its still got a long way to go -- if you ask when a business opens, it will show you the hours but not tell you the time it opens, even though Google has enough semantic understanding of the open/close times to tell you on the results page with the hours that it is "closing soon" or "closed now" if that is the case.

I have the Moto X 2014 running Andrdoid 5.0, and it does not compare. The X rarely understands anything I say, even after training multiple times. It's also extremely slow to respond when it does understand. The X takes around 15 seconds to tell me the weather, while the Echo has it right away.