Will these be networked together? For instance, if my washer finishes can Alexa tell me? Or if I want to tell something to my wife up stairs, can I ask Alexa to tell her?
Also, I know it's not possible... but something I wish I could do in the SDK, I want to ask Alexa (which sits on my counter) to listen for my instant pot to beep, and than tell me. Sometimes I walk away, and don't hear it.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'".
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.
At this point I buy everything with my American Express. The amount of extras they give you is just crazy. Between saving 6% on grocery, 3% on gas, extended warranties, credit on utility bills, and other random deals. It's basically a no-brainer. Assuming of course you're responsible, and pay it off every month.
I've been slowly switching everything over. I've been flying a lot too so getting a delta branded amex is really tempting for all the miles and such. Besides the extended warranties they give you, the travel aid is also a huge benefit. Instead of dealing with the airline I just give amex a call and they deal with it.
Many AMEX cards are not credit cards, they are charge cards, and supposed to be paid in full every month. Get one of these. Won't prevent mistakes but will remove the association between credit and money that many people have.
Integration with Domino's Pizza is a real win. If you're eating two to three deliveries a day, those few minutes of friction are costing you hours a year, never mind the overhead of the mental context switch. Buying this product is, in effect, adding quality years to your lifespan.
But, it's not hard to see how this functionality can be extrapolated: One day you ask Alexa for items off Amazon and a drone drops them off on your doorstep.
Think about all the pieces involved in that: The hardware and software design of Echo/Alexa, Amazon's distribution network built out over years, FAA lobbying to get the drone flying.
I'm with you. When they launch, to demonstrate the functionality, they need some functions, which means partners. Obviously there are near infinite applications of "Alexa, ask X to do Y". Zapier and Iffft have made entire businesses out of a much more annoying way to do this.
I think its understood that "ordering pizza" is just polite conversation for "Alexa activate emergency toilet paper delivery" while you're sitting in the bathroom cursing whoever used up the TP without ordering more.
I would buy one of these in an instant if it could control a Roku without me having to my own server and could control my infrared TV/sound bar. I can't believe how I still have so many remotes.
It does help. A lot. It's easily the best option out there. It's still just really frustrating to have to buy a $150 device that's more expensive than any of the disparate devices I am trying to control in the first place (save the TV). That said, given today's state of things, it's worth it.
I have a redmi note 3 Pro phone that has an IR blaster that I can programme for all the TVs in my house, I assume it will also work on sounds bars or anything else with IR.
Amazon may just be the 800lb gorilla that has enough man-hours and computing power to finally integrate all the disparate APIs into a single platform. And their device doesn't cost very much
They're punting though. After a triggering phrase is said it hands off a string to the API associated with the phrase. So, no natural language processing unless the API does it. Users have to be trained to say particular triggering phrases.
Not only are "normal people" - non HN-readers, that is - going to see through this anyway, but even if not, what's wrong with:
1 FREE Dot for every 5 you buy!
How is that not a better UX?
It seems so obvious, and yet this happens repeatedly - even from a company like Amazon, which I imagine has this tagline run past a fair number of people before it goes live.
If you see that if you buy 5 and get 1 free, you are now thinking about how great having 6 in your house would be.
What's this? Buy 10 get 2 free? Now you are thinking about getting 12. That's now putting your find on the 12 vs 6. So now you may think 12 is too many, but 6 is good.
Another trick I see in grocery stores is a get 2 for $2 deal. This tells you nothing about the price of 1 but people assume getting 2 is some sort of deal and buy more than they need.
I see them use odd numbers around here for the Buy X for X price. Especially with canned goods. Buy 6 for 4.50. Normal price might only be 80 cents so the savings isn't as good as it sounds. My guess is they're banking on people not knowing simple math or being afraid of large numbers. Example, coke likes to go on sale 3 for 11. The other trick I've seen a lot recently is stores showing the price per ounce instead of per unit. Before it would say the price of a 12 pack is 3.66 with the deal but now it's like .13/oz.
Anecdote time! Had an incident at a shop with my SO where we did the math and realized that the 'Deal' price was more than buying 2x of the individual package (it was something small but I forget what it was) . Someone screwed up...
One aspect about this that did not sit well was that bluetooth speakers will not work if they use security as "Bluetooth speakers requiring PIN codes are not supported." an aspect that puts me off. For example a neighbor got a branded speaker with the usual extra's like mic and ability to work with phones and it had no PIN code and I demonstrated how anybody can connect and indeed record using that built in mic.
So I hope that improves though you can just use a wired speaker, which would be somewhat better anyhow.
What's new about the 2nd generation, besides price?
One thing I'd really like is to be able to configure the Alexa voice to play back through both the speaker and aux output, since sometimes I turn my speakers off.
Also, if multiple Dots in the same household can work together as a Sonos-like system that would be awesome.
'
At the very least if two Dots hear the same voice commands hopefully only one (the closer one?) will respond.
As someone who bought the original dot at twice the price, I wondered the same thing.
They are cutting us a break, though:
"Something just for you
As a customer who purchased the previous–generation Echo Dot, you can get a $10 Alexa Shopping credit when you order the All-New Echo Dot using Alexa Shopping. Order today through October 20 and a $10 Alexa Shopping credit will be applied to your account within one week after your new Echo Dot has shipped."
They aren't really cutting us a break though. In order to take advantage of the offer, we have to buy the new dot and then purchase something else from them. They lose nothing, and gain everything. A break would be $10 off the new dot.
> unless you never buy anything from Amazon ever again
Exactly my point. You have to buy something else to take advantage of the offer. That's not a break - it's like a BOGO slap in the face for 1st gen owners.
Another thing I thought of: There are a lot of people who didn't know they were "early adopters" until yesterday. The 1st gen was marketed as "available until sold out", adding urgency to the purchase. It just keeps getting better and better (read worse and worse). I will very seriously consider further purchases of Amazon products, so they will definitely lose money over this.
Original Echo was insanely overpriced relative to BOM costs. Plus now that they have a big volume they've probably negotiated better deals for their cost-down design components.
Nope. I worked on it, the retail price was under the BOM cost. When it launched it was heavily discounted though.
Re: volume, the original part was an OMAP3 which ceased production creating a supply nightmare. The new part is shared with other products, so the cost should be low.
My Alexa products would be so much more useful if I could push things to them. Like even if you just gave me a way to subscribe my echo/dot to an SNS topic.
I could do so many awesome things when combined with all the AWS buttons that I've won.
Push a button, make the echo say "dinner is ready!". Put a button outside and when someone pushes it say "someone's at the door!"
People keep saying this, but you can actually see a log of everything that is sent to Amazon. And you can verify the log yourself by sniffing the traffic to Amazon. You can see that it most definitely does not send data unless the blue ring is lit.
Now, you may argue that it is recording all the time and then sending its recordings when you issue a command, but I'm willing to take the risk that Amazon is not willing to risk their entire reputation on helping the NSA like that.
I totally agree that Amazon would not "wish" to risk their reputation by snooping on their customers, however if they are forced to do so they might comply. Perhaps Echo is not installed in many homes for it to be any interest of NSA yet. But if it were installed in millions of homes I would imagine some agents knocking Mr. Bezos's door.
In terms of sending data, I would imagine they may optimize it by first matching the spoken keywords before they start extensive logging, or you have to be on some list to begin with.
I got one of the first batch of Echos when they were sort of an invitation-only thing. I wasn't sure how the voice interaction would turn out, but I figured it would at least make a decent streaming music speaker.
Ugh. The sound quality of the Echo was its worst feature for me. Really not what I expected from a speaker, especially after seeing their fancy descriptions of how they worked so hard on the sound quality.
It's boomy and muddy, not at all what I'm looking for in a music speaker. Oddly enough, I didn't see a lot of complaints about it, so I guess that boomy muddy sound is what a lot of people like? In any case it's not for me.
So yeah, having the Alexa functionality but being able to connect higher-quality speakers - and stereo too? That works for me.
I'm pretty snobby about my music quality, but the muddy and boomy is "good enough" for me when I just want some background music while we eat or cook, which I can make happen with the power of my voice while holding the baby.
Mainly it is the fact that I can make it happen while holding the baby, I'm willing to forgive a lot of the sound issues.
Oh, I hear you! (Pun intended.) There can definitely be a tradeoff between convenience and quality.
In fact, right now I don't have any really good speakers at home. If I want good sound quality I have to use my Yuin earbuds or maybe the old Sony E888's if I can find them.
Totally off topic, but since the earbuds came to mind I have a great hack for them. One problem with earbuds like the Yuins with a symmetric cord is that it's hard to tell the right from the left without looking closely. So I bought two of those bags of foamy covers that they have on Amazon for like $3-4 for a hundred of them - one bag of white covers and one of black. I put a black foamy on the left earbud and a white one on the right. Now I never get them mixed up!
Back to Echo, I think my disappointment with the sound quality had a bit to do with how they marketed it, claiming excellent sound and showing the cutaway drawings of how they achieved that, or claimed to. And then the actual sound wasn't nearly as good as what I'd expected from the marketing. A case of over-promising and under-delivering.
If anything, the new price point for the Dot and the fact that the Tap has been on sale for $99 recently could presage a lower price point for the Echo this holiday season.
Has Apple made any moves suggesting it will get into this category? A Siri-enabled Beats speaker would be a decent start. Call it a "hobby" if concerned about low volume.
If you're interested in this tech, come work on something cooler with us at Asteria: https://getasteria.com/ We're based out of San Francisco and have plenty of need for people interested in building the future with us.
Also, I know it's not possible... but something I wish I could do in the SDK, I want to ask Alexa (which sits on my counter) to listen for my instant pot to beep, and than tell me. Sometimes I walk away, and don't hear it.