Clearly, people love these things. I have a few friends who own it and say it's an amazing product; and commenters on HN have expressed their enthusiasm for it as well.
There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are?
I am currently typing this from a 2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router. Last week, iOS decided to randomly delete all of my saved locations in the Maps app. I've never had stable, fast internet anywhere I've lived in the US in the past 8 years - every few days or so, shit just doesn't work for a bit. I've owned things like a Nest or Philips Hue in the past, and they randomly reset to factory mode or desync'd from my phone . Half the time I try to play my PS4, some stupid patch fails to download, or PSN is down, etc.
The more things like the Amazon Echo I would have in my house, the more irritating my daily life would be - because I don't want to deal with the 5% of the time where I have to repeat my request 5 times for it to tell me the weather, or the connection to the Amazon server is lost and I can't play any music. This 5% of the time across dozens of devices results in being annoyed 100% of the time.
All of this is why I mainly use a record player to listen to music at home (no DRM, no problem with servers being down or albums removed remotely), really like my GameCube for video games (put a disk in and play, no patches to download), still exclusively buy paper books, am fine with dumb light switches, and so on.
If you think this entire thing is ridiculous, I fully agree - I make my living contributing to this industry! But either people are living through these same annoyances as I am and they're fine with it (in which case please teach me your secrets), or somehow I'm getting a worse experience with technology than 99.9% of the population (I guess statistically such a person must exist, and it is me).
You're not alone kindred spirit. Everything sucks and they keep inventing new ways for things to suck. Bluetooth devices randomly won't sync, internet randomly goes down for a few hours a week, console always needs to download a multi-GB update when I just want to watch a youtube video, OS install starts acting up after a couple of months, Siri goes into an infinite loop repeatedly confirming my new alarm, I switch to FM/AM with a button on my car center console but to bluetooth/usb audio with a button between the seats (wtf MINI?). There's still no single way for me to get all of my content onto my TV/speakers, only different subsets with Airplay, Bluetooth, Chromecast, and my XBox. Oh, and NEVER NEVER NEVER press cancel on a progress dialog; that's the doorway to the Twilight Zone.
On the other hand: I pay $10 a month for unlimited music, $8 for tons of movies and tv shows, I get most of the stuff I buy in the mail in two days, Google Maps can navigate me anywhere, and I do all of my trading instantly online with low fees.
A lot of technology is pretty flaky. I think you have a couple of issues however:
1. You have sucky Internet. Bad Internet is going to cause numerous issues. From what I've heard it's hard to get a really good Internet connection in the US. But in many places in the world, great Internet connections are available at low cost.
Bad Internet means devices are going to have issues with firmware updates. Things will be more flaky in general, data will be lost part way through transfer and you'll hit issues with devices not robust to this more often.
2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works.
> 2. There's no reason why your macbook should keep disconnecting from Wifi. Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise? Or you have a cheap/crappy router? Again, this is an issue which many people don't face. Mostly Wifi just works.
I've went through tons of routers, and on those routers all available firmwares (dd-wrt. open-wrt, tomato, etc).
I've been using an Asus RT-AC87U for the last couple of years now, on Merlins firmware (slightly altered stock). I want to say it's great, but really it's just the least sucky router [0] I've had.
Wifi has never mostly worked. At least I've never experienced it. With a wifi dongle on my desktop PC I could go for a few weeks without issue, but I often find at least one (random) phone to be disconnecting at times when I'm trying to access something locally on my network. I never have to reboot the router at least, but have to manually reconnect devices when issues occur, and of course it breaks any connections I had.
I installed a wired network in our house just this week, for the devices I care about the most.
I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works. I imagine that any such suggestion is a statement of minimizing the time when it fails, which is great, but it has never been on par with wired in reliability. I would be very happy if it did, but I won't hold my breath.
[0] Nitpick: We're talking about the AP part of the router, the router part is quite stable and I've had no wired issues.
> I have never been on or even heard of a wifi network that always works.
Years ago I had this problem and bought an Apple router. My wifi has always 'just worked' ever since. There was an entire thread of people on here on HN saying the same thing when Apple decided to stop making them. Wifi, like cell, is very anecdotal because of things out of your control.
Similar experience with Apple access points. After getting fed up with crappy gear which needed a daily restart, had awful range, overheated despite proper ventilation, would in theory allow simultaneous dual band but in practice really didn't, etc etc etc I bought a Time Capsule (the Airport Extreme with built-in hard disk) around 5 years ago and couldn't be happier. The connection has always been absolutely rock solid. My only complaint is that the client app got dumbed down more and more, down to a level I found really irritating.
It's a real shame they decided to discontinue them - they were absolutely the single consumer brand which didn't plain suck in my experience. Awful experience with Asus (overheating), Netgear (5 disconnects per hour), Cisco/Linksys (radio part died after a firmware upgrade, long fight to RMA a 3 days old unit), D-link (signal wouldn't cross a single wall), etc.
Fortunately I recently decided to look past the consumer products and discovered Ubiquiti. What a breath of fresh air. Amazing performance and range, all the stability of Apple without the Fisher-Price interface.
I set it up once and the only outages I've had were when my provider (Time Warner in NYC) had issues that made the Surfboard loose connectivity. Despite the fact that I'm in an incredibly noisy RF environment, I've never had trouble connecting to my AP.
If had spare time and money, this is a business I'd try:
I've had Apple routers as well. While above average, and not requiring restarts, it wasn't better than other premium (consumer grade) routers I've had. Of course, anecdata, but just for clarification:
Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?
I think the OP question touched on problems existing, but small enough for many to "accept them" as status quo, and him/her questioning if he/she was the only one bothered by them. I am one of those people too. Thus my question of whether or not you actually have no problems, or simply "no problems requiring intervention, other than waiting/reconnecting".
We have a decent wifi router and it's been running for over a year now with no issues.
Our internet has gone down (Uverse fiber), but that's outside of our home and there's little we can do about it.
My phone - a Nexus 5X - is probably the flakiest bit of tech that I have. I reboot it every 10 days or so. The next worst is the AT&T DVRs. They are terribly designed, painful to use, and have bugs.
Most of the tech in my house (Canon printer, QNAP raid box, Hikvision cameras, PS4, Roku, Wii-U, Onkyo receiver, Samsung and Toshiba televisions, iPads, iPhones, Samsung Tablet, Thinkpad, MacBook, gaming PC, Kindles, etc...) have basically no recurring problems. We've had brown outs where the power goes down but not off that made me have to go reboot everything, but other than that, no real problems. Our VitaMix blender does blow one breaker, but that's not really a tech issue.
> Are you saying you never have any wifi issues? Even every other month?
Correct. It just works. The base station I have is also really old at this point. It is the larger flat one without simultaneous 5g bought ~2008. I bought it after I went through some of the other cheaper options that would cause my VPN to drop randomly throughout the day.
I want to upgrade to something with the newer standards and more speed, but I'm worried about going back to an unstable connection. I've been thinking about either the Netgear R6400 or the Google wifi 3 pack.
FWIW, I switched from an Apple router to a Google OnHub one, and it also works absolutely seamlessly. Tried a cheaper Netgear one inbetween and it was a nightmare. Sometimes it's better to just pay a little bit more money.
Check out Ubiquiti gear. I've been wanting to upgrade to their Unifi line, but haven't convinced the spouse that I need the money when it "works" to her. The random drop-outs don't bug you when you aren't constantly SSHed into something, and the bursty speeds aren't bad when you aren't moving files to and fro on the internal network. :(
Interesting, I'll have to investigate this, I've had other Asus in the past, but not those two versions. I'll have to check the chips on the ones I've had.
You might also be interested in the Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi APs. They are access points, so you still need a router and a switch. I got a Unifi AP AC Lite recently, and it's probably the best AP I've ever used, behind perhaps only the Apple ones.
I have the same router with the same firmware. I'm using a mid-2014 MBP Retina and my Echo Dot works great along with all my wireless devices both in 2.4G and 5G. My setup is basically Internet -> pfSense -> RT-AC87U with Webpass. Over 5G, I get 250+ mbit.
I have the exact same router (with Merlins firmware) and never get any disconnects and I have a lot of devices (mbp, macbook air, macbook, iphones, android tablet and ipad).
Do you live in an area with a lot of RF noise? or with a lot of other Wifi networks? I've stayed for a month in New York last year at a place with a lot of other wifi networks and my Macbooks became much more flaky when connecting to wifi.
Maybe you can try changing the wifi channel?
But I can say that having an internet connection that's not great definitely creates a lot of problem and additional frustration. I was way more frustrated when I stayed that month in New York (for some reason the internet connection had intermittent packet loss), I'm really quite surprised at how bad internet connections are in the US.
A house in suburbia. I can see maybe 5, possibly 10 networks tops, with a good client. I'd categorize that as "not a lot of noise", at least not from other WLANs.
I've tried different channels, but is that suggestion in regards to the signal (which is not a problem for me) or for its effect on reliability of keeping the connection?
No disconnects at all. I don't reboot the router often at all either. In fact I realized I probably should reboot one after realizing some issues with the onboard RAM and the uptime was over 3 months at that point.
I'm in the San Francisco area so you'd think RF noise would be pretty heavily present here. Before this I had the TP-Link AC1200 and I had all the issues you mentioned with that.
Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses. This includes:
a dedicated network router and dedicated access points. The placement of the access points is key. They should be in the dead center of the area they're meant to cover and not be near any radio absorbing materials. You pretty much can't do that if you have to put your access point at the place where your internet comes into your house. I use Ubiquiti Edgerouter and AP equipment[0]. I had to wire cat6 between my basement and my entryway closet to get good placement of my access points.
testing and optimizing frequencies for the environment. I live out in the suburbs, but I still have to contend with my neighbor's RF noise. I use a tool for MacOS called Wifi Signal [1] that identifies clear channels and regularly suggests improvements.
Understanding the differences in the technologies available. I have a large house, and lots of high bandwidth equipment, as well as some low bandwidth equipment. The low bandwidth equipment (eg. Nest thermostats, raspberry pi garage door controllers) stays on the slower, longer range 2.4 ghz access point and I don't have to particularly care about placement. The high bandwidth equipment (laptops, desktops, set top box) is set to prefer the high bandwidth short range 5ghz network, and I placed my access points close to their points of use. Equipment like phones and laptops that move around are set to prefer the 5ghz network, but accept the 2.4 ghz network when they're too far from the access points. Newer access points allow you to specify minimum signal qualities to encourage clients to switch networks sooner when their signal quality drops too far to be useful.
I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time. When we visit other people's houses, the wireless is bad and that's just something that is weird about other places. I want to say guests in my house get good wireless coverage, but if they do something with their devices that my family doesn't (like try to stream movies from a hammock in the back yard), or get on the "wrong" network, I can't guarantee much.
A lot of good points here. But your opening statement...
> Making wireless work isn't a matter of throwing money at the problem and buying off the shelf products, unfortunately. Nor is it a binary "works" vs. "doesn't work." I want to say I have "flawless" wifi at my house, but in reality I've looked at the use cases of all of my regular users and optimized the wireless network to be reliable and performant for those uses.
... I think fits with the question the OP asked, and my follow up to. Since it's not a binary, and people have different levels of acceptance, and different levels of work put in to getting that number closer to 1 than 0, that is my issue. A stable router and wired devices "just works" for at least the last couple of decades.
I can likely get a better WLAN than the one I have, but I have already put in more time than I'd like to. At this point if I can't throw money at it, I'll rather just throw money at installing cat6a, which I did for the stuff I cared about (desktop, htpc, server).
> I put a lot of effort and more money than normal into this solution, but the result is that my family generally doesn't notice the network. It just works, all the time.
Contradicting as it is to your first statement, do you really mean this though? Or is it simply "works well enough, within reasonable efforts, means and expectations"?
Regarding the first and last statements contradicting, I mean that when my family uses the network in the ways I have anticipated and built around, it works consistently and without interruption. This is different than saying it just works for everyone and anything they want to do. I think "just works for everyone doing anything" is what people want, and expect when they spend hundreds of dollars on a product, but I don't believe that's possible when you're dealing with the current state of the art in computer wireless networks. You need to take into account the environment and the requirements.
Also, yes, replacing wireless links with cat6 where possible is certainly the more reliable solution. Fixed location high bandwidth devices shouldn't be using wireless if it can be avoided at all.
That's quite unusual in my experience. Even most low end / lost cost routers are pretty damn reliable these days. In an office complex with more than a dozen competing networks I use wifi 8 hours a day and rarely have a blip. Have you by any chance being moving one of the same wifi devices between all the different places you've had problems? Another thing, which wouldn't explain all the different locations, is a problem with your electrical wiring / loading. For example I used to have a Dell ethernet switch that would reliably reboot itself whenever other devices it shared a power strip with were under a heavy load. I could actually force reboot it by starting a dd between the right combination of disks in a server. I guess that does technically qualify as out of band management.
fwiw, I own/sort-of-run an MSP/break-fix shop, and we see a lot of this sort of thing. People only ever call us when something's busted, so it distorts our perception of the reliability of technology, but we literally spend all day, every day troubleshooting technical issues.
For routers specifically, people are going to have a wide range of experiences depending on the brand (and sometimes model) they purchased. They all have their own quirks. D-Link tends to experience intermittent packet loss, Netgear has sudden intermittent loss of radio signal, ASUS routers just simply stop routing packets every few weeks or so. For off-the-shelf, we tend to see the fewest complaints from Linksys wireless devices, but their wired devices are pretty unreliable.
Engenius, which you'll see in a lot of commercial deployments, are over-priced and the radios in them just give up and go home after about a year or so.
This is one of my favorite soapboxes, so I gotta be careful not to get carried away, but I really sympathize with the GP upthread. Mail software, iOS, MacOS, Windows of course, networking, printers, phone systems, camera systems, databases, the whole kit & kaboodle is full of infuriating behavior and it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.
I'm currently in the process of selling my break-fix business, because it's an infinite suck-hole that's stupidly difficult to make money on, and moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.
I don't have any professional experience diagnosing problems like this, but I've managed more than a few large-ish home networks (many roommates, large family w/ a ton of devices, etc.) in sprawling houses with thick foundations all the way to signal-dense apartment buildings where 2.4GHz is all but useless.
I personally cannot believe how terrible consumer-grade WiFi has stayed. You'd think that some of these manufacturers would be upping their QC at some point: I've experienced all the random undiagnosable problems you've described where nothing short of rebooting the router fixes things, and only until things break again later. I currently own one of those fancy Netgear Nighthawk routers and after months of going through PCI-Express cards on my desktop machine where random packet loss made gaming impossible (but not on any other devices even in the same room), I finally gave up and bought a 100ft cable off of Monoprice and ran it over some doorframes with tape.
I see a lot of buzz around all this "pro-sumer" mesh network gear[1], but I haven't had the kind of sprawling living situation that justifies it yet. (Though I did just recommend that article to a coworker on a very large property, and he's hoping it fixes his many, many problems.)
> it keeps getting harder and harder to diagnose, since nobody believes in ugly things like log files or serviceable hardware anymore.
Hear hear. To OP's original point, I can't believe how much stuff simply doesn't work like it's supposed to. I always thought it was my high-tech demands for plugging together services/software that weren't necessarily built for each other (e.g. Google Music on a Roku, or Snapchat on an Android phone), but after going home last Thanksgiving, it's unbelievable to me how many mainline iOS scenarios are completely broken. Every conversation I had with relatives was "oh yeah, that's easy to fix...lemme see...wait, what?...that doesn't make any sense...google-fu...huh, I guess there's some random problems with this...let's try deleting/re-adding your account...okay, that didn't do anything...wtf..." Throw in some "you got your iCloud password wrong twice and now we're locked out, time to go through insane account recovery", and I was ready to move to the woods and give up technology forever.
> moving full-time to software development where I can at least close a bug report once in a while.
Hahaha, grass is greener, man. Be prepared to be not fixing A LOT more bugs. ;)
my co-worker has an apple wireless keyboard at work (BYOD). if he moves it more than two inches it will disconnect from his MBP (also BYOD). _very_ annoying when I need to type something for him...
I personally think someone has put an apple-curse on him, he blames it on cheap batteries.
Because he had "considerable problems" with his Apple products? Basically Apple release unfinished product and let users test it - and it shows in the software quality.
(Don't even ask about the quality of any of their "1.0" products - full of bugs every time, newest example is the touch bar.)
I hate solving problems like this at home. Part of the challenge is that I don't have the same resources, though.
> Perhaps you live somewhere with a lot of RF noise?
I hate this X-factor of WiFi with a passion. It's something that legitimately can vary in the time domain, either periodic or aperiodic. I have no good way to rule it out.
I have started using home powerline adapters and found them to be effective and reliable high throughput, low-latency connections to the smart TV/set top devices in my home.
My macbook disconnects from wifi once per day, quite consistently. I'm just used to it now, and reconnect and within a minute or so I am good to go again.
Things like that are why I wired network to all the important places - like my desk. I work from home. I don't want to think about wifi issues. I think I'd have to spend quite a bit to get wifi that was as solid as being on the wire - and that just isn't worth it to me. I never trust wifi to work, but that said I do have an Echo on each floor of my house and they are wifi only. Once in a while I notice they are spinning blue while they reconnect, but I don't know the last time that it didn't work when I tried to use it.
Its probably that the OP has wifi problems possibly very crowded spectrum or they haven't got wifi set up properly and apple is known for being a bit hit and miss with wifi.
I recommend if you have a choice get yourself your own modem. Switching to my own Motorola SB6141 was the best investment besides getting a decent router. Just a thought.
Another kindred spirit here, another programmer who can't tell if they're just getting old or if electronic devices are getting worse. I describe each of our AppleTVs as "something that works perfectly, except when you really need it"-- when we finally have time to watch a movie we want to see, when our daughter is losing her mind about wanting to see some video, that's the only time it craps itself.
>2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router
I have had two different Macs that did this. I did a ton of research (those 5-10(!) year-old bookmarks in Pinboard are unsurprisingly dead) and found certain wifi chipsets had problems (which is why other people with the same model as you will say they've never had a problem). That said, when we moved into our new house a year ago I had to buy a new router and add an access point because of the step up in square footage and I haven't had a problem since.
Of course, that new router was one of the Netgear ones with the giant security hole that was revealed a couple of weeks ago . . .
That's my Google Maps traffic experience pretty much daily. The section of the map that I actually need NOW is all of a sudden not rendering exactly when I need it, but hey here's traffic for the rest of the city.
Have you considered upgrading your Wifi setup to something like Ubiquiti Unifi hardware? I'm trying to convince the spouse that I need ~1k$ upgrade our home network to Ubiquiti...
Consider going with Mikrotik gear instead. It's the same hardware, but you aren't locked into Ubiquiti's proprietary Java cloud management software - everything can be managed with SSH if you prefer. It isn't as user-friendly or as pretty as Ubiquiti's web interface, but you can get deep down into all kinds of internal settings and it also ends up being significantly cheaper.
I have a Routerboard Hex and it's solid. It was a fiddle but I managed to get port isolation working so I could add a guest WLAN. This was more for 'fun' than any real need :-) A foundation in IP and routing is definitely beneficial for these devices.
Due to its excellence I have been eyeing their Wifi solutions.
Any good setup guides? One of the things I was hoping for was a good central management system, plus good roaming and handoff. I currently have two DD-WRT flashed ASUS routers, and having a hell of a time with handoff when going from one floor the the next.
They have recently introduced centralized AP management called "Capsman" but it's still a little rough around the edges to set up. Their wiki has a lot of good info though, eg http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CAPsMAN
Roaming is very tough to get right unfortunately. Only the client devices can make a decision to roam, so without ugly hacks such as using a single channel / MAC / SSID to create a giant interfering WLAN, your options are limited. What you can do with Mikrotik is set up access rules to kick a client off an AP if the signal strength falls below a threshold, but as this is not client-initiated, there is a longer re-association time which could interrupt VoIP etc.
So how do you handle roaming in your situation? Do you use different SSIDs between APs? Currently I have the same SSID shared between the two Asus routers (one configured as AP only).
Right now my apartment is small enough that I only need a single AP, I have it wall mounted high up in a central location so it has good coverage of the whole building.
There are options such as 3rd party roaming clients for (eg https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.heleron.wi... for Android) which I'd consider. For laptops, most drivers have a "roaming aggressiveness" setting which can be tweaked. In general almost all devices should handle transient connectivity glitches fairly well, so kicking low signal clients off an AP shouldn't interrupt too much.
Had this same issue. Appears to be more with whatever chip Apple uses not playing well with certain access points. I switched to ubiquiti APs and the problem went away.
I've definitely noticed certain people seem to deal with more glitches and breakage than others. Not saying any of these are you, but here's some speculation as to why:
1. Some people customize more, so their setup tends to operate in ways that weren't as heavily tested, or anticipated by the makers.
2. Some people are more technologically fluent, and instinctively avoid common failure modes, and/or tend to get everything humming along with minimal effort.
3. Some people push their tech harder, or more thoughtlessly, like people who open ninety browser tabs, or are oblivious to the fact that their laptop fan runs constantly.
4. Some people like to have the bleeding edge latest tech, which has had less time for the kinks to work out.
5. Some people are more bothered by little glitches.
This is me. I get irrationally furious when, oh, KDE decides one day to consume all available system memory and then hang and I have to ssh into my own laptop to reboot it. (It's an otherwise reliable, not heavily customized system, so not so much an example of #4.)
Meanwhile I see people walking around all the time with totally busted smartphone screens like it's no big deal. They just don't seem to mind very much if email stops working for a while or they have to reboot a computer or whatever.
5. There is a social media effect where the planet has billions of people and every single person who has a problem, socially talks about it, much as some folk monday morning quarterback football games at the water cooler. This leads to horribly inflated perceptions.
As an analogy from another totally separate yet strangely parallel hobby, back when social networking meant ham radio morse code radios, I can personally assure you that every ham radio operator who can not solder a PL-259 RF connector, can not crimp an Anderson Powerpole DC connector, or can not solder surface mount components makes certain via social networking (over radios, back then) that everyone knows they can not, and that makes everyone think no one can perform those tasks because negative reports is all they hear endlessly repeated. However the reality is all those tasks are pretty easy and problems are rare and usually its possible to learn how to do it correctly with little time investment.
None the less, its a common "design pattern" of social media / networking that once the numerical problem count exceeds, say, the tribal count number around 100, the entire population no matter how many billions will all "know" that problem is universal for everyone, while perhaps they're the only person out of billions not experiencing the reported problem. Meanwhile the reality of the problem is there are (billions minus one hundred) experiencing total success.
I'm just saying its a social networking or social media problem, not a wifi problem.
5. Some peoples' environment is innately hostile to tech. A modern flat with plasterboard partition walls will give better wifi reception than a victorian house with stone walls.
I am not in the US, but I've also had many of the issues you describe. For me everything originated in the network equipment. I kept upgrading to more and more expensive routers until I came to the conclusion they are all just shit. I literally bought the best router you could buy from Asus for like $300 and I kept getting disconnects and issues many times a day. I tried the custom firmwares and what not as well, but I think it's all just so badly designed that there's no saving it.
I had a hunch that it must somehow be "me" and not my ISP, so I replace ALL of my network gear with Ubiquiti stuff. I got a UniFi USG (handles actual routing), UniFi Switch (US-8-150W), UniFi AP AC Pro (Wireless AP), CloudKey (runs the software that powers all this, but it's not strictly needed, you can run it on your PC/Mac as well just to setup things and it doesn't need to be running 100% of the time).
Since I've done this I've had ZERO disconnects. Not a single one. No WiFi problems either. I'm not sure if it would fix what you're experiencing, but I thought I'd share my experience.
It depends on where you are but if you are in a hot country you may have been able to fix your network issues with a $5 laptop cooler. A lot of the wireless routers do not have enough cooling for hot environments. My cheap hack that usually fixes problem is a cheap USB cooling mat that I put under the router and plug it into the USB port of the router. Almost always improves the reliability.
My wireless issues directly correlate to my power bill here in Florida. The more the AC runs, the more it overheats and fails me. It's smooth sailing once the temperature drops, though.
The Ubiquiti APs really are the key here. My household had the same problem with the various makes, models, etc until we switched there. For wifi, we use a mini-itx box running pfsense and it works fantastically. If you want reliability, you need to not use consumer gear, period, because it's all crap.
I think the problem with consumer Wifi routers is that they pack so many features in them (that few people need or use, but hey, if you're comparing specs and one router is also a USB print server and the other is not, you may as well get the one with the extra feature even if you'll never use it... just in case). All of those features lead to code bloat, bugs, and dilutes development resources so they spend less time on core Wifi functionality and more time on features that I'll never use -- I know I'll never use my Access point as a cloud storage server.
I've been much happier with my home worker after I traded in my all in one AP + Router/Firewall with a discrete firewall (pfSense) and Ubiquiti AP that's only an AP, nothing else.
You sound like my brother. I swear he emits a wifi-disruption field around his person. We can be in the same house connected to the same router and I'll have 180 days of perfect pings and no dropped packets and he'll get 10 connection issues in an hour. Doesn't matter which computer he uses or where he goes, always with the bad internet. Meanwhile the last time I can remember having serious wifi troubles was way back in 2005 when I had a crappy netgear router that had to be reset once a day or it'd go a little funky on me.
This started a discussion in my office (software dev team). The summary is that I'm never satisfied with the quality of tech as paltry as smartphones but my colleague with a smart watch, smart TV and Alexa in his house views their defects as "quirks".
Seems to be a question of disposition, in my circles at least. There was a bonus anecdote about how Alexa has ignored his girlfriend for a year though.
My desktop and console are wired and I have reliable 200 Mbit Internet. There are a few things my phone is very good at picking up and I use it for voice commands there. My friends have Echos and Dots and they're great! No one has to get up from the table to pick a song!
Man, my life is good. The secret? Get good Internet. Wire what you can. Get a damned good wifi router for the rest. Know your tools.
I buy paper books because they're much cheaper but take my Kindle when traveling.
It's hard to compare objectively. I'm used to retrying or even working around some issues without consciously noticing (like the story of Turing's bicycle chain). I don't think my tech goes wrong very often - certainly not often enough to be worth putting up with the weight of paper books or the immense size and fragility of records. But sometimes that's because I'm working around it without noticing.
Technology used to be a product sold to consumers. Now consumers are sold through technology to data brokers. The priority changed, and you are no longer it.
I don't think what you are doing is ridiculous at all, in fact I myself strive for that myself but in a different way.
The reason why many people love it (me and my family included) is that they don't think of it as technology but as a product.
In my family we are two grown ups, a 7 year old and a 3 year old. Google Home understand us all first time in most cases. The ones where it doesn't are so rare it's note even 5% of the time.
I look for technology which:
1) removes the layers of abstraction when it comes to interacting with it.
2) Helps with banale tasks such as weather (can't be underestimated, when you have kids), starting some random music (Play smooth jazz, play Pat Metheny, Play dance music), play latest episode of "Startups for the rest of us", play the news, timer when you cook, add things we need to buy, ask something we are unsure about.
3) Gives us back some of the tangibility of the physical products.
All these things can be done via your phone, but once you have a voice interface you realize how much faster and less intrusive it is.
These voice interfaces are not yet good enough for really detailed needs but for our mostly simple needs.
I have similar experiences as you. I think it comes down to what is each persons' relative level of 'good enough' for each of the usecases. My 2013 Macbook and even more so my iPhone SE are 'good enough', and so far I haven't found anything else in their categories that can come up to that level. But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmented such that earnings per device are small to negative, it's clear that the simpler the better. There's just too many edgecases that engineers don't consider, but will annoy people like you and me tremendously.
This discussion also reminds me of this thread, see also my list of links there:
> But when it comes to smart home or networking or car electronics or various other places where markets are still fragmented such that earnings per device are small to negative, it's clear that the simpler the better.
It's not just about markets being small. Many times it's about designers pushing form over function, and people not realising what they're losing.
Take induction hobs, for instance. I had to go out of my way to get one with mechanical knobs, as opposed to touch controls, and it's such a huge UX improvement that I now feel handicapped in other people's kitchens. Yet I've had several friends and colleagues express genuine surprise that this is even possible; they've only ever seen induction hobs with touch, and thus assumed it's necessary to have touch on induction.
Funny that you mention induction stoves - that's exactly what I was discussing among other things in above link. I hate those touch stoves with a passion. What were they thinking? It has one job!
>> They're easier to clean. They look better. They're possibly cheaper.
You add supposedly safer as well. Since no heat is generated unless the pan is on the stove, it's safer for kids. Apparently the jury is still out on the technology since it uses electromagnetic currents:
My biggest problem with the Echo is that if the volume is too loud, I have to shout at it.
Outside of that, big fan of it. Despite only using a few features.
I'm less bothered by flaws in implementation, and instead bothered by failing to live up to potential due to artificial limits.
For example, the original Xbox had Ethernet and a harddrive, but it's capabilities were completely hamstrung by the OS. It wasn't until the device was hacked did it really come into it's own (spawning XMBP=>XBMC=>(Kodi|Boxee|Plex|...).
I got the Echo when Amazon was offering it to select Prime members for $99, so I didn't have much expectations for it. I was happy that I could change the wake work (Because Alexa is the name of an ex-gf), and the kitchen timer, and news feature were more than enough for me.
Once they added Spotify integration, it was well worth the cost to me.
We used to use my Xbox One to watch DVDs and such. Oh, but since I don't play it that often when we settle down to watch the movie: 30 minute download and update. Movie night ruined.
I finally bought an old, dumb DVD player that first came out in 2005. We're much happier with that.
To try to counter potential selection bias I'll give my boring answer: I would be really pissed if those things kept happening to me, so you're not particularly intolerant, but they don't. I get hard to fix wifi problems maybe once a year.
1) Q4 2015 MBP, top of the line - kernel thread crash on suspend, causing it to wake back up. Semi-random, kinda interesting except when it woke up in my bag and seemed to almost catch on fire ... repeatedly. People told me to take it to the Genius Bar .. I seriously doubted they could figure the issue out. It would've been a back to the factory situation (I sold it -- after verifying the hardware was still good of course).
2) Sometime in 2014-ish? I change the wireless bandwidth on a ubiquiti router at the office -- all the Macs go offline, Linux machines do not. Suggesting a bug in WiFi. This is not unusual for WiFi on any device (not just macs) in my experience. I disagree with the idea that it Just Works generally.
3) Macbook Pro 2013 - enabling IPv6 stack causes kernel crash when trying to disable.
4) and to make it clear I'm not just picking on Apple: Sony PS4 with a dual band 802.11a/b/g/n wireless router -- constantly drops connection. Figured out it was because of the 5GHz band. Had to set up a separate wireless network just for PS4 with an older router. Sony should put up some time and money to help fix these driver issues instead of leaving it entirely on BSD volunteers (assuming they're not using a custom driver, in which case they should, you know, fix it).
5) Making PSN a requirement was a terrible decision for the PS4: lizard squad DDoS the day after I got it. Updates kicking me out of PSN. Unable to log back in, etc. I will never buy another console gaming system with this requirement, if I can avoid it. If I can't I will do serious research first.
This is why I'm back to homebrewing/hacking hardware and putting Linux/BSD on all my stuff ... at least I then have a clue of how to debug this kind of weird shit, even if it is a PITA, and at least if things don't work, I can blame myself, rather than having to say I paid for it. Certainly no sense paying for premium consumer stuff either, even if you have the money. Spend it on something else.
Living in a house with no great internet options for a couple of years kind of cured me of my impatience with technology. I have co-workers who get ticked off immediately if the internet is out for more than a minute and get Comcast on the phone. I think it's good to lower your expectations with technology a bit. You really can live without internet or Bluetooth connectivity for a few minutes.
But I'm also in the same boat with using older "dumb" tech. People can't believe I buy cd's still, but hey, you can get nearly anything used on amazon for a few bucks and it's DRM free!
> I think it's good to lower your expectations with technology a bit. You really can live without internet or Bluetooth connectivity for a few minutes.
I just get annoyed if something that would work instantly otherwise doesn't work at all. Say I want to put on music while cooking - putting on a record or CD would take 5 seconds, and work 100% of the time. But if Spotify is down, or asks me to update my password, or has removed the album I've played every week for the past year from their library, or I have to re-sync my bluetooth speaker, etc., then now I'm dealing with this instead of getting on with my cooking.
Whether this expectation is unreasonable or not is clearly a personal matter, but for me it seems like a pretty basic thing to demand from the objects I own.
In addition to that the 5 seconds seems really low. I own around a thousand CDs, I guess, and can guess where each is sitting in my shelf, but I would have to go to the shelf, scroll along it a bit to pick the correct album, get it out, go to the player, take out the old disc, put that in its tray, put in the new disc, hope it is not scratched or otherwise damaged (I have discs where the simply information-carrying layer simply disintegrated behind the coating), and carry the old disc to the shelf and sort it in. Oh, and when I am done in the kitchen I now want to continue the music in the living room, so... I don't know? Since I got Sonos I just search for the album, doubleclick it, and group the speakers. I also use a local library on a NAS in addition to GPM, so it works without internet.
> if the internet is out for more than a minute and get Comcast on the phone
I love those people who choose to purchase the bottom-tier internet, and then bitterly complain about how terrible the customer service is. "So open your wallet and get an ISP with good customer service" -> cue look of hate from them.
Unfortunately not all of us have alternative ISP's to switch to. I hear upgrading to a business account can help with certain providers but that's not always available at all locations.
Just turned on the PS4 to play Final Fantasy XV, and was forced to update. The wireless signal was strong enough to actually complete it this time, but I ran into this bug:
While waiting for the update, I wanted to comment on HackerNews, so I clicked on the 1Password icon in Google Chrome, and attempted to login. It crashed, and a bug report was sent to their team. I think I've come to expect that most software is poorly written. What further compounds that fact is a lot of it is not open-source. Tons of bugs are out there, with only a handful of people to actually fix them (when they have the time of course).
Also, I try to avoid consumer grade equipment when possible. I'll be switching to the Ubiquiti products soon enough, as I've heard nothing but positive remarks. The same issues exist in other fields as well. For example, a friend of mine does painting for a living. Consumer grade equipment like rollers and hand brushes can't even come close to expensive machinery such as a spray machine. Or a mechanic using a hydraulic lift on a vehicle versus common jack stands.
"The only reason coders' computers work better than non-coders' computers is coders know computers are schizophrenic little children with auto-immune diseases and we don't beat them when they're bad."
I think every time I work on a type of software for work, I can never trust it again. I have javascript disabled by default, images disabled by default, cookies disabled by default. Smartphones are too inconvenient to carry around, so I use a Nokia and keep a smartphone plugged in at home for tinder.
Even on my workstation, I got fed up with desktop environments so I don't use them.
I try to ethernet connect every stationary thing I can. It reduces wifi congestion significantly and the wired items are rock solid.
The only things I have that aren't wired are iDevices, my laptop, a petnet feeder, a harmony hub and the echo. I hope amazon comes out out with an ethernet adapter like chromecast has. I don't have much hope for the other two.
I feel the same way. We bought an echo for the kids a month ago. It wore off within a week. They now really only use it occasionally for music.
I could be partly to blame for that though because I don't like that fact that every thing they say into the echo is recorded and saved into the cloud so I limited what they could do with it. Don't want all my kids silly activities saved and tracked like that.
The Echo gets things wrong a lot more than 5%. I agree, that takes the fun out of it and becomes increasingly annoying. Sometimes, its quicker and easier to simply type in the search in Google.
I love my paper books!!
I still truly do not understand the full appeal of the IoT. I play with this stuff as a hobby, but I am always asking myself "would, I really use this in real life?" and 95% of the time the answer is no.
I am the same way with net connection. I used to get so annoyed when I was living in the US and randomly my connection would start moving pre-56k speeds (AT&T). I've moved to Japan now and have yet to have a problem with my ISP.
Also, I hate using voice assistants. By the time I say "weather" I could have typed it into the browser (and 1/10 times it doesn't hear me properly and gives me some jibberish I'm not interested in).
Voice assistants aren't (in my opinion) for when you are at your computer. They are for when you are doing random daily tasks like getting dressed, cooking, watching tv, walking around the house... That's where the Echo shines.
Ah, I was referring to my phone when I said type it in the browser. I don't use OK Google, so I have to hold down the home key or push the mic button to start talking (hence I'm better off just typing it). Always listening would probably be more convenient but I didn't want to take a hit to my battery life.
Consumer networking gear is fantastically bad. The exception for most consumer purposes has been the Apple AirPort Extreme paired with a Mac but now that's about to be cut.
I use Ruckus Wireless WiFi paired with PFSense and HP Layer 2 & Layer 3 switching at home. I chose a building with 1Gbit fiber to my unit.
Things work great for me. The cost is crazy high for the typical consumer though. If I didn't run my own business from home I couldn't afford it.
Thank you for your comment. The Tech world is similar to the under-developed countries and their shitty infrastructure. I've always been amazed how good the physical infrastructure on the developed world is, but tech doesn't seem to follow through.
Regarding the Macbook, you might have a hardware defect. I changed the Wifi/Bluetooth adapter (Macstore) and it now works flawlessly. It used to drop weirdly on some Wifi networks.
Had some weird wifi issues with Apple. Ended up creating a new "Location" (the top setting under Network in System Preferences) and the issue resolved.
This is probably a combination of factors like your ability to understand that your issues are technology ones (hopefully accurate), noticing and remembering problems comes more easily than remembering situations where you might not notice, that sort of thing...
Well some of it is everything is amazing, nobody is happy syndrome, but I suspect another thing is the same thing that happens with me.
I am cranky when I know someone could have fixed a bug or UI defect and since I know what the problem is, have some good clues as to their thinking on the issue it makes me more cranky.
I like your sense of entitlement, but most of these devices are novelty stuff. You shouldn't expect your macbook or wifi router to not work 5% of the time, but I guess you could live a happy life with wireless speakers, light switches and bluetooth connections work 95% of the time.
In the case of your flaky wifi this guy seems to have the same problem and in his case it was caused by the non apple branded dongle he had connected: https://youtu.be/NYVjIjBMx6o?t=92
I feel much the same way about technology you do (and work in tech myself).
I just like to think I have a keen sense of where technology doesn't make things better, just more complex.
I still mostly use paper books, paper to take notes, have a physical journal, whiteboard, and calendar, and generally not a lot of home automation. It's not even that the technologies don't work so much as they don't offer anything I need -- eg, why manage the overhead of a digital online calendar between multiple accounts when some paper and a thumbtack works fine to share plans for meals with roommates?
I just don't think complexity is the same as progress, which makes a lot of modern technology sort of unappealing -- it's complex (and hence error prone) solutions to simple problems, usually with a side helping of exploitative psychology and selling your personal information.
I think there's an entire world of record albums that never saw the light. Sites like discog makes me want to start a collection.
But I very much agree with what you wrote. I'm not sold on voice interfaces, that one time where it asks you "Sorry, can you repeat it again?" is the last time I'm using Google Now.
But more importantly I just feel like I look stupid talking to the air alone. Also feel like I have to strain my voice and focus when I'm talking to a machine which adds some friction.
I do miss the days when we didn't have such bloat. Games would load instantly and ready to play without signing into facebook or being awarded without doing anything.
what are people actually using these for?
i'm legitimately curious about the use cases for this.
if you have an android phone or iphone or smartwatch, you already can "Hey Siri/Google" whatever you want, including playing music.
is it for light switches? Hey Siri/Google already does this, no? also, 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? (they're usually located right where you need them)
is it for shopping? this seems like still a rare use case.
is it to check the weather? that's already on your phone/wrist/computer/tv/window.
is it to look up facts? again, siri/cortana/heygoogle does this.
it's possible that i'm not the target demographic, that i'm the only person who doesnt have literally everything in their home futuristically connected (locks, lights, windows, curtains, vacuums, etc) -- and that this is actually solving a huge problem for a lot of people. but that seems unlikely -- i live in a relatively tech-infested city (SF) and almost nobody i know has those things.
maybe i'm too old (27) to "get it"? get off my lawn??
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.
I soooo wish there was a way to define non-Amazon defaults for a lot of things, but I get why they'd want to lock it down. I don't suppose there's an open-source alternative to hack on?
"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.
I believe from iPhone 6S and above, there's an option to just say "Hey, Siri" to activate Siri without having to touch the phone, so you can basically do the same thing with iPhones.
There is, but my phone is either in my pocket or not right next to me. Google Home works fine across the room, and ties directly into Google Music. I can also tell it to cast to my better speakers if that's what I want it to do. Siri also has a weird way of doing multiple timers: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2014/01/timers-and-reminder...
But then he's listening to Christmas music via crappy phone speakers. I think people in this discussion are ignoring the advantage of having half-way decent speakers in Echo and Google Home.
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.
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).
Exactly. The generation that grew up with Star Trek:TNG and Voyager are 35-45 years old now, and that's our vision of the future. I see more thirty- and forty-somethings with iPads and Kindles (i.e. PADDs) than any other demographic, and the idea of saying "Computer, add X to the grocery list" just seems like how the future should be.
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.
As an (incidental) user I can tell you that Alexa is of middling usefulness at best, even for someone with a high degree of home-automation type stuff. The voice recognition is quite good compared to similar services, but that's about the only thing it has going for it really.
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.
I think getting this right, and especially getting it right while allowing third-party skills and preserving user privacy, is probably very difficult.
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.
The full behaviour may be a bit too much for now, but deciding which to use seems simple: it's how Android Intents already work. Apps register themselves for which kinds of actions they can handle, then the user gets asked which one to use, and can set a default.
> 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)
I expect Google Home is much better with things like asking for Tesla stock since it already does this kind of thing for search. I tried your exact queries on my phone and they worked. People have also noticed that the Home device also remembers context, so you don't always have to repeat yourself.
So I don't think we can really generalize Alexa's failings to the entire space.
> isn't the most convenient way to turn on a light switch still just physically flipping the switch?
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!)
Yep. Same here. You want to be able to explicitly turn off the lights (say when you go to bed). Not have to wait for some timer to expire.
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.
The voice recognition technology is so much more reliable and flexible than I've found Siri to be. It has an API that allows developers to build apps for it, and is updated every week with new voice commands and features that make it even more interesting and useful.
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.
The last startup I worked at the server dev brought in an Echo and set up a basic analytics app that queried the database so we could ask it for user activity over the last 24 hours, or the last week.
Picked up an Echo Dot on Black Friday on a whim and I'm genuinely surprised how much I use it.
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.
> - 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.
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.
Yep! Currently the solution I have to that is an old bedside clock with glow in the dark hands. It's great when I'm sleeping alone though - which is what most consumer tech seems optimized towards.
> if you have an android phone or iphone or smartwatch, you already can "Hey Siri/Google" whatever you want,
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
I can't wait to be able to control my TV from one of these things. Much easier than hunting for the Roku app on my phone, since I've long lost the actual remote.
Nice. For me it seems a little ridiculous to spend $99 on an IR sensor + LED since I don't have any more home automation.
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.
I've had the echo since it was in limited beta, and while I've played with a lot of the features over time, I think what I use it for most consistently is a voice enabled alarm/timer and a way to shut off my lights without having to get up to do so. I don't really keep a consistent sleep schedule so not having to finger-fiddle with my alarm to set it to 8 hours from now is nice. "Alexa set alarm for 10:30am" "Alexa lights off"
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.
My mom loves it. It introduced her to the idea of unlimited free music(prime music) since she didn't care to figure out the others
The other big thing, even with a phone it needs to be out. Until recently hey Siri wasn't a thing. Cooking timers are really convenient - my phone gets covered in flour.
The echo is always in the same exact spot, so there's no hunting for it, never a need for hands. It just works
I'm a new parent and I need to track when my son eats/poops/pees etc. There are times when my hands aren't available. I built a tiny "app" that just records these things to a google spreadsheet for me.
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 don't think it's age. It's a lot more relevant to me as a parent (of 2). I suspect it has to do with how much time and energy you need to invest in the activities near where an Echo would be.
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.
Yep, there is no one killer thing, just a ton of small useful things. Like, when you are cooking and run out of oregano. "Alexa, add oregano", and now its in your shopping list.
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.
No one else mentioned my $500 phone has trash speakers compared to my $90 (or whatever I paid for it on sale) echo? I wouldn't want my phone to be as big and heavy as the echo, but I certainly enjoy listening to it.
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.
"if you have an android phone or iphone or smartwatch, you already can "Hey Siri/Google" whatever you want"
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.
Most high end phones now days have the option to have an always listening microphone for almost no power usage (1 or 2 percent over the day on my Galaxy S5). So if you leave your phone in the middle of the room it works quite well, and often you can even shout at your pocket.
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.
As a "read me the news, play NPR or BBC or Podcasts, tell me the weather, make a shopping list" kind of device, to play music in various places, to manage a lot of the automation in the house, to listen to audible books, to buy music.
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).
When I'm walking into my bedroom, I want the nightstand lamp on, so I say "Alexa, turn on the bedroom lamp". The nightstand with the lamp is on the other side of the bed that I don't sleep on, so it's much easier to say "Alexa, turn off the bedroom lamp", than to roll over and stretch out to turn it off. And much easier just to tell Alexa to turn it on in the middle of the night instead of fumbling around. Alexa always responds with "Ok", and saying the commands I could see as a problem with a significant other, but at this house I'm living alone, so it's all good.
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).
Have had an echo since launch and the Google Home for a month. The Echo basically uses commands. There is some flexibility but not inference like the Google Home.
So with the echo you sometimes have to do a quick Google search to get the name of the song so you can tell the Echo.
The Google Home does not require the extra step. With the Google Home I am starting to use a condensed English. So I will say "play sting Gwen bottle"
The Google home will launch Sting and Gwen Stefani playing message in the bottle. But the Google Home will also turn on the TV, set the correct input and then start playing.
The Echo is older but for my family use cases the Google Home is far more useful.
This was before the new capibilities just added to the Google Home
I've been eyeing these and had a question about a use case like this. Is it easy to utilize multiple media sources for this, like Plex and/or Spotify? Can you tell Alexa or Google Home which to use?
Not quite.. I ordered a second Echo Dot for my mom last Thursday (the 15th). It was originally scheduled to ship on the 30th, but shipped early on the 19th and she got it today.
She's not very technically oriented (iPad is about as complicated as she wants to get), but absolutely LOVES the Dot. I bought her first one for her birthday back in October, and she called me on my birthday three weeks after that and had it sing "Happy Birthday" to me over the phone. She'd had it for all of a week before she told me "I need another one of these for the other end of the house.."
I have noticed that Amazon (and Amazon merchants) seem to be unprepared for this holiday season. Amazon was always my go-to place for "oh shit I need a Christmas present at it's December 20th".
I went online to buy a few things this weekend and almost every item I looked up was marked "Back in stock on Dec XX" where XX was somewhere in the range of 24th to 30th.
So I'm not surprised that this extends to Amazon's own products. It's a shame, as one of the main reasons to shop on Amazon is to know you can get almost anything with no notice.
Could be a sign for the current economic environment. Ecommerce took really off in the last decade or so. The recovery after the crisis in '08 took long and while consumption was ok, it was never extremely good.
Current numbers, especially in the US, look very promising. Growth isn't where it has been in the past, but employment is very strong and so is spending. Wage growth will have a large effect on spending for gifts, especially for earners with low wages.
Maybe that's why Amazon was so surprised this year. They anticipated their growth number to what they sold last year and didn't account for the extra boost.
Of course that's just speculation, but it would fit well. And would explain why I don't see this effect on Amazon UK at all.
Don't take my comment the wrong way -- I'm not begrudging anyone on their spending habits or how they use their disposable income, but I genuinely have several items or activities that I'd rather spend that $140 current sale price on.
Or, to rephrase, the idea of voice controlling music in my house appeals to me, but not at this price point? For what it's worth, the sibling products are also awkwardly priced for me: the cheapest Tap (edit/correction: Dot) has a terrible speaker while the mid-range Tap isn't hands-free.
I'd be truly curious how people actually use the Echo: how much of it is music playing, how much of it is checking the weather, or witty banter, or re-ordering a household item. Is it more of a utility device? Is it more of an entertainment device? Is it some clever hybrid thereof?
I got a Dot for $40 a few months ago and liked it so much I got a second one at amazon.com/alexadeals for $20. Already had two alarm clocks with Bluetooth speakers built-in, so very quickly I gained a full-coverage voice assistant for home automation.
It's totally a utility for me... turning on lights when I'm heading up the staircase, setting timers while in the middle of cooking, checking the weather/forecast, making sure there are no surprises on my commute. I use it to play music occasionally.
I would have never started down this path if the device was over $100, though, so I agree with you there. $40 was just a good enough entry point for me.
If the price point is the only issue, I'm pretty sure the Echo Dot does the same thing for $40. My concern is that voice controlling the music might not be worth sending out recordings of everything said in my house.
It doesn't record everything said in your house. It only listens to the wake word, and then records. Source: I worked on some of the low level audio functionality.
These comments about the NSA listening to you through these get annoying enough to me, I hate to think how annoying they must be to you when you built the damn thing.
They could do the same thing to your computer or phone or even any speaker you have; why are we freaking out about this except for the fact that it's being sold as a microphone?
Why don't we freak out that Chrome could be listening to all our audio? I guess you could make an argument that far-field mics make it different, but I have a lot of conversations near my laptop and phone.
As tekromancr mentioned; it would be pretty obvious if these changes were made, especially on a wide-ranging basis, so that only really leaves this potential capability being used in a targeted manner, at which point Mossad is after you specifically and you're gonna get Mosadded. (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
Having said that, I would be interested in a 3rd party maintained registry of updates for all software so that it would at the very least be noticeable if updates were being abused for this purpose, similar to the way certificate transparency works for SSL/TLS certs.
> They could do the same thing to your computer or phone or even any speaker you have...
Absolutely. That's why I don't really let stuff auto-update, use as much FOSS stuff as I can, etc. Just because someone can push a malicious update to $product_a doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that they can do it to $product_b. I fail to see the logic here.
> Why don't we freak out that Chrome could be listening to all our audio?
I do. And that's why I don't use Chrome. Just because you don't seem to be worried doesn't mean other people don't worry about it.
> ...it would be pretty obvious if these changes were made, especially on a wide-ranging basis...
Maybe, but I'm not worried just about wide-ranging basis, but a narrow-ranging basis as well.
Most people are not concerned about Chrome, iOS or Android auto-updating; I'm sure you can see that you're an outlier here.
FOSS software might not have automatic updates, but if you do any sort of update where you don't verify the blob you got is the same one as everyone else you have exactly the same problem.
I largely expect that unless you get super paranoid about this (and hey, we're on HN, so that's a possibility), you're not really going to stop a sophisticated government adversary. And at the point where you're on a specifically targeted list, they will probably not limit themselves to the digital world.
I also think that expecting this level of privacy where the government cannot figure out what you're doing is a historical anomaly; most people who avoided telephones because the government could be listening are generally considered crazy people.
Does the government target people in a violation of their civil rights? Yes, but you probably know if you're doing something the government doesn't like, and it does not seem sensible to argue that people should become experts in technology and then give up a lot of benefits to avoid a risk that is not real for them.
> Most people are not concerned about Chrome, iOS or Android auto-updating; I'm sure you can see that you're an outlier here.
Sure, but I don't see how that invalidates my point. Some people are concerned about privacy, some people aren't. That doesn't mean the original software couldn't be updated with malicious code.
> FOSS software might not have automatic updates, but if you do any sort of update where you don't verify the blob you got is the same one as everyone else you have exactly the same problem.
I'd disagree. Having the ability to verify it has kept a lot of people from pushing a lot of bad code because they know they could be caught.
> you're not really going to stop a sophisticated government adversary.
I'd agree, but just because I can't really stop someone from breaking into my house doesn't mean I'm OK with putting a key under my doormatt.
> I also think that expecting this level of privacy where the government cannot figure out what you're doing is a historical anomaly
There's a huge difference between being able to figure out, and recording everything for later use.
> most people who avoided telephones because the government could be listening are generally considered crazy people.
lolno. Movies have often had a trope about talking in person because "someone could be listening" for a long time. Audiences understand this quite well and go along with the story. And it doesn't have to be the government. When party-lines were common, people knew you had to be careful, or the town gossip could get all the juicy details. The Public has long known that someone could be listening. The difference now is that a lot of actors are trying to always be listening.
> it does not seem sensible to argue that people should become experts in technology and then give up a lot of benefits to avoid a risk that is not real for them.
I'm not really sure where I said that. If I did, I'd like you to point it out. I just think people should be able to educate themselves and decide for themselves if that trade-off is worth it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't make the tradeoff, but pretending that "It's OK, the Echo could never be used maliciously because some guy on HN said he wrote the software and it doesn't do that" is naive at best.
Sure, if you were watching. But most people don't watch their network 24/7. Even if you watched it for one week, the next week they could turn it on 24/7, then turn it back of a couple of days later.
It's only trivial to detect if everyone is watching all the time.
I felt the same way and held off on getting an Echo for a long time. I thought it was too expensive at the $99 price point that it was originally sold under, in fact.
I broke down and got one on sale for $129-ish because it seemed to be the cheapest it was ever going to get.
It's nice to play with but I don't think it was worth the money for us. It is certainly a powerful speaker and if you're in the market for a good Bluetooth speaker, many of which are $200+, it's probably worthwhile. If you're just using it as a voice assistant, I think the Android/iOS VAs are probably better and I don't think they're really much less accessible -- everyone's phone is near them all the time and you can program Androids at least to unlock and execute your query upon hearing "OK Google".
The microphones do not work as well as advertised. We often have to repeat the hotword several times after turning our heads toward the device to get it to activate. After activation, it has bad noise filtering, doesn't work well in noisy environments. I have a Dot in my office (much quieter than the main area where there are 5 little tykes running around screeching all the time) and even it will struggle if my oscillating fan is blowing in its direction. It will also misunderstand and start answering totally different questions or performing totally different tasks somewhat frequently.
We tried one or two times to use the voice ordering functionality, but it's just plain unwieldy and we've never executed an order from it. I don't know if anyone actually uses that or not. It's hard to buy something without the visual confirmation and Alexa reads out the whole title. You'll say "Buy Ziploc bags" and it will say "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag 24 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $5.19, do you want buy it?" and then you say no and it says "I found Ziploc Plastic Bag Plastic 12 Count 1-gallon size Ziploc bags for $3.19, do you want to buy it?". Who wants to shop/browse like that when they could reach into their phone and buy it on the Amazon app with quick visual review of the available options and easy price comparison (don't have to remember "Oh yeah, was the 12 count $5 or $3")?
The Alexa backend service is not very good at answering random questions, which diminishes the device's utility. If you're not asking one of its canned tasks, it usually says "I can't understand the question I heard" or "Hmm, I don't know the answer to that question". The "OK Google" on Android is much more versatile and I've never used Siri myself, but it appears to be much more versatile as well.
My 3 year old daughter loves to ask it "Alexa, where do jumping monkeys live?" and get back "Hmm, I can't understand the question I heard". She laughs for a long time at this response and sometimes says "You're dumb Alexa".
We mainly use it as a voice-controlled timer ("set a timer for x minutes"), checking the weather, checking the news ("play my flash briefing", which, ugh), and doing quick math ("what's 341 minus 114?"). We also play songs on it, my kids think it's hilarious to run up to it and say "Play Bananaphone!!". They then dance around to Bananaphone. All of these things work nearly-identically (usually slightly better) with my phone's voice assistant.
So yeah, Echos are fun, but in terms of unique value proposition, they are pretty soft. Your phone's built-in voice assistant does everything Alexa does and more. The Echo can sometimes be more convenient if you're in the right spot in the right room and it's hard to reach your phone at that particular moment, but otherwise I don't think it brings a lot to the table. Honestly it's biggest value is as a powerful and vibrant Bluetooth speaker.
I had a similar impression until I got the Echo Dot. The Dot has way better audio recognition than the original Echo. Which makes sense since its the next generation of it. I’m loving it so far :)
I think ultimately google home and amazon echo will walk a separate path. Amazon will focus on what they do best--selling stuff, and Google will focus on what they do best--providing information.
Of course they will be a big overlap (like how it is now), but smart companies tend to play to their strengths than to play by their enemy's rules.
But why would I want a $100 voice-interfaced device just to sell me stuff? Not challenging your prediction. Questioning Amazon’s game plan if that’s indeed the path they’re setting out on.
In fact, their current ad campaign clearly shows the “buy stuff” use case. From ordering pizzas to buying roses to requesting an Uber. But it also features users asking Alexa for their calendar itinerary, or the caloric content of hot wings.
In the last year they've also been creating several Alexa (Echo Devices) exclusive sales. Meaning you have to order on an Echo device to get the same price. I suspect we'll see more of that in the coming year.
Amazon.com has already become a site where if you aren't a prime member then you may have well not use it. Since almost all sales are prime exclusive, shipping is now crazy expensive without prime, and almost all new features are prime too.
I suspect in the coming year or two the "cost of entry" will be both a prime membership AND an Alexa enabled device. Without both you'll miss out on a lot of the site's benefit and prices.
The manufacturing process is likely still several days as it involves more than one factory in the process. Plus shipping to the US (1-2 days) you'll end up at probably around a week in the best case. And that only if there's enough cargo capacity to add 100k units on that route (don't know how busy they are in these weeks). I'd guess it's realistically closer to 2 weeks from decision until it's in the warehouse.
It seems to me that the Echo is what amazon pushes most at the moment. They want to be in every house. I don't think they make much by selling it, it's mostly to bind people to amazon (prime and buying through the device). It doesn't make sense to constraint supply in that case. Constraining supply is used for expensive items to suggest that they're sought after. Don't think Echo fits in that category.
Even with that lead time, you know ahead-of-time when you're about to run out of supply in 2016. There's just no excuse.
That said, I just don't see too many people buying Echo. Another distracting device that tries to get you to buy more stuff on Amazon is just not something I think people want, and the speech recognition works flaky at best, even in a quiet room (my Amazon engineer buddy has one). It's just like Siri.
I had to go brick-and-mortar to get a flash drive in under an hour the other weekend. At Silicon Valley's Best Buy in SF, the in-store Echo demo had a few passersby press the Demo button, and then as soon as it started talking, they looked confused and walked away. Not a good sign.
It does make a lot of sense: When something actually isn't selling so well, running a marketing campaign saying "we've sold out" is a great psychological hack to temporarily drive up demand.
I'm here in Chicago and it's really sold out. Nothing at any of the major retailers within 50 miles of my location.
Google Home also seems to be completely gone at every store I've visited in the last few days. That includes places like Target, who usually have their shit together when it comes to inventory.
Having a hot mic in my house that there is data to servers that I don't control really doesn't appeal to me. Although I know my Android phone is essentially the same thing, I'm actively looking to replace my version of Android with something different soon as I can.
And at least with an Android phone it's typically possible to root/wipe and install a custom OS that's completely separated from Google/whoever. There's usually still a few binary blob drivers, and you have to have some trust that the hardware itself isn't malicious, but at least you can be confidant that it's not dependent on/subservient to some online service that's out of your control.
I'm not terribly interested in any home automation/assistant system that requires an always on connection to some external server.
Agreed. I don't like closed-source stuff, but I'd still absolutely use an Echo if it didn't require cloud connectivity. At least then I'd be able to prevent it from reaching outside.
Unfortunately all of the FOSS voice-recognition stuff I've tried has been hacky at best.
I found the idea that it could be always listening to you creepy at first...but if you think about it your mobile phone, landline phone, computer microphone and more could be hijacked to always listen to you as well so there isn't much difference.
There is a huge difference: You voluntarily give away this information with this device while on the others there is work involved from a 3rd party. Most of the time you won't be worth it.
While on Echo, you are just a part of the Quality System and Eris knows what they'll do with all that information in the future. Algorithms and AI is there to sort it out.
I find it creepy but what creeps me even more out is people who don't find it creepy.
"I thought leaving my door key under my matt was a bad idea, but then I realized that if someone wanted into my house, they could just break my window!"
I'm not saying your making the wrong decision, it's a trade-off that everyone needs to make individually. If your happy with your Echo, great! But just because someone has one attack-vector on you doesn't mean you should dismiss new attack vectors.
You should be more worried about using npm. How do you know that when you install 100 of different dependencies, there isn't one that is turning on your mic and listening to your conversations?
The Echo is an unlikely device to be compromised and recording everything you say, because it's pretty locked down and definitely not a general purpose computer.
(I don't use npm, but I do use other repos) The difference between an Echo and repo-code is that repo-code is open-source. I can verify it's running what it's running. AFAIK, there's no way to do that with the Echo.
> it's pretty locked down
source? AFAIK you can't verify what it's doing, so it doesn't matter how well it's locked down.
I was given one as a gift, but I can't bring myself to plug it in.
The device sends sound to their servers to process what you are saying. They probably aren't sending all the sound, but if they aren't, I can't be bothered to keep up to date on if they change that policy.
Is it unreasonable to assume that the NSA is logging (or will eventually be logging) everything sent over the Internet with this device around?
If you're seriously worried about the NSA logging things - I'd be more concerned with the device you carry on your person every day, with a microphone, two cameras, a GPS device, 24 hour battery, and probably 10x the processing power of the Alexa.
It seriously is no worse than OK Google or Siri and you should seriously be more worried about your cell phone.
The device I carry day-to-day needs to be specifically compromised. With voice assistants using an internet service, only that internet service needs to be compromised. For bulk surveilance, I think it's far more likely for the Echo servers to be attacked than my smartphone.
I'm starting to get tired of this. I really don't understand this sentiment on a forum called "hacker news" of all places. You don't have to trust anyones word about it not listening 24/7. It is t r i v i a l to look at the data from the echo transiting across the network. You can see that the traffic spikes after you say alexia as it sends the audio data out.
How? If you say "by analysing the amount of data it transmits when not in use", then not really - they could record it locally and then sneak it alongside a normal request.
I don't know how Echo's update, but they potentially could also sneak in an update that does listen 24/7, then a couple days later push an update that turns that off.
What does this mean, "specifically compromised"? You bought it compromised if we are being congruent with these sorts of accusations or precautions. If you assume the Echo is always listening, you should also assume that Apple, Google, and Facebook are also always listening... and, in fact, I recall earlier this year a quite vast conspiracy that Facebook did exactly that[0]. This was denied by Facebook, for the record – or do you not believe them?
I was in a Bed Bath and Beyond today and there was people looking for the Echo. All models were sold out, they put a sign saying they didn't have any more Echos.
People here are really missing the point with these things asking, "why should I care?"
It should be clear to the HN crowd. One day, ambient voice technology is going to be everywhere. In your car. In the supermarket. Everywhere. The Amazon Echo is an early example of it. That it's connected to the largest goods distribution network has the potential to enhance modern living in an obvious way.
It's so typical with new technology to see a bunch of naysayers and ho-hum attitudes until one day it hits mainstream and everyone is like, "oh yeah, I knew it all along"
I've had this stuff in my cars, phones and now laptop (siri and cortana) for years and I've never found it to be a smooth execution to the point that I just don't use it. My BMW has a horrible manual system for entering addresses into its navi (spin wheel to letters), you'd think the voice system would be an easy resolution but it's even clunkier.
I bought 2 dots last night, one to plug into my Sonos and one to use as an alarm clock. Let's see if I use them at all beyond that.
edit: I canceled the dots and bought a Google Home and a dot to compare. Mostly because I use Google Music.
I was hoping to see a review of them here. I almost bought an Echo, or a Tap, but then I read the audio wasn't great. I wanted something to play music well and it sounded as if it didn't. I would love to know whether or not their audio quality or Google Home's, were worth it. Otherwise I guess I'll buy a decent quality amp for my Airport Express or something, which seems to cost about as much.
I know Google put significant effort and takes serious pride in the audio quality of the Home, so while I haven't heard it myself it is probably worth a try.
I had one for two weeks and sent it back. The requirement to summon an app before asking your question is clumsy and really takes the "magic" out of the experience. I'm waiting for the Google Home to be available.
Critically lacking in both ecosystems, is the ability to handle multiple user profiles so that it can recognise who is asking the question and tailor the answer to that users schedule, travel etc.
> The requirement to summon an app before asking your question is clumsy and really takes the "magic" out of the experience. I'm waiting for the Google Home to be available.
TBH, GH is just a large speaker for your smartphone.
I was excited about Echo when my co-worker introduced it to me a month ago, but then realize I'd have to write a Lambda function, set up this and that, and the fact I'd have to write out the exact command, I shrugged a bit and lost my interest. Now that AWS has Rekognition, Polly, and Greengrass, I am more excited to find out how to integrate them (although sure Google's Vision API and Voice API already exist for a while now).
Why do I love the Echo? It was stupid easy to put up a Skill to control my house, my way. Skills are open to do whatever you can code up. They need to talk to a secure endpoint, but with Lets Encrypt handing out SSL like candy, what is your excuse? Since my Skill is custom to my house, it isn't open to the public - I'll just be "testing" it for a long time.
FWIW, they still have them in stock at the Amazon Bookstore (in Seattle). My sister in North Carolina was trying desperately to find one for a gift, so I popped in there. They're also on sale, a discount of about ~$40. They seemed to be aware of the shortage and saw this a good way to get people to check out the store.
This is surprising. How does it compare to siri and the android equivalent? For me Siri doesn't get me more than half the time, while google gets me most of the time.
My amazon dot and Rpi3 enabled kodi are next (literally) to each other, yet communication needs to leave the house for them to talk to each other...sort it out amazon!
I'm working on setting one up now, but find the docs confusing at best. I'm hoping once I get it set up it will work well, but I'm having trouble getting to that part.
I'm not sure. Guess only a few thousand people attended? As it's on the front page of Amazon for a while, they probably sold a few million of those now. I know quite a few people here (UK) who got one, it seems very popular at the lower price.
Had huge problems with my MacBook and with a zoom wifi cable modem and a dlink ac router. Connection to xfinity wifi was better. Then we moved and I got fiber with their commercial wifi router and things have been stable. Less APS around. At work we have Cisco access points which were stable when not misconfigured.
I was unclear: I want an "integration hub" that controls sonos/hue etc with a massive corporation polishing it, instead of the usual suspects of home automation crapware.
I'm happy to use it from an app rather than with voice
They've been running sales and promos almost back to back since Google Home shipped. Right now the Echo Dot is $10 off for example. In fact if you google "Echo Dot" the first adword is for "Amazon Echo Dot - $10 Off."
Assuming this isn't artificial scarcity (to imply their product is more popular than it is); it just likely means that Amazon discounted harder and further than they projected and thus ran out.
Plus the Google Home had a weak day 1 offering in my opinion and the opinion of many reviewers. So that may have driven sales too.
Absolutely not. They can't gain sales from this because they're sold out. High opportunity cost - flatline zero revenue for the next week, which is (at least one of) the highest demand weeks of the year.
The article touches on this. There is an equivalent product available from Google. People, in the US apparently, are more inclined to shift to a another vendor if they have the item in stock.
Because for Amazon the echo is not the actual product, it's just the platform. Don't think they make that much profit at the current price. But people who have one will more likely stay prime members and buy things at Amazon.
Was really concerned about that. But in the end it's really no different from a smartphone/laptop. If someone compromises my device it could also always send. I have to trust the manufacturer of my phone not to transmit audio unless I tell them to, and the same is true for Amazon.
I'm also pretty sure that people would've noticed if it always sends by default, guess some people will have monitored traffic from/to the device.
I'm using the Echo now, but I keep playing around with raspberry pi solutions. I'm waiting for Respeaker to deliver. I'd prefer to have it all in-house, but until I come up with something that works as well I'll keep the Echo plugged in.
There is a question that's been bothering me for years now, to which I still don't have an answer, which is: does modern technology suck just for me, or am I just less tolerant of defects than most people are?
I am currently typing this from a 2016 macbook that for some reason won't keep disconnecting from my WiFi router. Last week, iOS decided to randomly delete all of my saved locations in the Maps app. I've never had stable, fast internet anywhere I've lived in the US in the past 8 years - every few days or so, shit just doesn't work for a bit. I've owned things like a Nest or Philips Hue in the past, and they randomly reset to factory mode or desync'd from my phone . Half the time I try to play my PS4, some stupid patch fails to download, or PSN is down, etc.
The more things like the Amazon Echo I would have in my house, the more irritating my daily life would be - because I don't want to deal with the 5% of the time where I have to repeat my request 5 times for it to tell me the weather, or the connection to the Amazon server is lost and I can't play any music. This 5% of the time across dozens of devices results in being annoyed 100% of the time.
All of this is why I mainly use a record player to listen to music at home (no DRM, no problem with servers being down or albums removed remotely), really like my GameCube for video games (put a disk in and play, no patches to download), still exclusively buy paper books, am fine with dumb light switches, and so on.
If you think this entire thing is ridiculous, I fully agree - I make my living contributing to this industry! But either people are living through these same annoyances as I am and they're fine with it (in which case please teach me your secrets), or somehow I'm getting a worse experience with technology than 99.9% of the population (I guess statistically such a person must exist, and it is me).