I purchased an Amazon Echo Studio and got it the other day. Mostly wanted to just hook up to wifi Music (current sound system won’t).
Kinda creepy in a way. I didn’t really want voice control. But, seems to work well.
So far so good. It always seems to find the song or album I would want to play. I want to work with play lists but have not done that. Also think it would be nice for shopping lists. I’m just starting to get used to it.
To those that have such a device, what do you use it for? And other comments welcome.
We have had Alexa a month or so now, with one “main” unit and three “dots”. We use it for some lights in the house and for music. My gf has started using it for shopping lists. If I’m bored I’ll ask Alexa for a joke.
I paid $2 (?) extra and have, in addition to Alexa, Samuel L Jackson as a voice. It is pretty funny. “Hey, Samuel, what’s the weather like outside?” “It’s fuckin freezing, 28 degrees.”
I kind of thought about changing the voice to Samuel L Jackson. I think it would be kind of funny to call him ‘Alexa’ (as long as he’s not in the same room). Anyway, the thing that really bothers me is I am hard of hearing, but also generally keep music volume low while I’m working. The problem with that is that the voice assistant is also real low and I can’t hear the response unless I turn all volume up. Have not found anyway to have assistant voice louder, and music volume low.
I use mine for music. Been trying to use it for podcasts lately but for some reason it’s a little clunky for me.
I got an Alexa controlled plug and it’s been pretty cool to control my lamp with it. I got a new version (upgraded from 1st gen Alexa to 4th) and got 2 free lightbulbs but I’ve been too lazy to put them up yet. I’m about to do it tho. Will be cool to control my whole living room with my voice. Now I have to go around and turn off lamps like a chump.
One skill I like that I always share on the SDMB and always get appreciative “thanks” for is saying “Alexa, Play NPR”. Usually I do this when I get out of the car and had been listening to an interesting story on NPR. I come inside and ask for it, and since it’s a minute behind, it picks up where I left off (and it knows what NPR station is my local station)
I have a bluetooth speaker in my shower so I can pair it with Alexa when I go to take a shower.
Oh, and I ask it for the weather all the time.
I got my dad a Dot and he asks it for stocks all the time. He used to make my mom look it up for him online every day.
I’ve got an echo, and I mostly use it to play radio. Occasionally to turn on the the heat. However, it can’t turn on the heat if the Nest is set to “eco” mode. And I haven’t figured out the right combination of words to have it turn of eco mode.
Also, it has trouble with the phrase “play 90.1 radio.” It’ll play 92.1 unless I say “play nine zero point one.”
Don’t have a device yet but my SIL has one and uses it a lot. If she’s cooking and her hands are wet she can say Alexa set a timer for 12 minutes, which is nice. She also uses the grocery list which is linked to her phone; I can see the advantage here. We also use it to ask for a joke (some of Alexa’s jokes are AWFUL). And, she will sing happy birthday for you!
We went mostly smart home for christmas and went with the Alexa ecosystem. We got two studios and a dot as well as smart lights in our living room and smart colored lights outside. I also have a set of the alexa frames and we got a show for the grandparents and ourselves.
We got the two studios primarily because the sound on our TV sucked so we used them for stereo sound for TV and movies. It works really well for that purpose. For valentines day we had some friends over to the house and we spent the night each requesting one song and then passing it around the room that went on for several hours and was some of the most fun I’ve had in awhile. My kids like being able to request music they want on demand as well.
Outside of music we use it to set timers and I am having a blast with the outside colored lights so we “decorated” our house pink for valentine’s day weekend and we’ll be doing green for St. Paddy’s day. It takes about a minute and I can decorate my house for any holiday. For the interior smart lights we primarily use them to dim the room without a dimmer switch, or to turn off a light or set of lights on the 4 that are on the same switch. Like if one of the kids has fallen asleep in the living room we’ll turn the light off over their heads so they can sleep a bit better. Lastly, sometimes I forget to turn out the living room lights before walking out of the room and the light switch is in the middle of the room and its nice to be able to ask alexa to turn the lights out for me.
The Echo show has been the big failure we were hoping to use it to display recipes while cooking and we haven’t figured out how to do that yet plus in order to have the kids use it to talk to the grandparents it needs to be located in a different location then where the adults would want it for cookings. The video chat with the grandparents doesn’t work that well since we can’t figure out the voice commands to call them and the touch interface isn’t very good. We’re half considering buying one of the new 10s to see if will work better for us but its a lot of money for a service we’re not very happy with.
Over all I’d give Alexa a B+ certainly not something I couldn’t live without but a definite improvement to our lives. Of course, this doesn’t get into the frames which are the best bluetooth phone headset I’ve ever had by miles but I don’t really use any of the rest of the alexa stuff on it.
I have my whole house controlled through Alexa - lights, thermostats, Ring alarm, garage door. It generally works pretty well. The Alexa functionality certainly seems to have passed the point where the benefit & fun of having it outweighs the annoyances, and since many of the improvements are implemented in the AI software, it’s not like you’re paying out to upgrade the hardware every year in order to benefit as the AI improves.
The two things that did’t work for me:
(1) Echo Show. I returned it, they stubbornly won’t let you set it up so that the screen just shows what you want it to. It has pseudo-settings, but the screens changes and displays “hints”, even if you tell it you don’t want to see them. I don’t want distracting movement from the screen in my peripheral vision all the time.
(2) Fire TV. The voice commands just don’t work well enough, and the integration with other streaming services is not great. It insists on flipping you out of what you’re watching after a short delay if you put a movie on pause, requiring you to go back and find what you were watching from scratch rather than just resuming play.
Oh I forgot to mention we’ve got a fire TV too. We’ve had that for years and it wasn’t as good as the Roku until we upgraded as part of our smart home revolution to the latest fire cube and it finally does a good job and has more options for apps and doesn’t push you quite as hard at the amazon stuff.
Heh. We “worry” about Alexa hearing us all the time. Recently, my gf thought she’d caught Alexa eavesdropping. She wanted me to order something and we talked about it. That evening she told me Alexa mentioned the item we had discussed. I had to burst her bubble and explain that I’d been online earlier and placed the order, explaining why Alexa knew without “eavesdropping”.
I have an Echo, which I use with my Ring Doorbell.
But other than that, I hardly use Alexa. Just in the morning when I say good morning to her and she gives met the date, time and weather. And at night when I say good night, and she tells me to have sweet dreams or she’ll talk to me in the morning.
The other reservation I have about Alexa is that recently I’ve had the option of talking to Google too, since I switched to an Android phone and got the Nest Wifi. It’s not a full comparison, because I don’t have Google controlling my home, but my sense is that maybe the Google AI is better. It seems to understand and respond to instructions and questions more accurately.
For the last three years or so my Wife and I have started playing a lot of chess and card games. It’s great. We usually listen to classic rock or 60’s rock or something over our DirecTV Sat dish. And discovered that it’s really just on a loop (no great surprise I guess). You can practically time your watch to when a song will come on. So I looked for something else. The earworms where getting really, really bad.
My Wife has not tried it yet and is a bit dubious. Only had it for 3 days though. I think it’s cool to be able to ask for an obscure song or album, and it’s right there.