Amazon Echo

Okay, I signed up for the Echo Look, but now there's an Echo Show? I'm not sure why I'd want what seems to be a less portable version of a Fire tablet.

Just watched the video and the Show seems more functional to me overall.

You're right though that it doesn't do anything a tablet can't do except perhaps better voice features?

I like that they're adding voice to all Echos though! Both my Mom and my in-laws all have them. They're also bringing the feature to the Alexa apps.

Must not spend kids' college fund....

Oof, I just saw the price: $230!

Gonna pass on that one for now...

Echo Show is f-ing weird and I love it. The world is changing right before our eyes with this stuff. I don't know where it'll all end up, but it's frickin cool!

Note: I'm talking from a technology standpoint, there's still a ton of horrible things outside of technological comforts.

Am I the only one who really doesn't care for Echo?

We have had a Dot since Christmas. I don't know what to do with it. We have it play Pandora, but getting it to change stations is a pain (for my wife, especially). I use it for a kitchen timer when I use the toaster oven. That's it.

Whenever I ask more general questions, it has no clue or just sends stuff to the app (which takes forever to load).

It also has a lot of false positives. I'll be sitting in the other room and all the sudden I'll hear, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." Or the other day, "it is 4:17 pm." When we've said nothing resembling Alexa.

kaostheory wrote:

It also has a lot of false positives. I'll be sitting in the other room and all the sudden I'll hear, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." Or the other day, "it is 4:17 pm." When we've said nothing resembling Alexa.

Sounds like she's lonely.

kaostheory wrote:

Am I the only one who really doesn't care for Echo?

We have had a Dot since Christmas. I don't know what to do with it. We have it play Pandora, but getting it to change stations is a pain (for my wife, especially). I use it for a kitchen timer when I use the toaster oven. That's it.

Whenever I ask more general questions, it has no clue or just sends stuff to the app (which takes forever to load).

It also has a lot of false positives. I'll be sitting in the other room and all the sudden I'll hear, "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that." Or the other day, "it is 4:17 pm." When we've said nothing resembling Alexa.

They defintely have their flaws, but they are just barely useful enough to me right now.
We control some of our lights, alarms and timers are nice, partial music controls, the kids love asking for jokes, and the shopping list is handy.
The false positives and other speech issues are annoying. They need a way to connect multiple echos on a network.

Ours gets a lot of use on a couple repetitive tasks and not much else, but I love it for those tasks. It's rare I use it to answer questions unless I just want a quick sports score, but as a kitchen device I've found it phenomenally useful for its grocery lists features, having music play while I make meals (Spotify), and having the Daily Brief feature give me morning news highlights while I'm making school lunches for my kids.

My top Echo commands are:

"Alexa, Good morning." Gives you some sort of blurb of the day. Today it was "Happy Teacher's Day". Other days it's "on this day in 19XX...", other times it's sort of a plug for other features (prodding you to ask her for a joke or a fact).
"Alexa, what's the weather like?/weather forecast for [time] [in [place]]" Gives me an idea of how I need to dress/pack. Not entirely sure how reliable the information is though.
"Alexa, play [insert music here]" Self explanatory, although I don't have Spotify or Pandora, I use Prime Music/my personal Amazon library. It's a little disappointing whenever a song I want to hear is paywalled behind Music Unlimited. The Prime stations are pretty good though.

I've often found that asking Alexa to Wikipedia various topics is more efficient than asking her about them directly. e.g. - I was trying to explain to my gf the "Original Six" of the NHL. Instead of asking Alexa, "Who were the original six NHL teams?", I said, "Alexa, Wikipedia 'Original Six'". Gave me exactly what I wanted. Same deal when I wanted to know where the Sundance Film Festival was held. Asking her directly got a confused response, asking her to Wiki it gave it to me and then some. Didn't work when I tried to Wikipedia "Stew Leonard's", I got the page on Sugar Ray Leonard.

Also, don't forget Alexa has "skills" that are akin to smartphone apps. You can browse them on the Alexa app or on Amazon's site. Usually to access them you tell Alexa to "ask [skill] for [request]", e.g. - "ask TD Ameritrade for a quote on IBM". I got the Tonight Show skill, in part because I'm a tool, but also to introduce my gf to the Thank You Notes bit ("Alexa, ask the Tonight Show to play Thank You Notes").

I've had a handful of false positives, but usually I can trace them back to similar phonemes that I might have slurred/accentuated in such a way that it fooled the Echo. I dislike that it can be woken up by the TV, especially by commercials that actually involve an Echo. Often I shout "ALEXA STOP" whenever she gets woken up, usually she just goes back to sleep or says, "Hmm, I'm not sure what went wrong."

It's clearly still a work in progress, but I like it for what it does, and they're improving/expanding it all the time. They send emails once a week about "What's new with Echo?" including some neat statistics and things to try.

My best false positive was when playing Breath of the Wild with my wife, The Echo kept activating when we spoke about elixirs.

Another way to do a Wikipedia search is "tell me about."

I use the commands: good morning, news, weather, and my calendar every weekday morning. Then I listen to NPR. Usually my local WNYC, but lately I've been really digging their new podcast Up First. You just "ask NPR One to play Up First."

We constantly stream Spotify and Pandora. I find it works better with playlists, but we really don't get many mistakes. One frustration is she just could not recognize a Spotify playlist named "ear worms." I still love just thinking of an old song out of the blue, asking Alexa to play it and boom, it's playing.

She's the only timer we use in the kitchen most nights of the week. I'll also use my Tap for reminders downstairs for laundry occasionally.

But the absolute best feature are lists. Being able to simply speak out loud shout "remind me to" and "add this to my shopping list" is almost worth the price alone to me. It is magical.

I haven't even started "smarting" my home yet! I love this product.

PaladinTom wrote:

But the absolute best feature are lists. Being able to simply speak out loud shout "remind me to" and "add this to my shopping list" is almost worth the price alone to me. It is magical.

Seriously. People look at me cross-eyed when I say that I love it for the grocery lists, but being able to just say what we need out loud as we run out of items ("Alexa, add peanut butter to the grocery list," while I'm using the last of it on sandwiches), and then not having to worry about having a physical list when there is a spur of the moment run to the grocery, is a godsend.

Does it plug into Google Keep for grocery lists yet? Because the Alexa app is kind of terrible.

hbi2k wrote:

Does it plug into Google Keep for grocery lists yet? Because the Alexa app is kind of terrible.

No. But I use IFTTT to send reminders and shopping list items to my to do list app Remember The Milk via email. The downside is I have to manually erase the items from the Alexa app. Alexa natively supports Todoist and Any.do.

I hope they get native support for remember the milk. My top uses is news, timers, and controlling my lights. I use these daily.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

I hope they get native support for remember the milk. My top uses is news, timers, and controlling my lights. I use these daily.

I just checked the Ideas forum and it turns out they launched a skill!

https://www.rememberthemilk.com/serv...

It's a little ham-fisted that it's not native, but it's probably better than IFTTT which fails a lot for me. I can't wait to try it out.

Edit: It doesn't seem like it supports adding to specific lists. :-/

If anyone is frustrated with the Echo's web search, you can create your own Google skill! It's a bit of a pain to set up, and involves creating a free developer account, but it actually works.

I followed this guide to the letter and it worked perfectly:

http://alexamods.com/guide-install-a...

Now if Alexa says "hmm, I don't know the answer to that. I can now say "Alexa ask Google..." and get a better response.

Alexa, are you listening?

Introduction

The Amazon Echo is vulnerable to a physical attack that allows an attacker to gain a root shell on the underlying Linux operating system and install malware without leaving physical evidence of tampering. Such malware could grant an attacker persistent remote access to the device, steal customer authentication tokens, and the ability to stream live microphone audio to remote services without altering the functionality of the device.

This vulnerability is due to two hardware design choices:

  • Exposed debug pads on the base of the device
  • Hardware configuration setting which allows the device to boot from an external SD Card

Here we present a technique for rooting an Amazon Echo and then turning it into a 'wiretap'.

Prior Work

Prior researchers were able to boot into a generic Linux environment from an external SD Card attached to debug pads made available on the base of the Amazon Echo device. They made their processes, details of the debug pins, and bootable SD Card image available on a Github wiki [1]. In their white paper [2] they further speculated how to 'root' the Amazon Echo.

Here we extend their work by booting into the actual firmware on the Echo, install a persistent implant, gain remote root shell access, and finally remotely snoop on the 'always listening' microphones.

Pretty slick way to bug someone.. they would never know to look at the device they themselves put into their home. Thankfully this requires physical access to the Alexa device so as long as you aren't buying them through a third party its probably safe.

TheGameguru wrote:

Pretty slick way to bug someone.. they would never know to look at the device they themselves put into their home. Thankfully this requires physical access to the Alexa device so as long as you aren't buying them through a third party its probably safe.

Safe at home maybe. Scary as f*ck in hotels though. Now I won't even feel safe hitting mute, I'll just unplug the damn thing.

Putting an always-on microphone, that you don't control, anywhere around you strikes me as a real bad idea.

The only reason it presently needs physical access is because it's not possible at the moment to change the operating system without it. Hacks only get easier, and of course Amazon can do this to the device anytime they want to -- or are compelled to.

Knowing what you're listening to and what you're saying, in unguarded moments in your living room, would be a bonanza strike for marketers.

Makes me wonder if the NSA has some leverage over Amazon.

Nevin73 wrote:

Makes me wonder if the NSA has some leverage over Amazon.

Of course they do. Whether or not they've chosen to exercise it is unknown.

PaladinTom wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Pretty slick way to bug someone.. they would never know to look at the device they themselves put into their home. Thankfully this requires physical access to the Alexa device so as long as you aren't buying them through a third party its probably safe.

Safe at home maybe. Scary as f*ck in hotels though. Now I won't even feel safe hitting mute, I'll just unplug the damn thing.

Havent seen it at a hotel yet.. but yeah I would unplug it as well right away.

Malor wrote:

Putting an always-on microphone, that you don't control, anywhere around you strikes me as a real bad idea.

The only reason it presently needs physical access is because it's not possible at the moment to change the operating system without it. Hacks only get easier, and of course Amazon can do this to the device anytime they want to -- or are compelled to.

Knowing what you're listening to and what you're saying, in unguarded moments in your living room, would be a bonanza strike for marketers.

I suspect its already feeding marketing data.. I swear sometimes my wife and I will be talking about a product and do no google or bing searches on it and will still see ads pop up during browsing.

TheGameguru wrote:

I suspect its already feeding marketing data.. I swear sometimes my wife and I will be talking about a product and do no google or bing searches on it and will still see ads pop up during browsing.

You should test this out.

"Honey, I sure do love sandpaper. I wish I had some." Then see how long it takes to get an ad related to sandpaper and/or honey.

"Sure thing, Sugar. I'll buy you a new crowbar to sand." Then see how long it takes to get an ad related to crowbars and/or sugar.

Unless you normally talk about crowbars and sandpaper. Then move on to adult diapers as a conversation centerpiece, or maybe maps of Tunisia.

-BEP

Could be your phone, not your Echo.

I figure this is relevant:
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/pS7Ngp0.jpg)

I posted this on the Xbox thread as well, but relevant here.

This makes me happy. As an owner of both Xbox and Echo (and having them in the same room) I have been hoping that they would find a way to work together. It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.

Abu5217 wrote:

I posted this on the Xbox thread as well, but relevant here.

This makes me happy. As an owner of both Xbox and Echo (and having them in the same room) I have been hoping that they would find a way to work together. It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.

I've been eyeing new TV's, and I was surprised that all of Sony's new sets are Alexa-compatible.

Amazon seems to be revamping their whole Echo line.

What is a "smart home hub," and what makes the Echo Plus different from the (new) Echo, or the current Echo, for that matter?