311–320 of 410 posts
Dot: has no speakers? Requires bluetooth based pairing. Requires an Echo to work?
Tap: has wireless speakers with a built in battery. Also seems to have a Mic. Do I need an Echo to make this work? Can the tap work with the dot?
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Considering most smartphones already have this app on them - I'm going to agree. FREE vs. $99? No contest there my friend
We all spend our money how we want, and cell phones most certainly aren't free, either. Aside from that, I didn't purchase the Echo with the intent of it being primarily kitchen timer. It just so happens that after owning it for over a year my usage of it is mostly limited to that. My usage is probably around 85% timers and alarms, 10% streaming music, 4% shopping lists, and 1% everything else.
Do you think you've used like you thought you would, or did you have ideas about how you might use and those didn't pan out or the device didn't work very well for those?
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I presume because they've had trouble keeping the original Echo in stock. And they want Prime members more than Echo Dot owners.
It's not just Prime, you need one of the other Alexa products to order it.
It likely that DOT uses the Echo as a parent device to do all processing of things like sending the voice requests to the servers and back and the DOT just works as a microphone slave device with some basic synchronization to determine which device heard the wakeword first. If DOT hears it first it sends the voice data to Echo and Echo does it's normal thing and sends the response back to DOT. (At least that was the intent when I worked on early versions of the project.)
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There will certainly be some aspects of the computer training the human, too. Just using this as an example, I don't know how much candlepower I want, but computers don't get bored or annoyed by my requests. I could start with 1 candlepower and move up to 10 if it's not bright enough. 100 might be too bright, so now I know what range I'm looking at. Next time I could just say "computer, 12 candlepower lighting, pleas…
I think that cuts both ways. If the computer can be trained to understand the user's intent, that seems like a better solution than forcing the user to think a different way. Which would you rather do? Be forced to state your lighting preferences in candlepower, or have the computer learn that when you say "subdued lighting", you mean "12"?
But if I type in "how fast do I need to go to travel 100 miles in 6000 seconds", now it has no idea what I'm talking about and instead gives me a comparison of time from 6000 seconds to the half life of uranium-241.
Now, when I get that result, I don't usually just give up on trying to figure out the answer. Instead I try to figure out what the computer expects me to say. Through some trial and error, I can shorten the query to "100 miles in 6000 seconds" and boom, I get the answer of 60 miles per hour. Instead of natural language, I'm using the search engine like a calculator.
The computer has just taught me how to use it. Ideal? No, but we work within the reality we're given. 12 candlepower is dim for you but for someone with decreased vision, that might be completely dark. The computer doesn't know unless it's taught, and we know from looking at history that users would rather the computer train the user than the user having to train the computer.
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It's not just Prime, you need one of the other Alexa products to order it.
>> you need one of the other Alexa products to order it. It likely that DOT uses the Echo as a parent device to do all processing of things like sending the voice requests to the servers and back and the DOT just works as a microphone slave device with some basic synchronization to determine which device heard the wakeword first. If DOT hears it first it sends the voice data to Echo and Echo does it's normal thing an…
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The problem is that voice interfaces break down pretty quickly once you try to do anything complicated. The Echo has pretty solid voice recognition--far better than anything else I've ever used--but it's still hard to get it to do anything useful once you get beyond a pretty narrow script. (e.g. what's the weather forecast, play this artist, etc.)
I've found that the voice recognition on Android phones works well enough to be useful in a wide variety of circumstances. Navigating, getting directions, setting alarms, taking notes, sending text messages, sending emails, searching for things, and many more. When I was still using my Moto X I did the majority of every-day tasks with voice recognition. The iPhone is catching up fast too...my wife's taken to sending…
It would be nice for voice recognition platforms to start being built in. I know there's training data that's needed, but there's some convenience afforded.
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I nearly renewed my Prime membership on reading the first part but then stopped when I read the second part. Holy market segmentation, batman - why actively repel new customers and only make this available to those mini-me-philes who already have an Echo?
Pssst: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00VKTZFB4/
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x-10 FTW!
I still have a couple of X10 lights controlled wirelessly in my house. When I moved in, many of the lights in the house weren't wired to switches but just had pull chains. Over time, most of the house has been rewired and switches added but I still have a couple of lights that haven't been connected to switches and I still use X10 for them.
One night, I couldn't enter the code in time and you could see what house was alarming for miles around. Inside and outside the house, everything that could blink was blinking - to go along with the blaring sound.
I cancelled the alarm service (and kept the alarm) soon after because 1) it would freak anybody breaking into my house out, and 2) if the cops couldn't figure out that there was something going on at my house without somebody having to call them, they just weren't doing their job.