221–230 of 467 posts
Any echo owners feel like they would get additional value out of this? 90% of my interaction with my standard echo has been "what's the weather". Even when I want visual controls for music, I'd rather pull out my phone than walk over to a screen.
I was battling back and forth FOR A MONTH with their skill certification approval team for a skill update that would allow customers to call people by name, where in the first version it was only by phone number. They would fail the certification because apparently people didn't know how to test, or used fake numbers to make phone calls and complained the call would not connect, or the certificate validation (that wa…
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Video calling and instant messaging have both been around for ages at this point, and remain stubbornly walled off. Both should qualify as "basics" by now. Sure, you can still SMS worldwide, as long as they have a cell phone. But non-phone devices are becoming very common. What if you want to send or receive messages on your tablet or computer. (This works OK in the Apple world, but only because they hack it by routi…
Video Calling is a HARD problem that still has not been solved even remotely to the broader markets satisfaction. Everything from latency/compression techniques to hardware is in flux. It is a long ways away from a standard that can be easily and widely adopted and work in all scenarios.
Sure, bringing everybody together would be tough. You'd need a lot of discussion and probably glue/bridging code between different services. But it could be done! None of the big services are even trying to integrate with each other.
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Video calling and instant messaging have both been around for ages at this point, and remain stubbornly walled off. Both should qualify as "basics" by now. Sure, you can still SMS worldwide, as long as they have a cell phone. But non-phone devices are becoming very common. What if you want to send or receive messages on your tablet or computer. (This works OK in the Apple world, but only because they hack it by routi…
Video Calling is a HARD problem that still has not been solved even remotely to the broader markets satisfaction. Everything from latency/compression techniques to hardware is in flux. It is a long ways away from a standard that can be easily and widely adopted and work in all scenarios.
It is a miracle that the web itself has survived as one of the few open interoperable protocols. Though I think this golden period will soon end, strangled by the death of net neutrality on one side and proprietary walled gardens on the other.
Ultimately, a commons is not compatible with unrestricted capitalism.
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Locate remote, Turn on TV, select EXT3 input....
Modern HDMI-based systems can do this in one stroke. And by "modern" I mean that pushing my PS3 (yes, 3, not 4) button to start it up starts up my TV, and would start up my audio system were it not too old for that. (Though it occurs to me now to check whether it might do that if I routed HDMI in to it; for historical reasons I route optical audio to it which I believe lacks the channel for this.) Shutting things bac…
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There is a large space between sitting at my computer and talking to my wife in the grocery store vs. sitting on the couch and talking to my wife in the grocery store.
Is it not a space filled by your cellphone?
An Amazon Echo isn't a needed device. It just makes certain actions easier (e.g. playing music, checking the weather, listening to the news, etc), all of which can be satisfied with a cellphone and computer too. But the key is, it makes these actions EASIER.
For someone who's already indoctrinated to an Amazon Echo device, I can see the barrier for purchase being lower than someone who doesn't have one. For such a customer, the appeal again is that it makes even more actions EASIER.
Being able to see your baby monitor, make a phone call, check the news, see who's at your front door (integration with doorbell video services coming up, I'll bet!), etc, are all achievable by other means. But this family of devices makes them all EASIER.
I think that's the key here. And granted, these devices aren't going to appeal to everyone. But for those that already have the gateway drug/device that is an Amazon Echo, I can see them investing further into this ecosystem of devices.
Maybe that's just me, but based on the photos, this device looks quite ugly - which matters for a gadget that people put inside their homes, doesn't it? The "original" Echo has a futuristic design. This one feels more like created in 70s or 80s.