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Amazon Echo Show

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Re: Amazon Echo Show

#361

Post by inopinatus »

silvanojr wrote: post #134

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…

Amazon are strangling the Alexa ecosystem in other ways. They have a strangely parochial attitude to international usage. Phillipines? India? China? Japan? Germany? France? Russia? Korea? Forget it, you're not welcome to develop for this platform.

You can't buy one, and if you try developing for it, you can't test or demo anything that is location-based.

And this is why the Echo will ultimately lose the market to every other voice assistant.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#362

Post by sushid »

stingrae wrote: post #238
jaboutboul wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they are definitely pushing into that space with Amazon Chime, so it only makes sense. This is also absolutely going to kill Nucleus[1] which was the first device released with Alexa Voice Service integrated and was heavily hyped by Amazon at the time. [1]: https://nucleuslife.com/

I wonder what the Amazon strategy with this is, given they invested through the Alexa fund.

Probably just hedging their bets. But they definitely want their own horse to win the race.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#364

Post by sib »

mholmes680 wrote: post #330
anonymousthx wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They started working on this late 2014 / early 2015. Work started on Look in late 2015. Source: ;)

Awesome. Now, one more thing: Echo Car. I dunno why, i just want Alexa in my car. She's already in 4 rooms in my house (no wait, 5 including Fire Stick? 7 including the Kindles?), and in my pocket.

Alexa is coming to cars (at least from Ford):

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/ford-turning-cars-amazon-alexa...

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#365

Post by Spoom »

mikeash wrote: post #90
eclipxe wrote: post #21

People are missing this: "With the Alexa App, conversations and contacts go where you go. When you’re away from home, use the app to make a quick call or send a message to your family’s Echo. Alexa calling and messaging is free—to get started download the Alexa App." Alexa is now in the messaging and communication game. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/amazon-enables-free-calls-...

Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…

That is supposed to be what WebRTC is for. But major companies with their own motives are running the the major video chat solutions.

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#366

Post by [deleted] »

mholmes680 wrote: post #330
anonymousthx wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They started working on this late 2014 / early 2015. Work started on Look in late 2015. Source: ;)

Awesome. Now, one more thing: Echo Car. I dunno why, i just want Alexa in my car. She's already in 4 rooms in my house (no wait, 5 including Fire Stick? 7 including the Kindles?), and in my pocket.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#367

Post by [deleted] »

thinkling wrote: post #356
mholmes680 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome. Now, one more thing: Echo Car. I dunno why, i just want Alexa in my car. She's already in 4 rooms in my house (no wait, 5 including Fire Stick? 7 including the Kindles?), and in my pocket.

A bit off-topic, but: is Amazon the only company with substantial machine learning talent that doesn't seem to be working on a self-driving car? Are the people who would be doing that busy developing Amazon's drones?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#368

Post by ghaff »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #275
tsunamifury wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facetime works very well, my family uses it from 4 different continents around the world, from cities to villages, varying from toddlers to nonagenarians who didn't even go to school or know English. I don't know why something cross platform can't work as well as Facetime does. I had hope for Hangouts, but Google dropped the ball big time in terms of user complexity and quality of product as they are wont to do.

Someone had me use Hangouts for a press livestreaming thing a couple of weeks back. I was actually surprised at how the UI had improved since I last used it.

I agree that video conferencing is rather fragmented but I'm honestly not sure how much that has slowed adoption. People just don't want to use video in a lot of cases. Essentially all my internal calls are on a videoconferencing system and I doubt I turn on the webcam 25% of the time. (We do use screen sharing a fair bit though.)

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#369

Post by djrogers »

shostack wrote: post #318
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, people don't know that. The Echo doesn't "record everything", and I'd challenge you to provide any evidence that it does.

True/false: Can Amazon technically enable it to record without the user's knowledge? What if a government compelled them to activate this to spy on someone?

Ability to create a new (creepy and likely illegal) feature is not the same thing as it being the Echo's "value prop"...

Re: Amazon Echo Show

#370

Post by pgroves »

mikeash wrote: post #90
eclipxe wrote: post #21

People are missing this: "With the Alexa App, conversations and contacts go where you go. When you’re away from home, use the app to make a quick call or send a message to your family’s Echo. Alexa calling and messaging is free—to get started download the Alexa App." Alexa is now in the messaging and communication game. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/amazon-enables-free-calls-...

Are we ever going to see unity between these services, or are we doomed to have little walled-off fiefdoms forever? A phone number works anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, with anyone who has a phone. All e-mail providers work with each other. I don't care who you're with, and I wouldn't even have to know except it's usually part of the address. SMS works no matter which provider we both have. It feels…

More optimistically, it could be a step toward solving the problem if it adopted a Roku-like model where all those apps are installed and logged in at all times and you can pick one from a standardized menu. On Roku you can go to Netflix, Hulu, and single-channel apps like A&E.

Bonus points if there is a standard way to 'get a call' or 'search for a contact' that cuts across the video conf apps.

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