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Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

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Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#91

Post by cpcb »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #56

> The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first. I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone. EDIT: That's too mean spirited. If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a p…

I just placed a pre-order for 2 of the Echo Shows mostly for this Drop In feature.

My wife and I are about to be first-time parents and for us, this is a pretty exciting product for parents compared to the other devices out there in this space.

For the "drop in" feature specifically, my plan is to leave one Show in the nursery and one for my parents. They like to call us a lot, and with this device, I should be able to whitelist their device and let them "drop in" on the nursery and whatever we're doing at the time. I think a lot of people have a problem with the privacy aspect, but for us, I don't see why we would have a problem with my parents seeing the nursery at any given time, esp with the 10sec window to decline. And then once the baby is older, we'd move the Show to the kitchen for music, looking up recipes, etc.

I think there's going to be a lot of parents looking hard at this device. The intro video Amazon made is mostly for this use case as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQqxCeHhmeU

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#92

Post by cptskippy »

ghurtado wrote: post #80
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #56

> The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first. I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone. EDIT: That's too mean spirited. If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a p…

> What person would ever want this "feature"? The disabled come to mind, for starters. The elderly, assisted living, I can think of a few use cases. Do you remember the Nextel phones? (push to talk) They were annoying as all hell in a corporate setting, but had some very valid use cases in a lot of industries, to the point of being the #1 feature of a Nextel.

There are definitely use cases for them. I was talking to a nurse the other day who was trying to track someone down on campus and she lamented "I wish we could just go back to our old Nextels".

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#93

Post by libria »

searchfaster wrote: post #17
technofiend wrote: post #16

Yet another missed opportunity for Google who purchased Grandcentral all those years ago. They already have call metrics for android devices. They could have had it for all the folks who would have dropped their PSTN lines for a Google Voice appliance as well as call history for anyone they called. Thought they wanted that kind of information but apparently not that much. Must be low value relative to web searches? W…

Plenty of 3rd party devices support Google voice though.. I have been using a ooba (not sure about the name) for 4 years now as my home phone.

*Ooma likely, e.g. Ooma Telo.

Didn't know GV integrated w/ it though, cool.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#94

Post by ianai »

sosborn wrote: post #72
ianai wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget their huge cash on hand. Apple could purchase its way into any market and technology at this point.

I really like apple stuff, but your sentence could have easily applied to Microsoft at the dawn of smartphones. Capital is not a guaranteed path to success.

Microsoft hasn't gone away. Both companies are huge successes. They've just got failures like everybody else. Unlike most, they're still owners of markets.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#95

Post by ianai »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #75
ianai wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be the thing that stirs apple to action. I'm under the impression that Alexa works much better at understanding than Siri? Is that true? What would be great is if all these things could work together. Amazons smartphones are not compelling and they don't have laptops/desktops. It sounds like they do IoT well, while Apple does the later.

2011 re MobileMe http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mobileme-failure-2... The tech matters in that it must work, but what they've really been lacking is a cohesive story around how all of this stuff works together and what it enables people to do. Right now, my biggest interaction with iCloud is constantly being reminded that I'm out of storage on it, randomly, sometimes via CarPlay while driving. Apple is a h…

"I know that they could do so much better with this stuff, and that hurts". Pretty much what's wrong with all monopolistic power holders. Technology disrupts so many things but not factors leading to monopolistic industries.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#96

Post by carapace »

FreakyT wrote: post #79
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #56

> The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first. I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone. EDIT: That's too mean spirited. If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a p…

> What person would ever want this "feature"? Look up research on "media spaces" if you're interested in the practical applications of this kind of feature. Just one example paper, but there are many more: https://www.billbuxton.com/DGPmediaspace.pdf Digitally creating a "portal" like this can be considered roughly analogous to connected spaces in real life. So, for example, two break rooms across different campuses…

I love this.

I'd like to have offices in a ring around the globe, maybe one in every other time-zone, each with an open floor plan and two opposite walls set up as full video walls with cameras and two-way connections so that it supports the illusion of looking into the neighboring offices through windows. There would be sound if you're standing close enough, and several scanner/printers (FAX machines lol!) connected so that you could feed a hard-copy to someone on the "other side" of the "window".

It would be so cool to look "across" the distributed meta-office and SEE the day/night cycle all at once though the real windows in the offices.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#97

Post by ghurtado »

dkrich wrote: post #89
ghurtado wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly every man, woman and child in the US has an Apple device no more than five feet from them at all time How did you come up with this claim? It's certainly not true for myself, my household, most of my relatives and most of my friends and coworkers.

Well, Apple sells about 200 million iPhones a year, so when you add in iPad sales to that, unless you are outside the US, you should consider yourself in a very select minority.

200 million worldwide.

The iPhone currently has around 15% of the smartphone market:

https://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/27/iphone-15-percent-marke...

Last time I checked, 85% was most definitely not a minority.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#98

Post by vidarh »

t0mbstone wrote: post #52
wan23 wrote: post #22

This seems like the biggest feature these devices have been missing. Some use cases off the top of my head: * Alexa, call my phone (because I can't find it) * Alexa, call for Chinese food (okay everyone call out what you want) * Alexa, send a message to my son -- "I've fallen and I can't get up"

You can enable "Alexa, find my phone" by installing the skill and android/ios app called "Trackr" Once it is set up, you can say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to find my phone", which will tell you the address your phone was last seen. You can also say, "Alexa, tell Trackr to ring my phone", which will make your phone ding even if it is on silent. The "Help! I've fallen and can't get up!" functionality can be had by installin…

> It's not chinese food, but both Dominos and Pizza Hut now have Alexa skills available which will let you order by voice, as well.

In the UK, Just Eat has an Alexa skill - they're one of two major "takeaway aggregators" here.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#99

Post by technofiend »

searchfaster wrote: post #17
technofiend wrote: post #16

Yet another missed opportunity for Google who purchased Grandcentral all those years ago. They already have call metrics for android devices. They could have had it for all the folks who would have dropped their PSTN lines for a Google Voice appliance as well as call history for anyone they called. Thought they wanted that kind of information but apparently not that much. Must be low value relative to web searches? W…

Plenty of 3rd party devices support Google voice though.. I have been using a ooba (not sure about the name) for 4 years now as my home phone.

Oh yeah there are plenty of hacks to make it work, but Google worked to remove native SIP support from their service, which was originally there in GC. It's too bad, because it was handy as hell.

Re: Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices with Alexa Calling

#100

Post by thinkling »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #56

> The one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a call to someone without them even answering the phone first. I wish that the product person who pushed this as an "innovative" idea lives a short, brutish, and painful life where he/she dies alone. EDIT: That's too mean spirited. If you want to peer in on your elderly parents, webcams are a better idea because you'll put them in a p…

I've actually long wanted something like this and proposed it to friends but never built it.

When my friends and I got married and started having kids, contact fell off a lot -- we just didn't call as much, you get busy and you assume the others are busy putting kids to bed, etc. etc.

What I wanted was a way to say "we're available to chat right now" for a handful of people I know and trust. My idea was to create a webcam into our kitchen with a limited view, turn it on when we were interested in chatting with friends, and when on it would be displayed on a dedicated tablet in our friends' kitchen, showing them that we were around and available to chat.

It seems Alexa Drop-in is getting pretty close to this idea.

(I think chat/messaging systems are still missing this explicit "I'm available for a synchronous chat right now" flag. Being "online" in Skype is just not quite the same thing.)

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