Just before the holidays I gave in and purchased an Amazon Echo, the small hockey puck one called the Echo Dot. It was on sale for under $40. To be honest, I don't need another gadget and it doesn't do a whole lot of things that I need doing. Plus, I already have an iPhone so Siri can do stuff by voice. The naming is a little confusing. The Amazon Echo is a big tower with speakers. The Amazon Echo Dot is the small one. It still has a speaker, but really only for conversation, you wouldn't want to play all your music through it. However, it does have a 3.5mm jack (unlike a certain phone), so I can plug it into my good (well, OK, acceptable) speakers. The operating system that runs on both systems is called Alexa. To get its (her?) attention, you use its name and say something like "Alexa, set an alarm for five minutes" and it replies "Alarm set for five minutes time. Starting now." After five minutes, the alarm goes off and you say "Alexa stop" to make it quiet. So I don't know whether to call it an Echo, a Dot, or Alexa. However, I'd read several articles that voice is the next thing, and Amazon is going to win and leave Apple and Google in the dust. Here's just one example from this morning: Voice Is the Next Big Platform and Alexa Will Own It . I decided that I should experience it for myself. The voice recognition is very impressive. I find with Siri on my phone that I have to talk to it very deliberately, like talking to a four-year old. If there is much noise around, especially in my car, it seems to be difficult to wake Siri up by saying "Hey Siri" without shouting at it. Even with other noise around, such as the TV, just talking normally Alexa works across the room. I was lying in bed a few days ago, having woken in the middle of the night. I could find my phone on and see what time it was, but I just said "Alexa, what time is it?" in a normal voice, and it answered. This doesn't sound that impressive except that Alexa is not in my bedroom, it is in the living room so quite a distance away (the bedroom door was open though). Amazon says that Alexa "hears you from across the room with seven far-field microphones for hands-free control, even in noisy environments or while playing music" and I have to say that my experience is that they are not exaggerating. What can you do with Alexa? Not a whole lot yet, to be honest. If you have Amazon Prime, then it will play any music from their music library. It can set alarms, tell you the weather, search the net, re-order anything you've ever ordered on Amazon, give you the news headlines. There are more services being added all the time. I've not tried it, but you can order an Uber through it, or a pizza (well, Domino's, so a simulation of a real pizza). It has Bluetooth so can play music to Bluetooth speakers or headsets, and can also control Bluetooth enabled lights. I don't know how reliable the data is, but apparently 6 million homes have an Echo of one sort or another. Gartner predicts that by 2018, a third of our interactions with technology will be through conversations with devices. There are competitors and rumors of competitive products from Google (Home), Apple (something Siri-ish), Microsoft. There is a Chinese competitor that sounds like something out of a 1970s racist joke, the LingLong DingDong. The Alexa technology is expected to show up in lots of other places such as smart TVs, automobiles, and more. Wynn Resorts is putting one in every room in their Vegas hotels, and you can use it to control the lights, TV, curtains, and thermostat. One thing is clear, that the software will only get better and the basic hardware is already impressive. The Echo is just one way to both showcase the technology but is clearly not intended to be the only delivery mechanism. It doesn't take much effort to take your phone out of your pocket, but with Alexa sitting a few spoken words away, I use Alexa more and more. Get ready for a new term in technology, the VUI—the voice user interface. VUI is the new GUI. Here's a video of me interacting with Alexa, just in case you've not already seen one. (Please visit the site to view this video) This post is not meant to be a commercial for the Echo, but if you want to try one then you can just order one from Amazon. As I write this, they are out of stock but should have stock in a week, so I'm guessing that a lot of people have bought one as a present (I'm writing this before Christmas although it won't appear until January). A link for the lazy. Previous: Pat Pistilli: the First Cell Library, the First DRC File, the First Computer-Printed Label![]()
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