Not unexpectedly, Echo creeps forward from mainly a home automation front end to more of a stand alone platform.

Curious to hear thoughts on where this is heading.

[Link: cepro.com]

I expect they will shortly introduce their own lighting products. If they did zwave they'd have to be part of the alliance and compatible with other hubs. Going zigbee frees them from that.

2014 echo in every home
2017 echo in every room
2018 addon 10 devices per account
2019 take over the world

To be successful they need to make some major improvements. For one, Alexa needs to stop randomly spouting off things like "sorry, I didn't understand" when no one has addressed her or even said anything close to the trigger word. I get this out of my echo at least once a day. And then integration with 3rd party devices needs to be improved. As hard as Dish is pushing their integration, it rarely works without going through a whole process to get it to reconnect.

Ha! the poor people at dish at Cedia were so excited to show us the alexa integration. It turned into being a 40 minute flame fest because it only half worked!

Alexa is still nothing more then a novelty IMO. It will take a while to get there. Josh.AI is and was pretty impressive, I read they got a undisclosed amount from an undisclosed "Investor" Shortly after that they debut a piece that sure looks like an Echo Dot and the price of entry is substantially lower. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to guess who that "Investor" is...

Voice control is such a wonderful thing.

Everyone can sit on their, getting fatter, ass and do things. IF it works.


Every time the voice control on my GPS "hears" something on the radio, it asks me to tell it where I want to go.

And every time, I have to reach up and turn it off, since no amount of MY voice will make the damn thing shut off.

On the rare occasion it does turn on when I announce "voice", it never knows the location I'm asking it for directions to.


Yeah, voice control is wonderful. IF you want to go around having a machine piss you off on a regular basis....


I can see a homeowner, sitting in the dark, screaming "Turn the F'ing lights on!", and then getting the shotgun to fix that little POS....

If they did zwave they'd have to be part of the alliance and compatible with other hubs. Going zigbee frees them from that.

Rob, I can't swear, but I don't think that's the case. They have to be CERTIFIED for interoperability, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to "support" every device. Most of the Z-Wave-enabled hubs support only a heavily curated list of devices.

I'm going to have to figure this out.

I don't think their play is about voice control - they are just using it as a Trojan Horse to get their platform into homes.

My speculation is the other way. They won't want their to be released IoT products used with other companies HUBs. If they used zwave for their platform, they'd likely have to allow zwave devices they produce to work with other companies products and HUBs, and thus provide added technical support to those users, that's costly.

Going zigbee should allow them to create a closed system, like Control4's. Providing integration now to the handful of open zigbee products is a stop gap until their products are ready or to test the market for end user adoption, and is used to explain the inclusion of the zigbee radio in this Echo release.

I use voice control every day on my system. For me its far from a novelty. Its works well, very well. Customers love it as well. I cant speak for dish integration as i have not used it.

Infancy or not, its hear to stay and not going away. It will only improve and be a larger part of all of our lives.

Huh...what day were you there? I was there pretty late on Friday afternoon and the demo was pretty flawless.

Hi,

I like my "Echo" devices a great deal and they get regular use.

But I have not used any of the "smart home" features.

No real problems with spurious responses.

I am surprised the voice recognition works as well as it does.

Frederick

Does anyone else that has an echo dot ever have it randomly start up and say something like "Sorry, thats not available" or "Sorry, I could not understand"? Mine does it all the time, even when nothing on tv or in a conversation has been said tht sounds like the trigger word, Alexa.

yep. atleast once a day.

Last night she just blurted out the daily news, we were sitting on the couch reading, with NO background noise.

The Globalist George Soros no doubt.

wow... 2 months. that didnt take long.