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E-commerce giant and source of everything you need Amazon is getting in on the Internet of Things party with their new "Echo" platform.
This hands-free, cloud-enabled, Siri-ish type device is the latest player in the raging "battle for your home" powered by the Internet of Things. What do you think of the Echo? All hype or cool device?
I like how the marshmallows in the first link are being sold by Discount Herbals.
I received mine the day before Christmas and have had a while to play with it. The voice recognition is easily the best I've used in a device, able to pick up commands accurately from across the room at conversational volumes, even while it's playing music.
I think the biggest downside to the device is that there's just not a lot to do with it. It's nice for playing music, or asking it "what's up?" in the morning to get the day's NPR rundown on events, but I'm really hoping for some more service integrations - particularly something like IFTTT.
It looks cool, but I'm not a fan of these cloud-connected, closed-source personal assistants. The fact that they need to upload everything I say to Amazon/Apple/Google is ridiculous. Accurate, offline speech recognition is not that resource intensive.
If it had AVRCP so I could control bluetooth playback with the voice controls it would be a perfect device.