Nutech: Amazon Echo is DAMNED useful

Hey there.  After I finish selling you this bridge I have for sale, I'm going to sell you a $170 tube that has Siri in it and plays music.

I have no screen and minimal physical control inputs.

Like, right?  You hear about this thing, and it just sounds like another dumb tech gadget that people buy to show off how techy and geeky their life is.  When Amazon Prime offered me an opportunity to buy it at half the price, I thought I'd check it out, being the UX geek that I am, but I figured it would be quite a dud and I'd be giving it away to someone else pretty quickly.  Boy, was I wrong.

Review

What has blown my mind, though, is just how useful this pringles can can be, especially given the fact that this is only the earliest of releases for this thing.  In our household, we use it fairly frequently.  More than ever before, our house is filled with music, and basic kitchen tasks are a lot more convenient.  It's great.

Okay, so what's the big deal?  First of all, the primary purpose of the Echo is to be a speaker.  It's a reasonably good wireless music player that you can put anywhere in your house and get good audio out of.  Even at our noisiest in the house, the volume and sound are just fine.  I'm sure audiophiles, bass junkies, and volume ravers will find it lacking, but for us, who just want a little background music while we do other things, this thing is perfect.

Alexa, define overkill.

Since the vocal interface is so easy to use, it's extremely convenient to turn it on and get music going.  Controlling it with your voice is also absurdly convenient.  I'm finally starting to dig into areas of my music library that I haven't touched in ages.  For a while there, music was just becoming something to listen to while working, and now it's coming back into my life, thanks to the Echo.  There's just so much more music around, and I love it.

Our kitchen and media/family room are right next to each other, so we put the Echo in there, making it accessible to the kitchen, and that's turned out to be an incredible choice.  Whenever someone cooks, they use the Echo timer, because it's just so much easier to ask Alexa (The name of the voice software) to set the timer than to figure it out on the microwave/oven.  Additionally, the "buzzer" on the Echo timer is so much louder and clearer, and you can hear it throughout the house, unlike the crappy buzzer on the oven.  Echo is also great for quick quantity conversions, switching effortlessly between cups and teaspoons or whatever, without having to do a lot of math.

Children are going to grow up without kitchen calculators
and this is the end of the world.

We live in a communal house of 5 adults, and sharing communal shopping lists and TODO lists can be hard, but with Echo, it's a lot more convenient than writing it on a whiteboard to forget later.  Just ask Alexa to remember it, and it gets added to the app for anyone to access and review.  Very easy.

Finally, the integration with Hue lighting has been a huge boon to us.  We use Hue lights in our media room, and Alexa makes it absurdly convenient to turn the lights on and off.  These days, we barely even touch the light switches, because we just ask alexa to turn the lights on and off, or to set their dim level.  It's surprisingly convenient and useful.

The real reason we love Alexa

A day in the life

So here's a common day of using Alexa.  We love the thing so much, we got a second one for our bedroom to control the Hue lights and music in there, so it's in the rooms of our house that we use the most.

Alexa wakes us up with an alarm, when it is time to go to work. "Alexa, stop alarm" we tell her, and the alarm is silenced.  After a few minutes of groggily waking up, we turn on the lights without leaving bed, "Alexa, turn on Master Bedroom."

While I grab my phone and start checking my emails and such, my wife starts getting dressed and checks the weather to see if it is cool enough to wear her new vest: "Alexa, what is the temperature today?"  Alexa gives her a full weather report, and she cheerfully goes and dons the vest she's been dying to wear.

After she leaves, I sit down at my desk and start to work.  I just recently purchased a bunch of music by Lindsey Stirling on iTunes, and imported it to the Amazon Music account, so I ask Alexa to start playing it. "Alexa, play music by Lindsey Stirling."  The volume starts out a little low, so I ask her "Alexa, turn it up."  It's still a little low. "Alexa, turn it up." Whoops.  Too much, "Alexa, turn it down."

I had actual discovered Lindsey Stirling because a friend had come over and wanted to try out the Echo, and asked Alexa to create a Pandora station around Lindsey Stirling.  That station has quickly become one of my favorite stations to turn on whenever I'm looking for music, so I finally broke down and bought it.  You can actually buy music straight through the Echo, but we haven't done that much yet.

Around dinner time, I head downstairs to bake some cookies.  "Alexa, turn off Master Bedroom."  While cooking, I need to use 1/4 cup of chocolate in my recipe, but all of my 1/4 cups are dirty.  Instead of cleaning one, I ask Alexa to do a quick conversion "Alexa, how many tablespoons are in a quarter cup?"  After making the dough, I put it in the fridge and set an alarm to give it enough time to chill. "Alexa, set an alarm for 9pm."

After that, we head out to dinner.  Upon arriving back, my wife heads to the family room to play some Minecraft.  "Alexa, turn on Family Room"  I head to the kitchen and start putting the cookie dough on trays to put in the oven.  After each one, I set a timer with Alexa, "Alexa, set timer for 10 minutes."  While they cook, I do other household chores, or go work on my D&D campaign on my computer.  The loud timer alarm always gets my attention no problem, and I head right over to the oven to take the cookies out.

After the cookies are done, I put some video game music on to help me think about D&D stuff until bed, "Alexa, play my video game music station on Pandora."  Several hours later, it's time for bed.  Before heading up, I make sure the lights are on upstairs, "Alexa, turn on Master Bedroom."  Then we head up.   The lights are a little bright, so we dim them. "Alexa, set Master Bedroom to 30 percent."  Jessie sets an alarm for the morning, "Alexa, set an alarm for 7:30am."  Once we are ready for bed, we turn the lights off, "Alexa, turn off Master Bedroom."

We close out the night listening to some soothing nature music from Amazon Prime Music. "Alexa, play Nature sounds for sleep on Prime Music."  And we drift off to sleep to the sounds of rain and thunder.