Amazon Echo

Gordini

Gordini

Paid Member
Has anyone else preordered this? I thought it looked pretty cool so ordered two, one for the kitchen and one for the bedroom. May well be another piece of technology that gets relegated to my cupboard but thought it may be worth a try.
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I have been tempted by it actually, I have prime so it's £50 cheaper. Not so sure I'd use it though.
 
Chris91 said:
I have been tempted by it actually, I have prime so it's £50 cheaper. Not so sure I'd use it though.
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I'm not sure if I'll use it other than for the first day as a novelty. Will give it a go through and feed back my findings here. I've previously fitted a nest thermostat and some Philips hue lights so will give it a go as a wireless controller. Worse case scenario it will be another Bluetooth speaker for me for £99.
 
Yes please do, I am tempted by it, would be nice, I don't actually have anything other than the tele for playing music when I'm downstairs cooking so would be nice to be able to just flick on spotify with a simple voice command and listen to music!

How do you rate the lights & thermostat? Would be handy for me to flick them on just before i get home.
 
Nest thermostat is great, no issues with it and very convenient. Very easy to setup and it learns what you like and pulls together a heating schedule for you. Best thing for me is the ability to control it remotely, be that from bed if I've forgotten to turn the heating off or from work if my wife has it turned up too high :wink: Nest send emails from time to time to let you know how your energy usage has gone and you can see what you're saving compared to the old controller.

The lights seem great too. I bought them initially as I am doing up an old house in my spare time and had a change of mind on location of a light switch after decorating one of the rooms. Not wanting to spoil the wallpaper, I bought a hue bulb and wireless switch and it is very easy to set up and use. Also includes a dimming facility and I am gradually putting more of the hue bulbs throughout the house. With Echo it may be useful to be able to turn off the kitchen lights from bed if the kids have left them on (lazy I know but why would I want to get out of a nice warm bed when there is a beautiful Czech girl next to me 11years my junior) :yum:
 
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Thanks very much for that. I think the nest is on my agenda at some point. Maybe when winter sets in... :smile:
 
My Echo turned up yesterday and it is pretty cool. Very easy to set up and now controls my Nest heating and Hue lighting. It is good at playing what music you tell it to but ideally you need Spotify as Amazon music is not great. My 6 year old can speak to it and ask who Darth Vader is and it tells him, so the kids like it :smile: A gadget I definitely didn't need but I don't think I'll be sending it back.
 
:grinning: Think I might have to be careful with Alexa (the Echo 'wake' command) as I don't want her waking me up in the night - my wife would go full on apesh*t. Alexa (Echo) was well behaved last night though and didn't wake us. Read a funny US review on Amazon where some bloke asked his Alexa to play some calming music to get him to sleep and once he dropped off he was woken up by Alexa telling him his wifi connection had dropped. Alexa would have found herself in my garden if she did this to me.

It is basically just a Bluetooth speaker with Alexa (Amazon's Siri/Cortana) built in but it works well. For £99 preordered it wasn't bad value but I think at the current £149 I'd probably pass.
 
Gordini said:
It is basically just a Bluetooth speaker with Alexa (Amazon's Siri/Cortana) built in but it works well. For £99 preordered it wasn't bad value but I think at the current £149 I'd probably pass.
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This is it exactly, £99 pre ordered on the whim it would be good is fine, but £150 is quite a bit more money, sort of heading into Bose territory there... as I said before, I'm sure it will come back down to £100 when holidays approach and I'll get myself one then.
 
Exactly right. I've had a couple of Bluetooth Bose speakers and the sound difference is night and day. The Echo can't compete on build or sound quality.
 
Call me paranoid but I don't like the idea of multiple arrays of always listening microphones beaming information to Amazon's servers 24/7, something it has to do as the voice recognition can't be done locally due to not being powerful enough. At least with Siri you have to activate it before it listens, this is a whole other ball game. Does nobody remember the issue with certain smart TVs uploading private conversations from peoples living rooms to servers, well outside of the scope of what it should have been doing. Dodgy dodgy dodgy lol.
 
Mattb_197 said:
Call me paranoid but I don't like the idea of multiple arrays of always listening microphones beaming information to Amazon's servers 24/7, something it has to do as the voice recognition can't be done locally due to not being powerful enough. At least with Siri you have to activate it before it listens, this is a whole other ball game. Does nobody remember the issue with certain smart TVs uploading private conversations from peoples living rooms to servers, well outside of the scope of what it should have been doing. Dodgy dodgy dodgy lol.
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Remember the same concern when the Xbox thing came out that is permanentely listening and also had a camera.
 
I understand people's concern with the Echo always listening but you can mute it. Not that I have - if folks at Amazon are really that interested in listening to me or my family all day then they should get out more, my life is really not that interesting :smile:
 
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