There's an Echo in Here

My Amazon Echo arrived yesterday after a long (six month-ish) wait.  I was excited to have it, but my excitement quickly turned to frustration.  Let's just say that setup did not go smoothly.

Setup was hampered by the Amazon Echo app crashing (the first attempt) and then not being able to connect to one of my wifi networks.  Why, in 2015, do I need to enter the wifi password when the device that is connected to the echo has the wifi password in it?  Doesn't make any sense.  I gave up on setup (which appeared to be hanging) and ate dinner with my boys.

After dinner, I moved closer to my wifi access point and thought I'd have to go through setup again.  However, when I plugged the Echo back in, it connected right up to my network and said that it was ready to go.  Exciting.  So what to do with it.  I decided that I'd mostly just try things rather than read directions (I'm a dude, after all) to see how well the natural interface would work.

I asked a few questions and for a joke.  It doesn't understand much.  It did start playing music for a reasonably obscure band that I like (Innocence Mission) after just asking it to.  Excellent.  (It's probably time for me to get a Prime Station set up).  It paused when I asked it to and got louder and softer, too.  Also, this morning, I asked Alexa for the news and got a reasonably useful NPR briefing.  I think that this will become a habit for when I'm making breakfast to listen to this.  I do love the fact that there is no friction at all - ask and ye shall receive.

I've since looked online to figure out what things are possible currently with the echo.  I've since done some more setup (for my commute traffic, customized the new briefing, linked my Google Calendar).  Looking forward to trying to use it to dim the lights in my living room (I have Philips Hues).

Last night, I then tried to get it to talk to me about Amazon.  Something I expected it would be familiar with.  "Alexa, what is the last Amazon streaming title I've watched."  No comprende.  "Alexa, what is the last purchase I've made on Amazon"  Didn't understand it.  Hmm.  Got me thinking what sorts of information the Echo might be useful in passing along.  What would take it One Step Beyond?

One Step Beyond for the Echo

One reason I bought this device is that I thought Amazon was likely to continue to improve the features.  And given it relies on cloud-based information retrieval and comprehension, the hardware purchased now should continue to work.  

In my view, here are the areas where the Echo could be useful:

• Likely obvious from my above discussion: better integration with Amazon.  Let me ask questions about my account.  What was the last thing I ordered?  When will it arrive?  Let me ask how much Crest toothpaste costs on Amazon.  If I want to buy it at that point, let me just "One Voice" order it.  Frankly, asking me to confirm the order is pretty easy to do.  Probably no patent opportunity here. [Update: looks like voice purchasing is already a thing - I will have to explore further].
• Integration with Roku & Amazon Prime streaming.  Let me control the Amazon app on Roku from the Echo.  This should be trivial?  Searching would be so so much easier with voice than the current on screen keyboard.  Amazon should not limit themselves to the Fire, just because they make the hardware.
• Allow personal "databases".  Pretty simple concept.  You tell the Echo, "Alexa, record in wallet, $33 end."   You've previously defined a database called wallet that has two fields, timestamp and amount.  The Echo inserts a row each time you update it.  More useful than just a to-do list.  Perhaps a more complicated example: "Alexa, record in feelings, overall 'wonderful' and record in feelings, description 'today was a wonderful day.  I got a raise and the sun was shining!' end."  I think that the voice recognition is good enough that you could reasonably use enum fields.  If you do, and the Echo wasn't able to parse your statement into one of the options, it could ask for clarification.
• Allow you to set up events.  For instance, "Alexa, I'm home!"  The Echo would then perform a series of actions including bringing up the lights and then reading the news.  After the news, Alexa asks if you want to record how much money is in your wallet.  "Alexa, I'm going to bed" could trigger a series of things, including the entry into a database of what time you went to bed. [Update: looks like this is partially, if not fully, addressed with IFTTT support that has been somewhat recently added].

There must be a ton more here and I will update as ideas form.

Recent Moments of (Gadget) Weakness

Yesterday, I bought a fitbit Surge after reading all about the watches on display at CES.  Today, I ordered an Amazon Echo.  The latter won't be here until mid-year, but I'm expecting the Surge in about a week.  I'll be posting shortly when I've had a chance to gain some experience with it.

The Golden Age for Information?

There is, perhaps, a golden age for everything.  And many different people will think that their time (or more likely a past time) was a "Golden Age" for something.  For me, I think that we are currently living in a Golden Age because there is so much human knowledge available to you almost instantaneously.  And folks are still innovating to come up with ways of speeding it up even further.

I recently watched the Amazon Echo promotional video and I was struck with how useful that could be.  (My son made me immediately watch the parody video, which is admittedly a lot more fun).  Talking about it over dinner, both of my teenage son's thought that I'd be supremely lazy to buy one.  Their argument was that I already have a device (my iPhone) that will basically do the same thing.  I tried a few of the same examples from the Amazon ad and was disappointed with the Siri results.  They just rolled their eyes and said why wouldn't you just type it into your computer.

Friction.  Forcing yourself to the computer to ask a question or to take a note doesn't work all of the time.  There will just be things that you don't take a note about.  Or things for which you don't ask the question, even though it would have been nice to have an answer just then.  Perhaps Amazon Echo could read you the next step in the recipe?  The timer function would definitely help.

I have a bunch of z-wave controllable light switches around my house installed to work with a Mi Casa Verde device.  It stopped working and I've been looking into replacing it.  I could just replace it with a Vera 3 or a Vera Lite controller.  That said, I don't like the idea that I paid $200 or so and it works for 3 or 4 years and then just poops out.  (But perhaps that is the state of all electronics these days?)

In my attempt to find a replacement, I've wondered how possible / fun that it might be to create a controller on my own (or at least partially on my own).  I'm a reasonably tech savvy person and can code reasonably well.  I've thought that the Raspberry Pi was a very cool platform to build on.  With a simple Google search, I ran across the Razberry daughter card.  The Razberry includes all of the hardware and low-level software to control a Z-wave network.  And from some review of their site, there appears to be enough information for me to learn how to program my own profile.

Amazing.  I can just decide to do an incredibly complex electronics project because I can find sufficient and freely available information on the Internet.  I have a means to ask questions (forums) and learn from questions others have asked before me.  Worst case, I can buy books (without leaving my house) to go in depth on a particular topic.

Golden Age for information and ease of access to it.  At least that is what it feels like to me now.  Will the next 10 or 20 years get even better?  Have we reached a limit to how free information can get?  Or will I laugh when I look back on the state of information availability of 2014?

Ways in which it could get much better:

• More information available.  Generally, just an expansion of human knowledge.
• Better searching on the internet.
• More open source and open source-like projects.
• Easier interfaces for relative noobs like me to get started on electronics projects.

Ways in which it could get worse:

• Copyright insanity
• Paywalls
• Collapse of civilization

My bet is that it gets better.  Much better.  I can't wait!