I've had my Amazon Echo smart speaker since they were available to the general public and can honestly say it has changed the way our family lives. We put it our open floor plan kitchen/family room where the far-field mic can hear our voices up to 20 feet away and has pretty incredible speech recognition accuracy. We were a little weirded out calling it "Alexa" so we changed the default name to "Amazon" – the only other current choice.
My wife used to ask me what the weather was going to be like in the morning which would annoyingly (jk love of my life) require me to go to a computer or smartphone and ask the...same...question. The Amazon Echo allows me to strut my passive aggressive side so when she asked what the weather was going to be like, I would just repeat "Amazon, what's the weather going to be like today". My wife, who hates using Siri because she feels like it makes her look weird/uncomfortable talking to her iPhone, stopped asking me what the weather was going to be like. She started asking Echo.
Bam! Worth the money right there. But there's so much more... Read more of this post
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