Hello and welcome to the show!
My name is Alex and this is TechFlow!
I've got one question for you: Is the Amazon Echo worth it?
Let's find out!
So, is the Amazon Echo worth your hard earned money?
Let's go through its features, its unboxing experience (what the thing looks like) and
what it can do for you.
Let's, first, kick things off with the unboxing experience.
So, we're taking out here £149.95 out of your hard earned money.
The unboxing experience is pretty good for a £150 product.
The box is very sleek and the Echo itself is well presented.
The box is very plain and simple: Inside, you'll find a user guide, the Echo itself
and a power cable.
Fairly simple stuff.
Upon taking everything out of the box, you're going to plug the power cable into the wall
and plug the power cable into the Echo.
You will then be greeted by some really pleasing sounds: Something along the lines of "Get
your phone out and download the app."
The Echo then creates its own wireless network; you can connect to that network with your
phone and then hop back over to the app, tell the Echo to connect to your home's WiFi and
then you're pretty much set up to go.
It then plays you a two minute video with some of the little tips and tricks and things
which you can say to your Echo and then you click done and that's it.
And then it's just: "Alexa, what's the time?"
Here's a few little examples of questions you can ask Alexa: ALEX: Alexa, how hot is the moon?
ALEXA: The surface temperature of the moon is -22°C. ALEX: Remind me to record a video.
ALEXA: Got it.
I put "Record a video" on your to-do list.
ALEX: Alexa, give me my sport update.
ALEXA: Here is your sports update.
In football, last night Middlesbrough beat Hull City 1-0 in a premier league match.
ALEX: Yesss!
Now, so far, with its far field, far fetching microphones, I've been super impressed with
its ability to pick up and understand what people have been saying and when I really
saw this was when my seven year old brother Jacob was speaking to Alexa.
He is seven years old and his voice isn't fully developed and he said "Alexa" and a
few other words in a different way to someone who has a fully developed voice i.e. an adult.
And Alexa really stood out to me here because, all of the time, Alexa was able to pick up
what he was saying and answer the questions in pretty good depth.
My brother was asking things like, "Hey, Alexa, how hot is the moon?"
So, Alexa seems like a little bit of a gimmick.
We've had it in the kitchen now for about a week and we've been asking it odd questions
now and again - very gimmicky.
But here me out here - I was thinking to myself, because my Grandma told me that she wanted
a DAB radio for Christmas and I thought to myself, wait a minute, why don't I just get
her an Amazon Echo?
I did a little bit of searching on Amazon and I typed into Amazon "Spotify radio," which
is a DAB radio which picks up radio frequencies, but it's also connected to the internet so
it can play things like Spotify, much like the Alexa can or the Echo can.
Now these are on Amazon for over £100 right now.
Now, Alexa is £150 but it can play internet radio at very high quality and it can also
play songs from Spotify or Amazon web services and it also is a personal assistant, so you're
getting all of these things in the one package.
Now, we've used ours in the kitchen; we've been adding things to the shopping list, we
have been putting things on to-do lists and we've been getting weather and sport information
just by clicking our fingers and saying "Alexa, what's the weather like?"
Now, Alexa has a mute button right on top if you're worried about privacy and you're
having a bit of a private conversation, you can smash that mute button and it won't be
listening to you at all but, so far, I haven't done that yet.
And, honestly, the Alexa is really fun and intuitive and it's awesome when the whole
family is sat around the dinner table and we're asking it random questions and seeing
who can throw Alexa the toughest question going and seeing what it can answer and what
it can't.
Alexa says that it's going to get more intelligent, the more it listens to you.
Now, upon set up, you do have to go into the app, which you download from the app store,
and set things in there like your favourite sports team, so that you can ask it sports
questions.
You also set, in the app, your favourite news articles, so let's say Sky News or The Guardian
so that it knows what updates to give you when you ask for a news update.
You can also ask it what the traffic is like and I tried to set this up but, at the moment,
this feature is not available in the UK yet, only in the US.
The way that it works is that you put in your home location and let's say your office location
and then when you ask it what the traffic's like and if it's clear to the office, it will
say it's fine and if not, that it's not fine.
It doesn't just say what the traffic is like anywhere, it says what the traffic is like
to your input locations, from the beginning to end destination and you provide these locations
when you set up Alexa.
Now, one of the main reasons that I got Alexa was to be able to control some of my smart
devices and it's really, really let me down.
I think that this may be something to do with my Philips Hue Bridge being NATed and not
actually allowed to connect to the Philips Hue servers but the Alexa and my Hue Bridge
are on the same network which, well, let me explain: OK, so, for some reason, I can ask
Alexa to turn off individual lights but I have to say the name of the light to turn
it off or on.
I can't just say "Alexa, turn on all of the lights," it doesn't seem to allow this as
if it does not understand the command.
I've done some research into this and I've downloaded and installed the Hue app on to Alexa
but still absolutely nothing.
The Alexa and my Hue Bridge are on the same wireless network so, theoretically, they should
work but I've had no luck with it and, according to some of the reviews of the Hue app in the
Alexa store, people are saying the same thing so hopefully this will be resolved but I think
that there are ways around this with a program called "If this, then that" which, again,
is really difficult to set up but if you know what you're doing and you're a tech savvy
person, this thing is going to be golden.
You can download apps on to Alexa and these are not termed "apps" but rather "skills".
You can download, for example, a "Cats fact" app and then you can just say "Tell me a random
fact about cats" and it will open up the app and intuitively tell you a fact about cats.
You can also download apps like "Jamie Oliver" and you can say "Alexa, ask Jamie Oliver for
a recipe for dinner tonight" and it will read you off a recipe or something to cook.
And I thought that this was really cool too - unfortunately, I don't have a BMW i8 to hand - but you can
also control your BMW i8 app with the BMW skill that the Alexa unit can learn.
You can tell it to turn on your heating in the car and different bits and bobs like that.
It's really cool stuff but what I'm saying is that you need to be a little bit tech savvy
to get this thing up and running.
For the basic things, it works fine eg.
"Alexa, play BBC Radio 1" or "Alexa, play 'All night long' by 'MGK.'"
It will just work.
Another thing that's really cool as well is that you can use Alexa as a stand-alone Bluetooth
speaker so you can say: "Alexa, connect to my speaker."
And what it will do is that it will make itself discoverable and then you can connect to it
via your phone and you can use Alexa as a Bluetooth speaker to play music from your
phone if a certain song isn't on Spotify which you want to listen to or you want to watch
some YouTube videos and what to have a bit better quality sound.
So, I really do think that Amazon have hit the nail on the head here - with the amount
of things that you can do and this thing also just having the DAB radio, or internet radio,
facility and the ability to connect to online music services and play any song just by you
saying it, as well as it having all of the reminders and shopping lists and these are
all of the things that you don't have to set up - these are things which are really very
simple and intuitive to get going with.
I think that this thing is 100% worth it and I only think that it's going to get better
with time.
So guys, that was my take on the Amazon Echo.
I really, really like it and if you are in to music and radio and something a little
bit gimmicky and you want to have a little bit of fun in the kitchen, or wherever you
want to place this unit (I think it's definitely best in the kitchen because when everyone's
sat there having dinner, you can just fire off random questions and it's just really
fun to use), this is just the ticket.
My family and I haven't stopped using it - even though I know what the time is, I still come
in in the morning and say "Alexa, what's the time?" just so that I can hear her because
it is just really surreal to have someone just so intuitively talk to you back but you
know it's not a human.
It's really strange and I think it would make an absolutely awesome Christmas gift too if
that's in your budget.
But guys, this has been the review and I really do recommend this bit of kit.
And, also, this whole review has been recorded on a £35 microphone so if that floats your
boat too, that'll be in the description.
This has been TechFlow and we'll catch you in the next one.