- If you're watching this video,
there's a pretty good chance
that you have an Amazon Echo or a Google Home.
And you know what, it's a pretty safe bet
that you probably have a television,
but here's a question, are those two things
doing a good enough job of talking to each other?
So I want to talk about one
of the biggest trends in tech this summer
and that's basically a bunch of companies
are trying to figure out a way
to get an intelligent assistant into your living room.
In this video, because there's just a million things
we could talk about, I want to focus specifically
on uh...
Lexa.
In videos, we're just gonna call it Lexa
so it won't turn on your Echo, you're welcome.
Lexa, buy some toilet paper.
Nothing?
Good?
Good, cool, we're moving on.
The way that most people get Lexa into their living room
is they buy an Echo or an Echo dot
or, I don't know, this cute little thing, the Echo spot.
I love it, it's cute.
It's got a little screen and it's round and...
Anyway.
The problem with that is you end up
with another gadget in your living room.
Maybe that's not a big deal,
but you've also got other gadgets in your living room.
You've got a TV, you've got maybe a sound bar,
you've got a console, a set-top box,
and you want all that stuff to talk to each other.
Frankly, it's complicated.
Welcome to the world of HDMI-CEC and HDMI ARC
and a million remote controls and (sighs), IR blasters.
It's a lot for regular humans to figure out
how to get all that AV equipment to talk to each other
and throwing a digital assistant into the mix
just multiplies that.
So what I want to do is look at
how a few different companies are trying
to get Lexa into your living room.
The linchpin for the whole experience is getting a Fire TV.
Now if you just get a Fire TV 4K
or just a regular old Fire TV,
the problem there is you've got
to hold down this little microphone button
on the remote to talk to Lexa.
Nobody wants that.
You just wanna shout commands into the room
and so then you have to get something on the side
like an Echo Spot or an Echo Dot.
Or, you can get this cute little dude.
This is the Fire TV Cube
and we reviewed it a little while ago and it's fine.
It's got those annoying IR blasters and whatever.
Now I know it doesn't work with YouTube
because Amazon and Google are fighting
and the world is terrible
and maybe they'll solve it someday.
I can't solve that problem.
But here's the thing, your TV probably has crappy sound
and you might not want it on when you're listening to music.
And I think the best solution for that, honestly,
is gonna be these sound bars because these processors,
they're not gonna need to be that powerful
to run these things.
So I don't think they're gonna get obsolete in a while
and it means you get to bark at the room
and you get good sound and they do talk to your TV
in a relatively smart way.
The one everybody knows about is the Sonos Beam.
We did a big feature on it.
We reviewed it a little while ago.
I think it's great but it is a little expensive.
It's $399.
There's another sound bar that's just coming out,
it's called the Polk Command Bar
and I actually want to spend a little bit more time
talking about it because the Polk Command Bar
really encapsulates all of the problems
of trying to get a digital assistant in your living room.
Alright, so this is the Polk Command Bar
and its associated sub, whatever.
It is $299 and if you look at it,
it looks like there's an Echo Dot slap in the middle of it.
It's not that, it's custom circuitry,
but two years ago that's what they thought
they wanted to do so they started that way,
Amazon gave them special permission, whatever.
The reason this thing is interesting
is it has a different solution
for getting Lexa working on your TV.
It's actually in the middle of the HDMI chain
instead of hanging off on the end of it.
So to explain that, we've got to talk
about inputs and outputs.
Okay, so if you look at the inputs on this thing,
it's pretty standard.
Two HDMI in, one out, there's an optical in,
normal stuff.
But what's interesting is because the Alexa is
on this sound bar, it is able to do the HDMI switching
with your voice because it has direct control of it.
You'll also see that this channel is really big
and that's because they designed it specifically
to fit a Fire TV stick.
It has an always-on USB port and so everything can
be hidden in there, except they designed this two years ago
and now everybody wants the Amazon Fire TV 4K,
which is really big and then when you plug it
into this thing, it kind of hangs out in a really dopey way.
So they didn't really think that through.
Oh hey, one more thing.
It's a sound bar, how does it sound?
I don't know.
Fine.
It's really aggressive at making you hear the center channel
and basically nothing else.
The sound is not very rich or immersive,
it's kind of flat.
But you know, it's a hundred bucks cheaper
than the Sonos, I guess.
Okay, so that's how the Polk Command Bar does it,
but after looking at all these different solutions,
which one do I think is actually the best
for getting Lexa in your living room?
Well, honestly, remember that we're still
very early in this process.
What do I mean by us being relatively early?
Well, here's just one example.
Up until recently, if you ask Lexa to play you a show,
it wouldn't play the show.
You'd have to pick the remote and hit play
to actually watch it.
They just fixed that.
I mean, all this stuff has basically come out
in the last six months and they all have
radically different solutions
and who knows what it's gonna look like six months from now?
Here's a story.
Do you remember the Xbox Kinect?
It did all of the stuff years ago.
You could yell commands at your TV
and ask it to do stuff and turn it on
and turn it off and everything worked
and it was great and you know what happened to it?
It went away.
And who knows?
This other stuff might go away too.
So if you really want a digital assistant
in your living room, I don't think it's a good call
to spend a ton of money on it right now
because who knows if that solution,
the thing they tried, is gonna work?
Polk made a bunch of weird bets two years ago
that I don't think played out very well today.
So maybe the Beam is okay.
The Beam is okay because you get to buy into Sonos.
But for everything else, if you really want Lexa
in your living room, you know what my advice is?
Just get a Dot.
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And thank you to everybody at The Verge.
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Thank you.
(bouncy music)