wkearney99
Senior Member
Yeah, well, in reading your responses you're often treading a fine line between advocating your product and being a jerk. Read into that what you will, but perhaps sit back and think about it first.
Amazon Echo to HA Controllers
- Thread starter jkmonroe
- Start date
ChrisCicc
Active Member
I'm also curious why you're bringing this up now when I haven't commented on this thread in a week other than to report a dead bulb? Seriously, I went back to May 31 and I can't even so much as a find a single post I made that has an opinion, never mind an opinion about another's product?
ChrisCicc
Active Member
IVB, replied in PM...
Edit: I took the convo with IVB offline, but for others, there's been FAR too many personal attacks on this forum lately. As many of you know, I'm not the only one who complained about this. My responses above are in response to Bill's seemingly unprompted, and unnecessarily public, personal attack. I don't think it's asking too much for him to clarify what his complaint is, and what his motivations are...
Edit: I took the convo with IVB offline, but for others, there's been FAR too many personal attacks on this forum lately. As many of you know, I'm not the only one who complained about this. My responses above are in response to Bill's seemingly unprompted, and unnecessarily public, personal attack. I don't think it's asking too much for him to clarify what his complaint is, and what his motivations are...
ChrisCicc
Active Member
IVB said:
As best as I can tell, this just flared up because Bill didn't like the fact that 14 days ago I said the Amazon Echo needs a) one per room, and b ) records what you say. He says it can hear past one room, but then concedes not if the door is closed. He also apparently hasn't read the terms and conditions he's agreed to, where it states, "Amazon Echo processes and retains your voice input and other information, such as your music playlists and your to-do and shopping lists, in the cloud to respond to your requests and improve our services." In other words, every command you give or question you ask Echo, is stored in the cloud until Amazon decides to delete it (which considering big data benefits is probably never). That's not even necessarily a bad thing, many of us agree to that willingly, including myself. But some won't, and so I said one difference is that we don't record data or use the cloud.
For that, Bill publicly posted 14 days later that I was a) wrong (I wasn't), b ) a very close to being a jerk (funny how I haven't call anyone a jerk here, but am getting called one?), and c) bashing other's products (assuming he's talking about the Echo, that would be pretty stupid of me, since we're integrating with the echo). So no, I'm not playing the martyr. I'm not just not playing his game either. I don't want some future customer coming along via search and taking my lack of response as implicit recognition of guilt, so I am firm and clear in my response to challenges like this.
IVB
Senior Member
ChrisCicc said:
Most adults have to make a decision between being right and being effective. There are those who bemoan the lack of upward mobility as some form of block / warfare, but in reality its that people love to be right. And argue. And, forgive the crude comparison but its one i've made many times before.
Being "right" is like masturbating. It feels good for a while, sometimes its even awesome. But after its over, you realize you're alone, you have a mess to clean up, and you're no better off than when you started. But if you're "effective", the world parties with you, as you're making other people "right" and not worrying about credit for yourself.
My suggestion is this: Not one single customer who finds you via google and searching some online forum to create an opinion over experience is a customer worth having. Better to take the high road 100%, and be effective at what you do. Having a solu
IE, i'd recommend no more posts with "if dean only knew" crap. But, what do I know, i'm just some schmoe on the other end of a keyboard.
IVB
Senior Member
Just realized you actually have one. How long have you had your echo? What made you get one? Whats the biggest thing you like? hate?
I'm down with the "get multiple". I have 9 rooms in my house, if it can be location sensitive i'd go buy 8 more. Well, after the one I ordered shows up on July 8th and assuming it works.
I'm down with the "get multiple". I have 9 rooms in my house, if it can be location sensitive i'd go buy 8 more. Well, after the one I ordered shows up on July 8th and assuming it works.
wkearney99 said:
wkearney99
Senior Member
ChrisCicc said:
You are getting out of hand. STEP BACK and question whether or not replying to forums in this manner is appropriate for the developer of the product. What impression does that set for potential customers? "Responding to challenges" is for children, not for a professional attempting to discuss their products online.
What's better for a customer to see, the potential for extrapolating a lack of response into something larger... or witnessing a dialog with the developer coming across poorly? There's an old saying "A closed mouth gathers no feet". I'm saying that it might be worth considering that BEFORE you type replies.
wkearney99
Senior Member
IVB said:
Yes, I've had it for a while and it's really doing a great job of automating really trivial stuff. No, it's not without it's issues (setup for some networks seems to be a challenge). I seem to recall it being a little stubborn about joining mine. But, eventually, it sorted itself out without a lot of jumping through hoops.
It comes with a remote that has a mic. You can use this to speak to the Echo if you're not close, or don't want to repeatedly use the trigger word. It comes with a mount with both magnetic or double-stick tape. I have mine on the refrigerator door. I've made use of it when scouring the pantry for adding a lot of things in a row.
I could see where it'd be very handy to have more than one of these remotes. I asked this question and was met with a very understanding reply from support, acknowledging the reasons why I asked for it and stating there's no support for that currently. Ok, so you wouldn't think it's a big deal to get an honest answer, but lots of companies do a phenomenally bad job of this. Amazon's always been remarkably clear in responding to me effectively. This is a big win, even if I'm not getting what I'm after right away.
I'm sure there's plenty of reasons why they don't support more than one Bluetooth mic currently. Could be any number of reasons like there not being enough CPU in the Echo to handle the potential for multiple streams, or known issues with Bluetooth, or whatever. Still, the underlying functionality for a remote IS already supported, so hopefully more than one might eventually be possible. It'd certainly be less expensive than multiple Echo units.
As for in-house location sensitivity, there's really very little we've been asking of it that would require it to know exactly where we are in the house. It can hear us and we can hear it's replies. Think of it this way, how many times have you dealt with someone saying "can you take a look at this" when you're not anywhere nearby or immersed in something else? Whereas if they'd simply added a description of what it was it'd be a lot less irritating. As in, "can you take a look at this bug I see crawling on the wall" or something like that. It helps set a kind of momentum to the dialog.
Well, the same sort of thing can be thought of when you deal with a lot of voice recog systems. Yes, there are a LOT of ways to process language, but sometimes a little rigidity in command structures is worthwhile. Once you 'get' how to issue commands, using it goes a bit smoother. The Echo does a better job than most others I've encountered but it's still at the mercy of people using it in ways it understands.
There's a very cool feature already present where you can tell the Echo to send results to an app running on your phone or tablet. Not much works with this at the present. You can ask it to look up something on Wikipedia and send that. You can't yet do things that would pretty much require results being sent to a screen. Like getting directions, transit times (bus, train, etc) more generic searching. But the fact that the underlying ability is already present... well, that holds a lot of interesting promise.
Anyway, my point isn't this is the end-all-be-all solution. It isn't and may never become that. But for now, the $199 cost of it is absolutely reasonable for the way it works now.
pete_c
Guru
Geez Bill you have convinced me to maybe open up the Amazon Echo box and give the Amazon Echo a try.
I didn't even know it came with an aux microphone until I read your post.
It will be connected to its own AP and internet port while testing.
I have finished that part of creating the connectivity infrastructure pieces of it.
Still procrastinating here though relating to playing with it. (thinking now its been a while and the box is starting to get a bit dusty).
I didn't even know it came with an aux microphone until I read your post.
It will be connected to its own AP and internet port while testing.
I have finished that part of creating the connectivity infrastructure pieces of it.
Still procrastinating here though relating to playing with it. (thinking now its been a while and the box is starting to get a bit dusty).
wkearney99
Senior Member
Frunple said:
I assumed the Fire TV remote with a mic would work with it. Heck, I'd LOVE if that was integrated. But, as of now, the Fire TV has no Echo integration AT ALL. You can't even run the Echo app on the Fire TV. Um, whoops? Clearly the two groups aren't quite integrated... yet.
Likewise the phone/tablet/app support isn't quite as integrated. Yes, you can use your device to SEND bluetooth streaming to the Echo. But you can't use the mic/speaker on the device to interact with the Echo. No picking up your phone and using it as an Echo remote. That would indeed be a very cool feature, but there's no sign of it in the app yet. Nor can you use the Echo as a bluetooth headset to your phone. Which would also be handy.
I don't see much point in being able to stream TO the Echo from your phone since the Echo itself is already supporting quite a lot of music services already. Sure, if you've already got content on your phone or an app that isn't on the Echo then it'd have potential. But given how easy it is to use services with the Echo I'd see ditching the phone content/services instead.
We have a couple of Sonos speakers. I have absolutely put buying any more of the on hold. Yes, they sound a LOT better than the Echo. But what's more likely, Sonos developing Echo-like functionality, an Echo getting an output jack, or a plug-in for the Echo to control a Sonos. I dearly hope it's the last one. It'd be killer to have the Echo be able to control the Sonos gear. Sure, there's a lot of potential overlap, but I'm OK with using both kinds of products.
