It's hard to join a conversation around Alexa smarthome automation without straying into forbidden roadmap topics but this is a core focus for me because it has had such a dramatic influence in engaging people who were previously either indifferent to, or struggling with, various smarthome technologies. People who used to curse and give up when they couldn't get the result they wanted from a smarthome device will just joke about it when Alexa makes a mistake! That difference in attitude coupled with the near zero learning curve of voice interfaces has me going "all-in: to incorporate Alexa integration into everything I can.
That said, there are a number of core challenges that I hope are being looked at by the Alexa development team. I don't know if there is any way to comment on any of these but I'll mention them just in case.
1- Interaction between different Echo units. With 10 Echos so far and expanding quickly, I find more and more situations where it would be useful to tell an Echo in one location to lower the volume or change the music on an Echo in another location. In other words have my Echos show up in my list of Smart Home devices so they can be controlled from other Echos.
2- Grouping Echos together. I'm assuming if the Echos were smart home devices you could create a group of them and then give a command for the whole group to play some music or raise the volume, etc.
3- Push Notifications. If I could use Echos for automation announcements it would be a real paradigm change as it would eliminate all manner of hard wired infrastructure and be infinitely and instantly reconfigurable.
4- Higher Fidelity options. I know there is going to be some integration between Sonos and Alexa eventually but it would be nice to see some other options that would be useful in a Smart Home environment such as Russound integration or some native Echo options from Amazon with higher fidelity speakers that could be configured as stereo pairs.
5- More robust TV control options than what is currently available. It needs to get to the point where you walk into a room and say what you want to see by channel, show, network, station, movie, or whatever and you get it. The key here being zero learning curve for the user to get the desired result.
Too bad I live on the wrong coast to be able to work for Amazon but I expect i will continue working with their Alexa products in a big way from now on. I hope the momentum they have going will continue to transform the whole definition of what a smart home can be.