No one knew what to make of the Amazon Echo when it first debuted. Originally described as a Siri-like, tube-shaped home assistant, how could this glorified speaker be more useful than similar phone features? But in its year-plus of existence, the Echo has been quietly taking over households everywhere. Amazon hasn't released official sales information, but we can deduce the device has experienced some success based on more than Alec Baldwin's endorsement. According to Slice Intelligence, the Echo's sales grew an average of 342 percent during Q3 and Q4 of 2015. And a new report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners estimates that 3 million Echos have been purchased in the US since 2014.
Clearly, Amazon isn't going to let the Echo go anywhere any time soon. The company even recently expanded the Echo family with Dot and Tap, giving customers more affordable hardware options for Alexa access. While often compared to Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google Now's nameless voice assistant, using Alexa feels fundamentally different. And after just a few weeks living with the Amazon Echo, I can see how—and in what capacity—I could be convinced to use a virtual assistant.
That tube in the corner
By now, you probably know what the Echo looks like. It's a nearly foot-tall cylinder with noticeable speaker holes along its bottom half and a blue ring on its top. Also on the top of the cylinder are the action button, the mute microphone button, and the microphone that picks up your voice commands. Echo comes with a slender remote that you can use to turn its volume up and down; skip, pause, and play songs; and activate Alexa without saying her name.
Echo looks like a smart device but not disruptively so. I set it on top of my entertainment unit, and it blended in with the surrounding vase, candle holder, bowl, and picture frame already there. You could strategically place the Echo on a bookshelf or somewhere more discreet, but my placement worked. I live in a one-bedroom apartment, and I could bark orders to Alexa from any room without issue.
Oh, the things you can do!
Generally I'm not keen on virtual assistants. I don't like talking to my iPhone nor do I understand the usefulness of Siri when I can just as easily type queries into my phone. I don't talk to Siri in my apartment, and I certainly don't talk to her out in public. That's the main reason I was skeptical about Amazon's Echo. Aside from its speaker capabilities, Echo is just a vessel for Alexa. I wasn't sure how, if at all, I'd use Amazon's voice assistant once she was set up and propped on top of my entertainment unit in my living room.
Music playback
At first, I did what most people probably do when they start up Echo: I played some music. "Alexa, play some Michael Jackson," is specifically what I told her. If you have Amazon Prime, Echo will stream music from Prime Music by default. The device shuffled a few of the King of Pop's songs and played them one after another until I said stop.
One thing I had to get used to was the language of Alexa. I said "Alexa, skip" when I wanted to go to the next song, but nothing happened. The correct command to skip songs is "Alexa, next." It takes a few tries to say the right words at the right time. The Alexa app and Amazon's site all list the proper phrases out for you.
As a speaker, the Echo is more than capable of filling a room with boisterous sound. It has a 2.5-inch woofer for deep bass playback and a 2-inch tweeter for playing crisp high notes. However, I did notice that lows got a bit grainy at higher volume levels. It wasn't enough to distort sound, but the Echo's speakers just aren't the same quality as my beloved Fugoo Style Bluetooth speaker. I love the balanced, robust sound that little portable speaker provides, and it was my main living room speaker before the Echo came in. Now, the Echo only replaces it because of convenience—I can play music instantly just by asking Alexa to do it for me. If you have a speaker that you love and use often, I'd recommend getting the Echo Dot and connecting it to the other speaker via a cable or Bluetooth.
News
Even more than playing music, Alexa has proven herself to be most useful as my personal news anchor. By saying "Alexa, what's new?" or "Alexa, what's the news?" you can activate your Flash Briefing or a customized list of audio news clips. You can choose from different sources in the app—there's NPR, CNN, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, and more as well as general topics including Top News, Politics, Business, Science, and Unusual. Alexa pulls these from the Web and reads the news herself. Depending on how many sources you activate, your Flash Briefing may not be so speedy; Alexa typically takes 20 minutes or so to play through all of mine. Still, it's convenient to be able to listen to the news while I'm running around, getting dressed, and making coffee in the morning.
Smart home
A lot of smart home companies have native support for Alexa. I have a few Philips Hue smart lightbulbs in my apartment, and connecting Alexa to them through the app was relatively painless. Once they were connected, I could say, "Alexa, turn off the living room light" and the room would dim into darkness. In the Alexa app, you can group certain products together to control them simultaneously with a single command. I bundled my two smart bulbs together, and then I could say, "Alexa, turn on the lights."
After using Alexa with the few smart devices in my home, I see the potential for voice commands to control an entire smart home. It frees up your hands and body to do whatever—wrangle the kids, cook, stop the cat from escaping, get dressed hastily when you're late for work—while still letting you control the basic parts of your home simply by calling upon Alexa. And since anyone can control her whether they're a part of your household or not, it makes it even easier to let guests take over if they're house-sitting or just hanging out.
In addition to Philips Hue bulbs, Amazon's Echo and Alexa can control products including Belkin's WeMo devices and smart thermostats from Ecobee and Nest. Numerous companies have smart home hubs that can control different brands of devices, but most of them fragment the landscape by not being universal. Alexa has serious potential to be a universal smart home hub for all the devices in your home no matter who makes them.
Skills
Echo's skills "store" has grown to more than 500 skills since the device launched, giving the Echo a bunch of potential new features. For now, the problem is that most of them are still quite gimmicky and not that useful.
There's an Uber skill that lets you hail a ride by asking Alexa to do it for you (you must link your Uber app to do so) and a Dominos skill that turns Alexa into your personal pizza orderer. Most of the available skills are made by small developers, so with that you get tricks like the naysaying Boo skill (want to kick someone out of a charades game? Just let Alexa boo them out of your living room) and the Fortune Cookie skill that makes Alexa tell you "Good news is coming soon" and other silly, pseudo-inspirational one-liners.
The skills store is like any kind of app store—it needs to grow and have more contributors before useful things will pop up. I'd also like to see Amazon make the store better within the app, mainly in terms of categorization. Currently you can only search for skills alphabetically or see the top-rated skills first. I'd like to be able to find specific skills by using categories like weather, productivity, dining, entertainment, and more.
Miscellaneous
Alexa can do a number of nuts-and-bolts things that your smartphone can as well. You can set timers or alarms by saying something like, "Alexa, set an alarm for 5pm" or "Alexa, set a timer for 20 minutes." I found this useful when I wanted to wake up from naps on the weekend or when I was cooking and needed a timer to set and forget. There's also the shopping and to-do list functions, which allow you to tell Alexa to add things to either list. Being an Amazon product, Alexa can naturally shop directly for you if you ask, and she can cross things off that shopping list as she orders them from Amazon for you.
Amazon recently added calendar notification support for Google Calendar, meaning you can ask Alexa about your day and she'll tell you what's on your agenda. For now, Alexa will only read off events (not reminders) on your main Google Calendar. So if you have another work calendar imported from Outlook or iCal, she won't be able to update you on those meetings. Most of my daily appointments are scheduled on my work calendar, so Alexa would often tell me that "nothing is scheduled for the next 30 days" even when I had weekly meetings to look forward to.
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