Living with Amazon’s Echo: A cylinder of fun and frustration http://goo.gl/O2F2zj

Since I already own a Roku, a Chromecast, and an HTPC, I wasn’t in the market for another streaming device, especially not one that only does audio. But one thing about the Amazon Echo caught my attention immediately — it is voice controlled. Instead of adding yet another complex interface to our lives, it promised to simplify them through the magic of speech. For $99, I just had to find out whether it could. After using it as a family (we placed it centrally in the kitchen dining area) for a few days, I can report that it is both incredibly cool and uniquely frustrating.

A Nexus Q you can talk to

Long-time readers will remember our initial, luke-warm, review of the ill-fated Google Nexus Q. It wrapped a surprisingly good stereo into a Google Play-only streaming device that could only be controlled with an Android smartphone. At least in the end, Google never charged anyone for the Q. The Echo delivers several big improvements over the Q. First, the voice control. Anyone who can say the magic word “Alexa” (or the less exciting alternative, “Amazon”) can in theory make their Echo (or any Echo within earshot) do their bidding. The on-device listener is in fact pretty amazing. So much so that you can’t even discuss Alexa without her (it?) taking notice.

Amazon Echo with Google Nexus Q by David Cardinal

The Amazon Echo certainly looks a lot like the ill-fated Google Nexus Q when they are both lit up

I was a little worried when I saw that the Echo comes with a remote control. It is small, well-designed, and tasteful, but after all the whole idea was not to add another remote to our arsenal. Fortunately, you really don’t need it unless you have a very noisy environment or don’t like saying, “Alexa Volume Up” instead of pressing a button. The voice-driven volume control also doesn’t have very many levels, so it can be hard to get it just right without the remote. In our family, depending on the music source and who is walking into the room, there can be a competing chorus of “Alexa, volume up” and “Alexa, volume down” throughout the day.

The Echo responds to a reasonable set of mostly-canned queries, including questions about the weather, the day’s news, and basic facts it can find in Wikipedia. You can also set an alarm or timer, or add items to your Echo app-only shopping lists. But the big sell is music. Simply ask Echo to play an artist and it will dig into both your Amazon Music library and Amazon’s Prime music collection to fetch up a selection of their tracks. The music experience is both incredibly powerful (just say what you want and it plays) and frustrating (if it doesn’t understand you, it gives you a long-winded answer concluding with the probably-not-helpful answer that it has put a bing search link up on the screen of your Echo app if you’re running it).

The Echo’s audio is quite good for a single-source, small, speaker, but didn’t impress any of us as being as high-quality as a top-of-the-line Bluetooth speaker like the Jambox.

Amazon all the time

Amazon is so determined to make the Echo a showcase for its Prime services that it neglected to provide an alternative. The Echo not will stream from any other library (like Google Play, for example), and you can’t even turn off its enthusiasm for Prime. In my case, for example, I have my music library uploaded to Google Play, but that’s useless for Echo. So for this review I uploaded it to Amazon Music — another $25/year — but I still can’t tell Echo to search for music from only my library on Amazon Music without it attempting to find similar sounding songs and albums from Amazon Prime. Sometimes that can be a good thing, as it did help me discover new tracks. Other times it is very frustrating, as Echo insists on digging up new music for me, even when I’m not interested.

Next page: Lots and lots of Amazon, and missing integration…

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