Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Or at least a future I'd like to be living in :-) Lets get this straight. As a Prime member, you can get this for $99. At that rate, think of it as: -> A wireless speaker that you can just issue spoken instructions to! -> An alarm clock that you can shout at ("Alexa! Shut up!") in the morning, and it will obey you :) (its my half asleep morning power trip) -> Set a timer for when you're cooking -> Fact check your friend while you argue with them :P So my common use cases aside, here's what is good about Echo: -> Speech recognition works *really* well, esp for brief phrases. -> It can hear you from pretty much anywhere in the room, and is pretty accurate with the wake word (I've been using Alexa) -> As a music player, its really nice to be able to just ask for a song by name and have it just come up, without having to hunt through a playlist, connect to the bluetooth speaker etc. -> Purchasing music is pretty seamless. (As if Amazon needed another way to get you to spend money:-) ) -> iHeart radio integration, if you're into that kinda thing Here is what is not so great: -> Speech recognition for longer phrases needs a couple of attempts, maybe because of my accent. (e.g. "Alexa, play the song The Troubles by U2" -> As a music player, its a bit lacking in bass. -> Sometimes, while its playing music, you have to use the wake word once or twice to gets its attention -> Bing search? Really? *rolls eyes* I'd love to see in the future: -> Integration with Fire TV, so that I can simply say "Alexa, play The Sopranos on my TV" -> Google search? -> Being able to send a message to a friend in my contacts "Alexa, message [XYZ] [blah blah blah]" Overall, its a pretty cool product, and I'd love to see what it looks like over time!