Amazon Echo - anyone have one?

Soldato
Joined
13 Sep 2008
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Have anyone read 1984? They're basically telescreens. Ok, no screen as of yet, but everything that is heard in your house will be sold to advertisers, cold callers and the FBI/NSA/GHCQ etc. Kiss your privacy goodbye.

Given its Amazon we're talking about this wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Stay away.
 
Caporegime
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Have anyone read 1984? They're basically telescreens. Ok, no screen as of yet, but everything that is heard in your house will be sold to advertisers, cold callers and the FBI/NSA/GHCQ etc. Kiss your privacy goodbye.

Smart tvs already do this :p

Bevause it lets them use big powerful cloud compter farms to do the voice recognition work rather than the tv itself.

But it does warn it may pick up orher conversation
 
Soldato
OP
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Not sure if to go with the Echo (£100) with it's average always on speaker or the Dot (£50) and use my bluetooth UE Boom. Boom has a better speaker but I'd have to manually switch it on when I want to listen to music.

Heard the Echo is better at picking up audio too.
 
Soldato
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Been watching this in the US.

Sonus will be joining it next year apparently allowing you to control that so the dot might be the more interesting one (and cheaper obviously too)

Not sure whether to wait till Google Home though as I have a number of Nest products already.

That said I use IFTTT a lot so it would work OK with both.
 
Man of Honour
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I decided to get one because it seems like a fun gimmick that'll be a novelty for a while and wasn't as expensive as I thought it might be. Dunno why but I thought something like this would come in at around £200, bearing in mind how much a reasonable wifi/bt connected speaker costs on its own. If the national rail integration works well it will also be useful in the morning to avoid faffing about with a phone app.

The reviews I read seemed generally positive about the voice control, I'm a bit of a sceptic and expected it to have problems letting me choose what music I want to listen to. If I can just bark out requests to play a specific song or album name by a specific artist and it works properly, then I'll be happy.

I also can't find the charging cable for my existing bluetooth speaker.
 
Associate
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I genuinely do not understand why people would ever be happy to have an always on device listening in to their conversations and using/selling that information on to various third party companies.
 
Soldato
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I genuinely do not understand why people would ever be happy to have an always on device listening in to their conversations and using/selling that information on to various third party companies.

I know this gets banded around a lot but is there any actual proof it does this. People used to say the facebook app also did this but it turned out to be BS. However facebook do record meta data about allsorts.
 
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