I've never got on with these smart home devices that you talk to so don't have any. I am not really sure why they are deemed more useful than just tapping a screen/pressing a button.
My dad always tries to show how much he loves his google nest thing that can turn the TV on/off with speech, but half the time it doesn't work and he could have turned the TV on much quicker by just pressing a button on the remote.
The only place i like voice control is in the car, for obvious reasons. In the home, i much prefer to just tap/swipe on a screen than rely on voice control which is always pretty flakey.
They're very useful for things like setting timers when cooking or when you're doing something that needs your hands (I use one when i'm painting to play music/audiobooks).
They've also effectively pushed the cost of some kinds of disability type aids right down, as it's now trivially easy for someone who is visually impaired to do things like get the time, control all sorts of things, or even listen to audio books compared to what it used to be, before the likes of the Echo if you wanted a talking clock it was typically something that did a single task, required you to press a button to get it to talk and cost as much/more than a full price Echo dot for that one task.
When my dad's eyes were really bad he couldn't operate a tablet, he could barely operate the TV remote by touch (and really struggled with the onscreen guide), but could manage to get his Echo to play audio books, get the time etc.
I was seeing the headline about the losses for the Echo's etc at Amazon yesterday and was wondering if they've had a change of management at some level, as it seemed to me for a long time the Echo's were not there to make a profit at the hardware level, but to encourage you to buy into the Amazon ecosystem for other things, so you'd be more likely to buy audiobooks, amazon videos etc if you had an echo, I know when my dad's eyes were bad we were buying anything up to 3 audio books a week for him to listen to on the echo, something like £600+ a year spent at Amazon for digital media we wouldn't otherwise have bought.
Currently we've got an echo device in most rooms because of the timer type functions and audiobooks, but also to control various lamps as for example when my dad gets out of bed at night he'll tell the echo in his bedroom to turn on a lamp in there, and one in the hall so he's not struggling in the dark (his eye is far better than it was a couple of years back, but he's got basically no night vision).
arstechnica.com
