The “Smart home” is quickly becoming the next big platform for the tech world, connecting appliances to our phones and to each other is just the beginning. The smart home as an idea has been around for years, in pop culture, science fiction and the like. But in the past five or so years it has become a tangible and practical area of development, you can walk into a best buy today and buy anything from a door that you can unlock anywhere in the world, to a toaster that’ll tell you when its popped. Now that last one may be a bit humorous but its not far form the truth, with WIFI chips becoming cheaper and smaller, everything is getting connected. So, you may ask, “Why don’t I (the consumer) have a connected toaster” well it’s for the same reason that ten years ago, only the rich and geeky had smartphones, for a more modern example take the smart watch, a smart home sounds great in theory but actually setting one up requires money spent, time dedicated and change of habits. It’s just too complicated.
That’s where Alexa comes in, Alexa was going to be to Fire devices (Amazon’s mobile division) what Siri is to iOS devices. An ever present virtual assistant to aid in scheduling, communicating and everyday tasks. However, as you may know, the Fire Phone, Amazon’s first and so far only attempt at the phone industry, absolutely flopped, Alexa seemed to be dead with it. But of course that would be a rather boring end to this editorial. Alexa was resuscitated in the form of a black cylindrical tower of microphones, a speaker and a cloud ready platform.
The Echo was marketed mainly to Amazon Prime subscribers as a virtual assistant in a speaker, at first you could ask Alexa simple fact based questions, set timers, play music from a very limited array of sources (Prime music and Pandora at first), as well as order from Amazon with your voice. None of this was revolutionary however one of the major selling point was the price, $99 for prime members at launch, for well, a speaker you could talk to. However, the biggest selling point for the Echo was the promise of more ‘Skills’ to be added soon. To date arguably the most important skill that the Echo has received is IFTTT (If This Than That), with IFTTT, Alexa started to be able to control your home, more lately services like Nest, Hue, Insteon, Samsung SmartThings and WeMo, Alexa has become to many, the easiest and most efficient way to control the connected home. Simply saying “Alexa, turn off the lights” will switch off the the connected Philips hue lights, very futuristic.
Many news outlets have eluded to the possibility of an Echo competitor from Apple, it makes sense right? Siri undoubtedly would be a great fit in a speaker, however currently Siri can’t interact with the home the way Alexa can, which to me makes it almost useless. Because Amazon is opening its platform to developers and really isn’t a competitor to any of the companies making smart home gadgets, there is no reason for them to avoid the Echo, a huge bonus for Amazon. With more skills being added every week, the Amazon Echo is the perfect control centre for the future of the smart, connected home.
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