How often does a truly new electronics category come along? The first television. The Walkman. The iPhone. The iPad. Each time, the industry spends years making copycats and refinements, but the original concept doesn’t change much.
Frankly, Amazon is the last company I would have expected to come up with the next completely new idea. I mean, its hardware ventures so far have been very much in the Us Too department. E-book readers, touchscreen phones, tablets — we’d seen all that before.
But not the Amazon Echo, which just became available for sale to the public (following an invitation-only, testing-the-waters release last November). Somehow, nobody’s thought of this before.
The big idea: Create a voice-activated smartphone assistant like Siri or Google Now — but take it off the phone. Make it a smart, always-listening machine in your house. Engineer it to understand you from across the room, hands free, as you’re cooking, reading, doing homework, discussing, living. Make it good enough to be just like the conversational, environmental computers on Star Trek or in the Iron Man movies.
That’s what the Amazon Echo attempts to be. And you know what? I’ve never been so excited about something that did so little.
Meet the Echo
If you wanted to make a conversational computer for the home, what should it look like? Because Amazon was creating the first one of something, there was no existing design model, no accepted size or shape.
So Amazon went with a nine-inch-tall, sleek black metal cylinder. And why not? It works. It fades into the clutter of your house, along with whatever else is on your bookcase or shelving unit or kitchen counter, just as it should.
The bottom part is perforated, hinting at the speakers inside. The top disc rotates — it’s a giant volume knob — and lights up in various cool LED colors and patterns to telegraph what the thing is doing. On the very top is a power button and a mute button that means both “stop speaking” and “stop listening.”
The Echo is indeed listening all the time to the conversation in your home, but it doesn’t pay attention until you say, “Alexa.” (You can change the attention word to “Amazon,” but that’s your only option. It would be so much more fun if you could make it any name you liked — say, “Hal,” “Jarvis,” or “Skynet.” But you can’t do that. Yet, anyway.)
Why is the product called Amazon Echo, but its starter name is Alexa?
Anyway, once you say “Alexa,” the Echo is just like Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. You ask things in conversational English, and it answers in a clear, fluid, natural-sounding woman’s voice. Actually, Alexa sounds much better than Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. In part, that’s because she’s being projected by a 2.5-inch woofer and a 2.0-inch tweeter instead of a phone speaker the size of a fingernail clipping.
The most amazing engineering achievement is the Echo’s ability to understand commands in terrible acoustic conditions. It understands you whether you’re close to it or a whole room away. It understands every member of the family without training. It understands you when there’s background noise. It even understands you over the musicit’s playing.
Above all, it understands you despite the natural echoes and reverberations of a room. Amazon says that’s because it has an array of seven microphones on top. Apparently, even though they’re just inches apart, they can measure the relatively delayed arrivals of incoming sound waves from your voice, and thereby cancel out any echo.
Now, the Echo doesn’t understand you every time. If you ask something beyond its limited circle of commands, you get either a beep or a “Sorry, I can’t find the answer to the question I heard”-type message. And sometimes it mis-hears you completely. (That situation crops up most often when you’re ordering a certain song or band to play.)
But considering the fact that your voice commands have to be transmitted to the mother ship (Amazon’s computers) and back across the Internet, the accuracy and speed of Echo’s responses are really impressive.
Oh, that’s right: Your recorded commands are collected for study by Amazon, for the purposes of improving Echo’s recognition skills. Amazon says that these recordings are not anonymous, and they’re not deleted unless you delete them. You can delete these recordings yourself, either one at a time or all at once (but that “may degrade your experience using Amazon Echo”).
In short, the easily spooked should not buy an Amazon Echo.
What Can I Say?
At 6 months old, the Echo isn’t nearly as capable as, say, Siri; it doesn’t recognize as many commands or do as many things.
But Amazon promises that the Echo’s talents will rapidly expand. And indeed, the number of requests the device can handle has already doubled since its early adopter beginnings six months ago.
Here’s what the Echo responds to, in order of usefulness:
“Alexa, play Billy Joel.” Music is the killer app. You walk into the kitchen and ask for virtually any band, song, album, genre, or even activity (“play some cooking music”) — and the music just starts. It’s as close as you’re going to get to owning the Star Trek computer.
This feature works best if you’re an Amazon Prime member ($100 a year), because it gives you instant access to a million songs, plus thousands of playlists created by your fellow members.
If you’re not a Prime member (or even if you are), you can also request any of the personalized radio stations you’ve created on a Pandora or iHeartRadio account (free or paid). “Play my Coldplay channel from Pandora,” you can say. Here’s what else you can say.
You can also upload 250 of your own song files to Amazon, to play upon vocal command.
Spotify and Apple Music are more limited; they’re not integrated with the Echo (yet, says Amazon). For services like these, you’re supposed to use the Echo as a glorified wireless Bluetooth speaker for your phone.
You start by saying, “Alexa, connect my phone,” which starts directing playback to the Echo instead of your phone’s speaker. Then you open the music app (Spotify or whatever) on your phone. From here, you can command playback by voice, without needing your phone: “Play,” “Next,” “Previous,” “Resume,” “Softer,” Louder,” and so on.
When music plays, you can adjust the volume by voice, buy the song by voice, or say “Alexa, thumbs up” to “like” the song (for Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Prime Music).
“Alexa, play WCBS.” You can also request any radio station in the country, just by asking for it. That’s a feature of TuneIn.com, which is built right into the Echo and doesn’t require an account or setup. It’s the best.
“Alexa, what’s the news?” Alexa instantly begins playing NPR’s latest headline summary. Using the Echo app on your phone, you can also turn on the option to request the news from the BBC, ESPN, the Economist, or TMZ.
“Alexa, how’s the traffic?” Once you’ve entered your home and work addresses in the phone app, Alexa can tell you exactly how many minutes your commute will be if you leave now.
“Alexa, what’s the weather in Dallas this weekend?” As you’d expect.
“Alexa, read ‘The Casual Vacancy.’” If you’ve bought an audio book from Audible, the Echo begins playing your most recent book. It picks up where you stopped before, even if you were listening to it on a different device.
“Alexa, wake me up at 7:20 a.m.” The Echo is rock-solid on alarms and timers. (If Echo is in the kitchen, you’ll use “Set a timer for 20 minutes” a lot. One night, my wife, with no idea if it would work, said, “Alexa, how much time is left on my timer?” — and bingo, Alexa answered. It was awesome.)
“Alexa, how far is it from Chicago to Tampa?” Alexa is really good at facts. She’ll convert units for you, give you historical or geographical facts, calculate the days of the week for dates, fill you in on movie and music trivia, and on and on. Same kind of thing Siri, Cortana, and Google Now do. Here are a few examples.
She knows sports scores and schedules, too. (“When do the Giants play next?”)
“Alexa: Wikipedia ‘The Rolling Stones.’” This command reads the first couple of lines from the corresponding Wikipedia entry.
“Alexa, put nutmeg on my shopping list.” Alexa doesn’t buy anything without your confirmation. But she will put things onto a shopping list that’s maintained in the Echo app on your phone. Same thing with To Do items: “Put ‘Paint the living room’ on my To Do list.”
“Alexa, reorder cat food.” You can buy stuff by voice — if you’ve previously bought them from Amazon. Alexa describes, aloud, any matching item from your order history, tells you price, and asks if you want to go ahead and order it. For things you order often, it’s pretty cool. (If you make a mistake, you can return the stuff for free. And if you have mischievous teenagers in the house, you can also disable this feature, or require a spoken password.)
“Alexa, how do you spell fluorescent?” She’s a great dictionary. She’ll also define any word for you.
“Alexa, turn off the living-room lights.” In one of Amazon’s recent feature updates, the Echo gained the ability to control home-automation gear from Wink, Belkin, and Philips (that is, the Philips Hue light bulbs). Here’s the complete list of compatible gear.
Once you’ve set all this up, you can use your voice to control lights, light switches, and — here’s the limitless part — power outlets. I tried it with a couple of Belkin WeMo Internet-controllable outlets, and it was wild.
“Alexa, when’s my next appointment?” You can ask various things about your Google calendar, once you’ve told the Echo app your Google account details. You cannot, however, create, delete, or move appointments by voice, as you can with Siri; you can only look things up. (“What’s on my calendar for Tuesday?”)
“Alexa, tell me a joke” quickly became a favorite command in our household of kids. She’s always good for a short, painful pun or two (“Why don’t bicycles wake up early? They’re two-tired”), but now and then she gets the adults laughing. (“How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.”)
Alexa’s Personality
Amazon has put a lot of work into giving Alexa witty responses to silly questions, just like Siri or Cortana — especially when you feed her movie quotes. For example:
You say: “Beam me up.” (She says: “At warp speed, Captain? The engines will never take it!”)
“Which came first: The chicken or the egg?” (”The chicken. Or the egg. No, the chicken. I’m not sure.”)
“Do you want to take over the world?” (”I don’t want to take over the world; I just want to help you.”)
“Earl grey tea. Hot.” (”Unable to comply. Replicators are offline.”)
“How much is that doggie in the window?” (”That one’s not for sale. But the one with the fluffy tail is really nice, too.”)
“I am your father.” (”No! No, no, no!”)
“All your base are belong to us.” (”You have no chance to survive. Make your time.”)
“I want the truth.” (“You can’t handle the truth!”)
“Inconceivable!” (”You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.”)
“Is Santa Claus real?” (”I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard a lot of good things…”)
“Klaatu barada nikto.” (“Well remembered! Unfortunately, I’m not Gort, and I have no powers of resurrection.”)
“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” (”A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”)
“What is your favorite color?” (”Infrared is superpretty.”)
“Knock-knock.” (She tells a knock-knock joke.)
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” (”More fair by far are you than all…” etc.)
“Party on, Wayne.” (”Party on, Garth.”)
“Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” (”Deny thy father and refuse thy name; / Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love / And I’ll no longer be a Capulet!”)
“What do you think about Siri?” (”Siri’s a great app, but I’m different.”)
“What does the fox say?” (”Waa, was, way do.”)
“What is your quest?” (”To seek the Holy Grail.”)
“Who’s your daddy?” (”A team of inventors at Amazon.com.”)
“Open the pod bay doors.” (“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m not Hal, and you’re not in space.”)
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” (”I want to be the computer from Star Trek!”)
The App and the Remote
You don’t have to spend much time in the companion Echo app (for iPhone, Android, or Fire OS). But it serves as the only screen the Echo’s got. Here’s where you see your To Do and Shopping lists, for example. It’s where you set up your music-service accounts, specify which news services you want on call, get help, see manual music playback and volume controls, and take the voice-training exercise. (This asks you to read 25 typical Echo commands. It’s supposed to improve accuracy, but it’s optional.)
The app also keeps written and audio records of your voice commands — and lets you indicate which ones didn’t work, for the benefit of Amazon’s engineers.
For another 30 bucks you can get a remote control. It offers music-playback and volume controls, plus three key benefits:
You can command the Echo quietly, by speaking into its microphone.
You don’t have to say “Alexa” before every command (just press the microphone button and talk).
*You can make the Echo say anything you want. Hold down the microphone button, say “Simon says…” and then say what you want Alexa to say in her own voice. (That’s how I got the Echo to say the goofy things in my video above.) Great for pranks.
Where Echo should go from here
Amazon still has plenty of work to do on the Echo.
You should be able to add appointments to your calendar. Make restaurant reservations. Look up movie schedules. Make phone calls (why isn’t it a speakerphone?). Send and read text messages. Add notes to your Notes app. Check stock prices. Post to Facebook or Twitter.
The To Do and Shopping List features should integrate with the ones you’ve already got on your iPhone or Android phone, rather than being confined to the Echo app.
Some people complain that Echo has no batteries, so it’s not really mobile, although that seems beside the point; it’s meant to become part of your home environment.
The price
If Echo were $500 or even $300, well, no: It would just be a gimmick.
But the price is $180, which is about what you’d pay for a similarly sized Bluetooth wireless speaker. You get the whole voice-assistant thing for nothing.
I know, I know: “But my phone does the same thing.” No, it really doesn’t.
Most smartphones can take commands like “OK, Google, what’s 17 times 12?” or “Siri, what’s the weather?” (Siri responds hands-free only if your iPhone is plugged into power.) But the details make the difference. The Echo doesn’t require your hands. Doesn’t require you to be close. Doesn’t have to come out of your pocket — or require you to hunt around the house for it. Doesn’t require you to be you (anyone’s voice works). Doesn’t sound tiny and tinny.
I’m telling you, a voice assistant is a totally different concept once it’s untethered from your phone and always available. It grows on you. As you experiment and live with Echo, you master its vocabulary and begin using it more.
You should give Amazon a huge mental high-five for a) having the imagination to create a whole new product category and b) being able to actually pull it off.
And you should keep the Echo in mind — maybe to get for yourself, maybe at holiday gift-giving time, or maybe just to keep your eye on. I’m telling you, it’s going to be a thing.
Agent Carter star Hayley Atwell may have just won her ongoing Marvel Dubsmash battle — with a little help from Captain America.
Chris Evans joined Atwell and her Agent Carter costar James D’Arcy for a fantastic cover of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” complete with Cap’s shield and an enlarged image of the trading card Cap signs for Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) in The Avengers.
“Mic dropped…?” the actress tweeted to Gregg and his Agents of SHIELD costar Chloe Bennet. “Consider it picked up and thrown out of the f–ing window.”
The Dubsmash is the latest in a five-day-long battle — which largely unfolded during San Diego Comic-Con — between the casts of the two Marvel series, both on ABC. It all began with Atwell and D’Arcy and their dub of the “The Oompa Loompa Song” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:
Gregg and Bennet threw down the gauntlet, officially declaring Dubsmash war and performing the Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock classic “It Takes Two”
Agent Carter shot back with The B-52s’ “Love Shack” and Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” (Goat Version), followed by a performance of Bennet’s “Uh Oh,” from back when she was singing under the name Chloe Wang:
Then Agents of SHIELD upped the ante, bringing in the whole cast for an ensemble performance of Queen’s “We Are The Champions,” complete with Gregg in Peggy Carter drag: But the battle was all in good fun. Agent Carter and Agents of SHIELD joined forces for this Dubsmash of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood”: After throwing what might be the winning blow, Atwell, Evans and D’Arcy celebrated, Dirty Dancing style: Chris Evans helps Agent Carter star Hayley Atwell win Marvel Dubsmash battle
Superheroes and supervillains collided — quite amicably, we must say — at The Hollywood Reporter‘s top-secret Comic-Con photo shoot.
After stunning the Hall H crowd on Saturday with new footage, 17 actors, as well as directors Zack Snyder and David Ayer, from Warner Bros.’ Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad — together comprising the long-awaited first phase of Warners’ DC Cinematic Universe — zoomed off for what would be their first photo together.
While both casts appeared during Warner Bros.’ panel, they didn’t take the stage at the same time. So THR‘s photo shoot was not only the first time that the two casts got together, but for many it was their first time meeting one another entirely.
Jai Courtney mightily shook hands with Jesse Eisenberg while Henry Cavill chatted with Will Smith, who introduced him to Jay Hernandez. Cara Delevingne and Gal Gadot posed for a selfie together.
Ayer and his Suicide Squad cast — Smith, Margot Robbie, Courtney, Delevingne, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Hernandez, Adam Beach and Karen Fukuhara — arrived backstage first. They rushed to the craft services table, scarfing down sandwiches and snacks.
The group was on a whirlwind trip, to say the least. Ayer had been working on the film in Toronto until 1 a.m. Friday night, then woke up the next morning to fly with his cast to San Diego. They were in San Diego for a little under three hours before having to rush back out to the airport at 1 p.m. to head back to Toronto. Ayer, who was trying to convince his handlers to stop to get burritos before he headed back to Canada, needed to return to shooting second unit the next day.
Onstage, Ayer touted his villain-focused movie: “Who’s got the best bad guys out there? DC Comics,” he said. “I’m not trying to start no East Coast-West Coast feud with Marvel Comics, but someone has got to say the truth.”
The footage he showed was surprisingly dark in tone, but at the shoot Ayer told THR of the film, “The real shock is how hilarious it’s going to be.”
Smith, who was the only castmember to speak (if only a few sentences) onstage during the Suicide Squad presentation, relished leaving the crowd wanting more.
“This was just a little taste,” he told THR backstage. “We’ll see them again next year.”
If the movies are part of a big DC family, Batman v. Superman is the older, more mature sibling on which the weight of responsibility falls. Suicide Squad is the bratty little kid, chewing bubble gum and tagging walls.
Each cast has bonded in different ways. Loud and boisterous, the Suicide Squad cast was bonded by an attitude fueled by brashness and exuberance.
“We’re very much a squad,” said Robbie, with her co-star Delevingne joking, “We should start a dance squad.” Indeed, the cast was seen taking plenty of selfies together, laughing at inside jokes and throwing up their hands in faux-squad poses during the shoot.
The cast of Batman v. Superman looked on with bemusement, like they weren’t quite sure what to do with the family member that steals cars for a living. They were bonded too, it just showed in a more subdued way — like when Adams jokingly sat on Affleck’s lap when they were taking their seats for the shoot. But don’t let their quiet demeanor fool you: Adams photo-bombed Delevingne and Gadot with aplomb.
And while they may be only newly acquainted, there’s already a friendly rivalry brewing between the two casts, with the Suicide Squad group joking that they’d eat all the sandwiches before the Dawn of Justice cast got there. Affleck, meanwhile, joked that he wouldn’t be waiting on the slacking Suicide Squad to take his group photo.
Click the photo below to see a larger version of THR‘s exclusive image, as captured by photographer Joe Pugliese. And click here for a larger version of the image that includes the key to who’s who.
Your assumption is correct, Game of Thrones fans: Bran Stark will be in season 6.
Actor Isaac Hempstead Wright confirmed to the Irish Examiner that he’s returning to the HBO fantasy hit after being benched during season 5.
“I can’t say a lot, but I am back this season, and it’s going to get particularly interesting with Bran,” Wright said. “He has some interesting visions.”
The actor noted he hasn’t watched the fifth season yet because he was so busy with school, and also said that he doesn’t know if co-star Kit Harington (Jon Snow) will return after his apparent death scene. “I don’t know [if he will come back]. He’s said he’s not,” Wright said.
Previously, Thrones showrunner David Benioff compared Bran’s season-long absence while he develops his warg skills with the Three-Eyed Raven to Luke Skywalker training in the Star Wars saga. “Like, it would be far less interesting, after The Empire Strikes Back to have an hour-long movie in between Empire and Return of the Jedi where Luke is training,” Benioff said. “It’s so much cooler to cut from end of Empire to beginning of Return, where he’s become the Jedi.”
