So Amazon dropped this thing on us last Thursday: a black cylinder called Echo that just sits on your counter and listens to you all day, waiting for you to say "Alexa" so it can turn on a light or tell you the weather. I've had six days to think about it and I still cant decide if its brilliant or the dumbest $99 I could spend.
Quick catch-up if you missed it: its invite-only right now, which is such an Amazon move. You put your name on a list, you wait, maybe you get an email in a few weeks saying congrats, you may now give us $99 (or $199 if youre not a Prime member, which, come on). Its a speaker, its got seven microphones in it apparently, and it does this always-on listening thing where it's supposedly just waiting for its wake word and not actually recording everything. Supposedly.
I want one. I'll just say that up front so nobody thinks this is a "get off my lawn" post. My problem isnt the concept, its the execution anxiety I already have about it. Ive got a Nest thermostat and a couple of Hue bulbs already, so its not like Im allergic to internet-connected junk in my house. But a microphone that's always on, sitting in the kitchen, streaming who-knows-what back to servers in Virginia whenever it thinks it heard its name? Thats a different category of trust than a thermostat that knows Im home.
And this is the same week — literally days apart — that all the CurrentC stuff blew up, the retailer payment app that got its pilot user emails hacked before it even launched widely. CVS and Rite Aid turned off Apple Pay to force people toward this thing and then it turns out their system wasnt locked down. I dont think these two stories are related exactly, Echo and CurrentC, but they both landed in the same two weeks and both are basically the same pitch: trust us with something intimate (your voice, your payment info) in exchange for a little convenience. Im noticing a pattern is all Im saying. Doesnt mean the pattern is wrong, just noticing it.
The name thing bugs me a little too, not gonna lie. "Alexa" is a real person's name, my cousin is an Alexa, and I have to assume there are a lot of very tired Alexas out there this week googling why their name is suddenly a punchline. Small thing. Still funny to me.
What I actually think will happen: this is going to be one of those products that looks silly for a year and then quietly becomes the thing everyone has by 2016 or so, the same way nobody understood Kindle pricing at first and then it was just what you bought your mom for Christmas. Voice as an interface makes way more sense in a kitchen than a phone screen does, my hands are usually covered in something when Id want to ask "how many tablespoons in a quarter cup" anyway. Im just skeptical of the invite-only rollout as a way to build trust in a listening device. Feels backwards. If youre asking people to put a microphone in their house you kind of want that decision to feel deliberate and informed, not like winning a raffle.
Also, and this is a genuinely small complaint that has nothing to do with anything, can we stop naming devices after their wake words. Alexa the device, Alexa the wake word, its going to get confusing fast when the reviews start rolling in and people are typing "Alexa did this" and "Alexa did that" and you cant tell if theyre talking about the hardware or the voice or the actual company behind it (which, fine, its Amazon, but you know what I mean).
Anyway. Todays also the day ESA is trying to land a probe on an actual comet, which if you havent been following is a genuinely wild thing thats happening right now while Im typing this, so my brain is sort of split between "robot butler learns to hear me" and "we are dropping a fridge-sized lander onto a spinning rock 300 million miles away and hoping the harpoons work." Different scales of ambitious. Both feel like the kind of thing Ill want to remember reading about today, for very different reasons.
Put me on the Echo waitlist. Ill report back whenever Amazon decides Im worthy.