As I have mentioned I ordered an Amazon Dot 'smart assistant'. They were £50, but I got £10 off on Black Friday weekend, so I ordered the £20 remote too. I only got it last night, so haven't had much chance to play. Basically, you can ask it questions, e.g. 'Alexa, what's the weather?' or 'Alexa, how old is Tom Hanks?' and it will answer in a very clear female voice. At least for us she has an English accent.
You can also play various media. She has access to all the tracks I have on Amazon from CDs and downloads I've bought. If you have a Prime or Spotify account I think you can play just about anything. There's also lots of podcast and radio streaming options. I did ask for a couple of podcasts, but was told they were not available at the moment. I think the app is still evolving. The audio quality from the built in speaker is not terrible. It's comparable with some of the smaller battery powered speakers you might plug into your phone. It can connect to other speakers, but I think that would disable the internal one and I won't have my hi-fi on all the time. Could plug it in when I need that.
You need to have the app to set it up. This also shows recent queries and the results. In some cases this will give you more details.
I've heard there are lots of silly questions you can ask. Any suggestions? If you want me to test something I may be able to record a video to show you what happened.
I want to get this working with my home automation so I can control lights and other functions. I need to look into that some more to get it working. my Home Assistant software can emulate a Philips Hue, which Alexa supports. It's possible to create your own 'skills'. I need to look into that too.
Let me know anything you are curious about and I'll try to answer. You Just have to say 'Steve, .....'
Can you guess how she answered the question in the post title?
UPDATE: Got the Dot controlling lights after restarting Home Assistant.
I ordered a Kindle Fire HD 8 on Black Friday, and it has Alexa too. Pretty fun to play with. I also got Siri on my phone but my phone is so slow and outdated. I got a iPad and iPhone from both around 2011.
So wanted a newer tablet that's faster. Surely not a iPad but it's actually a pretty fast tablet. Didn't really want to spend the money on a iPad and figured I'd try somthing new. The only thing that really annoys me is the autocorrect and copy and pasting is wonky. It's their customized version of Android.
Very interesting how Amazon started out as just a online book store, and became one of the largest cloud computing computers, biggest online stores and makes their own hardware now too.
I'm exploring what Alexa can do. I like that it's expandable. The Google Home may be good, but to start with it seems more limited and this was cheap enough to just try.
Amazon seem to want to do everything. You can buy just about anything from them now. I wonder if we will ever see deliveries by drone!