{"id":11333,"date":"2017-05-08T15:36:59","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T20:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therealdaily.com\/?p=11333"},"modified":"2017-05-11T15:25:05","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T20:25:05","slug":"amazon-echo-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/real-estate-tech\/amazon-echo-screen\/","title":{"rendered":"The new Amazon Echo is straight out of Y2K"},"content":{"rendered":"

New old tech<\/h2>\n

The future! Eternal, shiny and chrome. We all know what it will look like, right? A little bit of immersive VR, a splash of zero UI, maybe a tiny bit of artificially intelligent robot conquest.<\/p>\n

Read also: Where are we at with the smart home IoT takeover? #rollcall<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n

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\nAnd\u2026 this thing<\/a>, apparently.<\/p>\n

Echo<\/h2>\n

That there is a recently leaked new look for Amazon\u2019s Echo, and it may just be the future home of Alexa, the House Bezos entry in the apparently mandatory Charming If Subtly Creepy Female Sounding Virtual Assistant Contest, alongside Apple\u2019s Siri, Microsoft\u2019s Cortana\u00a0and Google\u2019s\u2026 Google Assistant.<\/p>\n

Google is not so much with the naming of things other than Google. Except Alphabet, I suppose.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As linked, ink has already been spilled over the seriously retro form factor of the screen-enabled Echo, but\u2026 seriously, that is a retro form factor. I mean, integral speaker? I\u2019m pretty sure I saw Ally McBeal answer a phone call on one of those, no doubt in a charmingly flustered fashion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to swim against the already-forming current, however: I like it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obviously I\u2019m 90s enough to make Ally McBeal references and use all the letters in the word \u201cobviously,\u201d but my fondness for the device goes beyond the fact that modern world frightens and angers me.<\/p>\n

Remember setting up Bluetooth for the first time? Or a wireless peripheral? Because I\u2019ll bet a shiny quarter a fair number of y\u2019all had to use a wired device in the process.<\/p>\n

I know I did.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s the unavoidable curse of new interfaces and connection protocols: if they don\u2019t work, by definition you can\u2019t ask them what their problem is, because you need it to work before you can ask.<\/p>\n

Looming over the otherwise utterly welcome shift to voice-controlled zero UI is the prospect of the most severe case of Can\u2019t Talk To The Thing ever. This time, if the cheerful Dalek of your choice turns blue and falls over \u2013 and it is a universal truth that everything, everything eventually turns blue and falls over, it\u2019s the Tao of Tech \u2013 you literally won\u2019t be able to talk to it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019ll be straight up \u201cI can\u2019t do that, Dave,\u201d and nobody wants HAL in their house, even if he\u2019s just queueing up Netflix reruns.<\/p>\n

What about redundancy?<\/h2>\n

By all appearances, this is a touchscreen interface stuffed in a very large, very grey box. Touching Alexa might be a plus (that sounded less creepy in my head) but how is that functionality not duplicated by your phone?<\/p>\n

My thing with that is\u2026 ever lose your phone?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole point of zero UI is that it runs everything. Techie types have been saying for decades that personal tech is eventually going to come down to two things, the thing you have in your house and the thing you carry around. Make the one depend on the other and the next time you leave your phone on the bus, when you get home, your house won\u2019t work. Undesirable.<\/p>\n

But look at this guy<\/h2>\n

It really, obviously isn\u2019t going anywhere. It\u2019s a beast. You\u2019d need worshippers with ropes and a bunch of log rollers. It\u2019s gonna hang in your house, shining the time, hanging on to your IMs and absolutely, positively guaranteeing you can talk to all the tech that runs your life.<\/p>\n

It might just be, in this one case, the way forward is taking a step back.<\/p>\n

#Echo<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(TECHNOLOGY) Amazon’s latest version of the Echo boasts a new feature that is sure t bring up flashbacks to the early 2000s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337683,"featured_media":11336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[1317,1560,1234,1561],"class_list":["post-11333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-real-estate-tech","tag-amazon","tag-echo","tag-real-estate-news","tag-screen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2017\/05\/echo2.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337683"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11333"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11359,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11333\/revisions\/11359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theamericangenius.com\/housing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}