Happy birthmonth things

[forgotten_aria]

It's not even quite my birthmonth, but I've started celebrating already. My amazon echo (which I ordered a few months back) arrived today and does the one thing I was really hoping it would do and I've been having silly fun with it.

I bought myself a table saw finally, after years of wanting it.

I wanted to do karaoke next month, but wasn't finding the energy to make it happen, but a friend is celebrating his birthday with karaoke, so I get my karaoke with out the effort and I get to see that friend, who I haven't seen forever.

The musical instrument addiction continues and I've bought myself a hammered dulcimer (used from bay, of course.) It's very pretty and old enough to likely have a sound board made from mahogany which is no longer used because of it's rarity. I just have to replace a string and tune it, but even untuned, it sounds nice.



And there will most likely be a party at some point during the month.

Comments

[jered]

What is the one thing your Echo does that you hoped for? Ours is rather useless.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

"Alexa, play Wait wait don't tell me."

And starting the music I want with voice.

[jered]

Ah, yes, those are both nice, although I wish it could control my Sonos (which is hooked up to better speakers) instead. "Wait, Wait" is fine on the Echo's speaker.

I'm very impressed with the voice recognition, and the industrial design. The grammar parser, on the other hand, is about on par with what we had to write in 6.001. Despite having a great recognition engine it really only has hooks to do about a dozen things, and that makes me very disappointed.

On the other hand, $99.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

I think I have a little bit of hope that they'll extend the functionality, but mostly, yes, I decided to be silly and get it, mostly. It's a toy, pretty much.

[forgotten-aria.livejournal.com]

The Echo just found me some new music. I asked it to play one of my favorite artists and it found an obscure remix available for listen on prime music that I really liked. I bought 4 other tracks from the same album.

[jered]

Today's "what's new" mail had the smattering of silly easter eggs (really?) but also announced a forthcoming SDK for app integration. I'm certain that Amazon has smart people working on the product, so I'm hopeful, but I wish it would show!