Over the years, the Alexa assistant has learned heaps of new things. There's a huge amount of skills that can be enabled for a variety of activities, like exercise and cooking.
Make it your business to know
Start your day with the latest business headlines straight to your inbox.Every week, I get an email telling me about the overwhelming amount of new skills Alexa has picked up, making me realise I'll never get around to trying out even a third of them.
If you have home automation set up, Alexa can turn things on and off through the Zigbee protocol and subscribe to streaming video and music, buy stuff but not easily play YouTube because it's Alphabet Google owned and they've got a competing assistant solution.
Even though it is a genie for voice control, Alexa requires a companion smartphone app, and sometimes the Amazon website itself. Not all functions and settings can be accessed on for example the devices running Alexa. I'm being picky, but I've always thought that's a design miss with all digital assistants.
Early Echo devices were rightly slated for their poor audio quality. The Echo Show 10 in comparison is much better in the sound department with separate tweeters for highs and a woofer for bass. I use my device to play streaming internet radio so good audio is important, and it also helps with Prime Video and Netflix movies.
If you're thinking about an Echo device, the $400-something Echo Show 10 isn't a bad choice. You could go for one of the smaller Echo Show devices with fixed screens that are cheaper, but the good sound quality in the Show 10 is worth the extra money.
Now, it's impossible to bypass the elephant in the room for Alexa devices and that's privacy.
Ask any infosec person and they'll tell you not to use anything with a microphone listening in at all times. A video camera connected to the internet somewhere is even worse.
Said infosec people will also advise against smartphones in general and tell you to turn off Bluetooth if you have to have a pocket device, to make automated large-scale tracking a bit harder. And, newer cars with hardware and software that inevitably come with security flaws that absolutely don't want to be exploited.
Although it's enabled in the Alexa smartphone app, New Zealand doesn't get the Sidewalk feature. Sidewalk builds a network outside your control for Alexa-enabled devices, using Bluetooth and 900 MHz radio frequencies, plus a small amount of internet data. It's used to make for example Echo devices and Ring cameras work better together, but it's one of those nervous-making features as it collects potentially sensitive information like approximate location data.
Authorities in bigger economies have powers to issue huge fines for privacy violations; it's a tricky balancing act for vendors not to fall foul of privacy laws while providing personalised services that means people will use digital assistants.
That's really the problem with digital assistants and similar services: it's due to hair-raising privacy breaches that we have got much tightened up laws. A good pinch of mistrust is always healthy when it comes to dealing with profit-driven faceless conglomerates.
However, imagine if said companies had had the vision, right from the start, to ensure that their products were designed with rock-solid privacy so that users could trust them more than what they can today?
For starters I wouldn't have to finish these sorts of pieces sounding cautionary notes having to make trade-offs between vendor information gathering for usability, versus the risk of privacy abuses and breaches.
All the above is a bit academic however, because Amazon's computers say no: the Echo Show 10 is out of stock locally and at Amazon. It's not clear when it'll be available again and no, you can't come and try out mine while you wait.
