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Comment by bebna | Hacker News Reader

I only have seen one guy asking Siri a question to this day. Everybody in the room was frowning to that, he never repeated it.

Killing Cortana is one of the first steps of everybody I know who switched to Win10.

Haven't seen an Amazon Echos yet, not even in flats which homeowners use a massive amount of home automation gadgets.

- East German

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I'm seeing more people get Google Homes and Amazon Echos now compared to when they first came out. It's still a novelty for most people. I was reading a newspaper the other morning at the kitchen counter when I looked over at the Echo my mom got my dad for Valentines Day. I realized I could just ask Alexa for the news but then I wouldn't have the convenience of just skimming headlines. I would have to verbally skip to the next story and that just felt like a lot more effort than continuing to read the paper. We don't have any other home automation devices in the house like the Nest thermostat or any Hues. I feel like if I had a lot more connected devices in the home, then having something like an Echo or some other hub for controlling them would be necessary.

Personal anecdote: I got one free at AWS re:Invent. I use it to play music of my choice (specific songs or playlist categories, which requires a subscription after trial period), set timers ("alexa set timer for 45 minutes"; "alexa how much time is left on the timer?"), do various calculations ("alexa what is 1 plus 1?" -> "1 plus 1 is two, but you already knew that"), and ask what time a nearby business closes ("alexa when does Target close?" yields the closing time of the nearest target based in the location I have set. If it's closed, it says when it opens next). Other than that, it's mostly just a novelty that I forget about 99% of the time.

My mom got her first smartphone, an iPhone 7 Plus last christmas.

She is using Siri a lot.

That and taking videos/pictures of everything :)

I saw an Amazon Echo on a colleagues desktop, still packed up. It felt a bit weird.

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