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Comment by chenster | Hacker News Reader

Seriously? Do people actually use it besides check weather?

I have 5 of them. Use them to monitor all my security cameras (with the Show), play music, control lights, my FireTV, listen to audible books, the news, build shopping lists, leave messages for my kid, etc. Essentially it has slipped into our lives.

Disclosure: Work at Amazon but am mostly just an Alexa fan.

How do you get time to do all that from home? Do you work from home?

Not sure if that's a serious question or not, but it probably looks like this:

Wake up, Ask Alexa for the news, Alexa turn on lights and TV. Cook breakfast, set timer using Alexa. Leave message for kids.

Go to work for x hours.

Come home, Alexa news, alexa audio book, cook dinner, add low items to shopping list, doorbell rings, Alexa check security camera. Sit down to eat dinner, Alexa play Spotify. Alexa turn off the lights. Alexa wake me up at 6:30.

Pretty much! And I am not the only person in the house

EDIT: I misread your post.

Pretty sure OP meant five units of Alexa.

I have a Google home and I wrote some custom scripts for mine to add things to TickTick (a todo list) and send messages to people on different platforms.

Potentially you could make it do anything you can code on your PC.

I particularly like being able to do the voice note when I'm trying to go to sleep but think of something I need to do. I can just say it outloud and not have to look at my blinding phone.

Edit: I also have a plan to add a command to schedule commands. So I could say something like "schedule March 6 message cliff Dude pancake day is coming soon!"

I use Alexa to turn lights on and off (Philips Hue lights) using verbal commands. Works really well, actually.

*once you get it setup.

Far easier than wiring a new light switch. Setup is basically app-free. Plug in bulb, plug in base, press button to pair, tell Alexa to look for devices, press button again.

A basic hue setup was pretty easy. Getting the keywords right with groups/scenes and multiple bulbs with an alexa has been a challenge. I've helped 2 fairly technical people with it. Both had the same problem. Once you lay out all the parts and pieces and explain how they interact it makes sense. It isn't something I could just give to my parents and have them figure it out.

I also have Alexa setup with Hue, and I find Siri requires a lot less rigid phrasing than Alexa and is better at figuring out what scene/color/brightness level/etc you actually wanted. But since my Echo dot is always on the kitchen counter, Alexa is more convenient.

I've got an Alexa dot and a Google Home right next to each other. I also find Alexa's commands especially rigid. But "Hey Google" is a guttural sound that's almost a tongue twister and the mic's aren't as good so I stick with the Alexa for hue.

We use them to control lights (Insteon) or more recently the garage door.

The Dot is easily one of my top 5 kitchen gadgets, it handles multiple concurrent timers, it's hands free so you don't get schmoo from your hands all over it, it can do unit conversions (e.g. How many teaspoons in a cup?), and math (e.g. What is 5 times 1/3?).

These are all things you can do yourself but just as you might ask someone "what's 54.32 * 3?" to save yourself some mental gymnastics, you can ask Alexa those same types of questions.

Is there an alexa app that can understand recipes? I hate having to constantly check the recipe when I'm cooking. It would be nice if I could just say things like "ok, I added all the spices, what's next?"

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Allrecipes/dp/B01N3MS7AV

Based on the reviews, it sounds like it used to do exactly what I described above, but then they changed it so it can only read the first two steps of a recipe, making it kind of useless. I wonder why they did that?

Jukebox

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