[jmcdonald-ut]

I'll add my two cents on top of the author's. I have both the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Tap. This article was spot on. I'm perhaps less forgiving than the author. If Alexa can't answer a question on the first try I'll just give up. When Alexa does answer a question or a request she usually does a phenomenal job and it's just really cool. It really feels futuristic.

Echo is cool, it can be pretty useful, but it hasn't realized its full potential yet.

I bought the Tap as a portable speaker to take with me on bike rides with friends. Well I took it out the other day and the minute it lost WiFi connection it just wouldn't work. I'm sure this was a problem on my end, but I had already paired the devices and I wasn't going to spend time fiddling with it while I was out with friends.

EDIT: Also it doesn't happen too often but Alexa has definitely accidentally triggered. It even woke me up at 2 AM after the power went out temporarily to tell me that it had no WiFi.

[wccrawford]

We've only had our Echo a couple weeks, but we've already found that characters named Alexa in TV shows are a problem, and that at least once it has responded to something that wasn't "Alexa" from the TV. So yeah, it definitely has false positives.