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by Nullabillity 3327 days ago
Presumably you only listen to chart-topping american pop and music made by people with common english names?

Because so far I've never had any luck whatsoever with anything else.

6 comments

"Hey Siri, play some Sun Oh Right Parentheses Right Parentheses Right Parentheses"
I don't know what you have in mind, but I was pretty impressed that when I asked Alexa to play 'Scherzo for X-Wings' she pulled up the right track from the Force Awakens soundtrack without a problem. Try it before you knock it.
Downvoted but a very valid observation. I listen to a lot of Black Metal and as most of it isn't in English, it's hard for Siri to understand what I'm asking for, or to even know if I'm pronouncing it correctly.
You can upload your own mp3s to Amazon Music and play them from the Echo. No cost until you go past 250 songs. http://www.voicedesigned.com/content/how-play-your-mp3s-echo...
The problem is not the availability of the music but Alexa's ability to understand names. If I tell an Echo to play, say, Zuntata, is it going to work? if I tell it japanese band names despite the overall language I speak being English or French, what will happen? Most voice assistants choke when you speak foreign-y names and can only understand them if you set the language of the device to the right language.

A voice assistant is only as useful as its ability to understand speech. If it can't tell anything from half of my music library then it's not worth much to me.

Yeah I've resigned to not being able to use voice assistants since I use 3 different languages on a daily basis.
I literally asked my Google home this morning: "Hey Google, play some Peruvian psychedelic cumbia" and it found exactly what I wanted (using Spotify). For me, these home assistants are the best thing I have bought since my first smartphone.
That's still a genre with a relatively english name. Good luck searching for a specific artist/track.
Doesn't that violate streamed discovery and all that? You should just be thumbs up thumbs down and trust the streaming service to take your advice as it DJs to you. "Alexa play what you think I need to hear"
Nice find : spotify:album:1YCdKn5y7C99mM2sb3QTlo
Sick burn. In your situation, you can pre-program playlists with your funky foreign beats and command Alexa to play the playlist instead. It adds a step, but it's painless after that.