echo

I've gotten a number of requests for an Amazon echo review. I've been meditating on it since. The answer is no. No echo review. I thought briefly about making a parody video for the 'Amazone Marco' -- a squat cylinder that listens to every peep in your house and stands ready to answer 'Polo' whenever it hears the call.

I actually have a use for a whole house listening device. I would pay for a box that listens all night long and uses sophisticated cloud analytics to pinpoint skittering sounds and figure out where the damn mice are living. That device would do me more good than a whole jar of peanut butter.

The reason for my no is that I have already lived the dream and I'm not going back to it. I ran a whole-apartment voice recognition system back in about 1995 on an AMD DX4 120 box. It really sucked.

How can I possibly compare some cruddy open source rig on a twenty year old computer to the marvel of Amazon's echo and the even more marvelous cloud behind it? Easy. I was young then. My powers of self-delusion were at their peak. I believed that the rig I built actually worked. It just failed to understand me _that once_. It failed to be exciting even when armed with the belief that it was working perfectly.

Fast forward twenty years and I'm sure the technology has caught up with my illusion. Has my position changed? It has.

I now have children. I have a hundred frustrating conversations a day with actual English-speaking sentient creatures. They listen to every word they can catch whether meant for them or not and interrupt thought to clarify some point not meant for them. My eldest will soon be able to look things up in Wikipedia for me. I don't think that will be more satisfying that looking it up myself. I love my children. I don't need a new one from Amazon in my living room.

I like the idea of reduced school tuition for Amazon Prime customers though. Maybe they'll work on that next.