Amazon Echo Ownership Experiences (Suggested Skills, Routines)

Got my Echo earlier today.

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Just like Fire TV Stick, it was horrible to get it to work out of the box.
Got on Amazon Support Call and I was suggested to disconnect and reconnect.
After reconfiguring, all issues got sorted out. It got connected to Amazon Music and started responding properly.

As a speaker, it is pretty solid. I am not an audiophile so cannot comment on how good it would be for people with specific requirements but I find it more than adequate for streaming music. Haven't tried streaming over bluetooth so cannot comment on that.

As for Alexa... It is no Google Assitant. It does not seem to handle simple queries that Google would have handled with ease. I guess Google's Knowledge Base is still superior compared to Alexa.

Voice recognition is pretty great. Though at times it does mess up. I have heard enough horror stories online so I do hope that it does not start reading/streaming adult stuff as I have placed the device in the living room with access to everyone in the house.

I would love to get recommendations for skills and routines that other folks are using.

I tried a few news sources and switched from NDTV English to NDTV Hindi. I prefer to get news without the theme song and background music. NDTV Hindi seems to be pretty nice. Any recommendations on news sources would be nice.

Would love to know how your experience is for ordering through Amazon, Zomato, Uber, Ola and others.

Just post your experiences using Echo devices here. Tips, tricks, cool features and anything that comes to mind!

Also feel free to post questions for me and others to answer!
 
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Amazon alexa app is a piece of shite.
 
having now used it for more than a day, i am sort of disappointed with the alexa component of the whole ecosystem. there is no native support for translation which is sort of annoying. there are no customized news updates for topics. i mean if i wanted to get latest news related to aadhaar, i do not seem to have any option. i mean there might be a recipe out there that might make it work with some news source but overall the functionality is quite restrictive. this is probably the most annoying thing for me as of now. i mean the news bulletins are nice but they are not updated in real time so you get the same broadcast (unless you change the source) for many hours. would have loved to have more breaking news.

music also seems to be quite restrictive. there seems to be just one playlist for devotional songs so they tend to get repetitive. niece tried to play padmavati songs and they did not play (tried adding saavn to the voice command and even that did not help). i do hope Amazon has big plans to expand the functionality of the native platform. recipes are cool for specific tasks but they cannot improve the core ecosystem.
 

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