See more at: http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo/ref_=ods_dp_ae
Thoughts?
Honestly?
Sounds like it could be potentially useful, but my overall feeling is that it’s still creepy having a device sitting in a room listening to you, and sending that out to the internet. exactly the same as the various Smart TV’s that have the same function.
As much as these companies say that they won’t do anything nefarious with the data, who is to say that someone else isn’t tapping in etc?
I know it sounds like a paranoid attitude, but it’s very 1984esque.
This reminds me of the film her. Although I like the film I was constantly thinking “Omg is this absurd. People talking to machines. Please don’t let this be the future!”.
Tech companies are more and more providing such gimmicks (siri, google now, amazon echo). But I’m glad I never see people using them, at least here in Germany.
Put a thing in my flat that uploads everything I say to Amazon, and make me pay for the privilege? No, ta.
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to me the most interesting thing is this looks like a stab by amazon at IBM/watson and Google in general
yeaaaah. When we saw all this stuff on Star Trek I think we all imagined it was self contained, not sending back all interactions (and probably everything else too) to 3rd party big companies. All of these can only work as thin clients basically for big server farms. Maybe when we have the storage and cpu power minimized to fir the entire app, not just the front end shim, in that devise it’ll be less creepy, but once companies now get hooked on the data flow why would they ever give it up? also that’s probably still a good ways away 
I assume neither of you guys use Google or Apple products then, right? 
i have 0 apple products, only use gmail for work (our company has a biz gmail account). I do have an android phone, which at a minimum i flashed cyanogen onto. thing still leaks tons of personal information (you know the ads on apps and games can generally track your location and stuff on your phone and are allowed to sell that data to other companies?).
I use duckduckgo for search, I host my own email, run a jabber server 
Trust me, I’m trying 
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Kudos to you, pal, you definitely are trying. 
ha it ain’t easy tho. I have a owncloud for more private files, but a) its more akward for sharing, and it’s performance is bad so I also use dropbox less pirvate data. A few times a year I poke google docs for coordinating shared activities. I do actually use a google calendar too for some meetings etc.
So it’s imperfect but I’m always looking for ways to minimize my usage of cloud services. But they do offer some nice well put together solutions 
I have the same issue, I don’t like sending a lot of data to other people.
I also host my own e-mail, and owncloud instance. So I guess I am trying as well, but it is indeed difficult.
I hope we would be able to do something similar with OSS in the (near) future. In the same way I am looking for a way to use one of those fitness trackers without sending all of that data to a third party…
I would love to keep track of my health, but I would like to keep that data private.
That’s the creepiest add I’ve ever seen. It could be the start to a horror film.
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I also use duckduckgo for search…but I’m always adding !g on my searches…
I agree that siri and the amazon echo are gimmicks but I don’t agree that Google Now is. I don’t think Google now should even be put in the same group as those two.
Google Now’s purpose is to show you context sensitive information. It’s not really for talking to like siri and the amazon echo. If you have to talk to it it’s not doing its job.
I have been using Google Now for a while and find it quite useful, especially while traveling.
I think that if Amazon wants to have a chance with all this, they need to stop “following the leader”