Home Automation With an Echo

[linus6948]

My brotherinlaw convinced my wife she needed an Echo/Alexa in her life and so I finally gave in and got her one from the amazon warehouse. Being a lover of gadgets I soon got another one from the warehouse and a couple of the Echo Dots. That quickly escalated into a bunch of smart switches and smart bulbs installed in a lot of the house. I guess I always was a big childhood fan of the Jetson`s Cartoons and this is getting pretty close in a lot of ways.

You can tell it to turn things on and off, dim or raise lights, change light colors in rooms at request, raise or lower music volume, request just about any song be played, weather, news, time etc. One issue started to show up with the two Echo units where it would take three repeated questions/requests to get a response. I contacted the amazon tech dept that handle these things where I spent 20mins on the phone with a guy in South Africa who gave up and connected me with a woman in India who kept telling me to do the resets and other tricks I had done a dozen times before. Finally after about 20mins of listening to her nonsense I hung up and made and posted a couple of short videos to document this problem that amazon claimed they never heard of.

I have now heard from them twice as they now have seen the video and they said items from the warehouse are often "unique" which is their business speak for defective. I have sent one of the bad units back and a new not from the warehouse Echo arrives today. Then I will be boxing up and sending back the 2nd bad unit, they are offering me a discount on the new units as compensation for the problems.

I wound up making two videos as my 5 dogs were making some background noise in the first one. The echo dots work flawlessly and never have a response issue or lag of any kind. All in all we love these damn things.

 

 

 

Edited March 17, 2018 by linus6948