Got mine yesterday am struck by both awe and severe disappointment (which I hope will subside once I get the hang of the thing!).
For example:-
I travel a lot and wanted traffic info between my home and Newbury, all Alexa could suggest was traffic for my standard commute.
I wanted to get some sports info about this weeks F1 race and the Cricket County championship standings. no luck, obviously Amazon think that we only play ‘soccer’ in this country. I couldn’t even add my local Division 2 team to my list of preferred teams in the Alexa app.
Tried to get some cinema times and listings for my area this evening, Alexa was no help whatever.
Tried to get an idea of what the last song was that I just heard on Radio 1….the DAB radio I just replaced with Echo could do this no problem….Alexa just tells me that Radio 1 is playing.
When volume is at level 10, Alexa is deaf, and I need to tap her on the shoulder manually, like I used to do with my old granny!
Alexa frequently just thinks for a bit, flashes her blue light at me and ignores anything I just said. No background noise, at all.
I’m not being too judgemental yet, but I hope things improve otherwise Alexa will just become a glorified music player which is not nearly as good as my UE Boom, and cant match the features of my 3 year old Pure DAB radio.
In most cases Siri managed the same queries very well, and if she could have transcribed the search results and read them to me (which Apple will be doing soon) she would have won hands down.
On a brighter note….just working with Alexa to control my Hive home automation system and its a lot of fun so far.