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Amazon Echo Smart Speakers Gain Room-to-Room Intercom Feature
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We have one of those, even played music via AM and FM. Next time I paint they're getting ripped out and the hole plastered over.
Hmm well they have stated apple will have apps.
And also depends if you want a decent sound. Echo is shocking really.
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Beats yelling all the time.
Echo sounds pretty good to me, for what we use it for: low volume night time music.
And if I wanted a nice speaker system for louder playing, I sure wouldn't waste my money on a single speaker setup.
YMMV
Correct. All this BS "calling" stuff is stupid beyond belief. They are trying to reinvent the wheel, while for some unfathomable reason STILL refusing to allow my iPhone access to the microphone via Bluetooth so I can use my Echos as common, albeit super high quality speakerphones.
Every conference room on Earth would have an Echo in it for speakerphone use, as would a huge percentage of homes around the world too.
But some idiot pointy haired manager still thinks they have a better idea. Eventually someone higher up at Amazon is going to figure this out, fire the pointy haired manager, and have that mic turned on.
Oh boy! I remember household intercoms! They were the best for the 10 times I used them for novelty.
I would love to use the intercom (I mean drop-in) feature in my three Echo's at home. But the UI to turn it on is a bit convoluted. I have enabled drop-in in the toggle in the Alexa/Settings app for all my Echos. I don't want to allow general Alexa calling and don't want to allow the Alexa app access to my contacts.
The instructions involve my Contact Card apparently. That's where it wants access to my iOS contacts. When I can "Alexa, drop in family room", I get various different errors, including can't find device. Typical sloppy Amazon UI. Feels like I'm using Android.
A hands free intercom would be cool. Don't want to have people call me on the Echo's. Don't want to give it access to contacts. If someone figures this out, please post. If someone at Amazon is reading this, please consider decoupling the intercom feature from the calling feature. The first is a no brainer. The second is a bigger usage and privacy commitment that some folks might not be willing to make.
The instructions involve my Contact Card apparently. That's where it wants access to my iOS contacts. When I can "Alexa, drop in family room", I get various different errors, including can't find device. Typical sloppy Amazon UI. Feels like I'm using Android.
A hands free intercom would be cool. Don't want to have people call me on the Echo's. Don't want to give it access to contacts. If someone figures this out, please post. If someone at Amazon is reading this, please consider decoupling the intercom feature from the calling feature. The first is a no brainer. The second is a bigger usage and privacy commitment that some folks might not be willing to make.
Well many is relative. Apple will sell a lot of everything. The Echo Dot is $50 and except for sound it seems to be about the equal of the HomePod. And unlike the Sonos I suspect very few people will buy his piece of tech expecting to get ten years or more of use out of it. But that is probably what you expect from your speaker set up.
I'm going to buy one and probably two of these things. But as good as it sounds I'm sceptical that it will replace my living room home theater set up. And I'm certainly not buying three or four just for that room so they can compete. Too pricey for me.
The intercom feature is now working for me, as of Thursday evening. I did not have to give the iPhone app access to my contacts after all. I did have to enable the drop-in (the first "on" setting, not the more restrictive "only my household" setting) in each of the Echo's and to give them easy to speak names. Now I can say "alexa, drop in family room" and it works. Great feature. The unclear errors from the previous attempts were apparently just bad UI while the feature got enabled either in the Alexa firmware or the cloud service.