Did you read any of the reader’s comments? I wouln’t want one of those things. You can have ‘em all if they make you happy.
Yes I have read the readers comments. Many of them show mostly that their authors are both ignorant and have a deluded sense of self importance.
We are very satisfied with the performance and utility of all of our Amazon echo and peripheral devices. We have been using them for a year and a half, they keep coming up with more and more useful functions for them. In another thread I mentioned that we are working on one house to sell and one to move in to. It was very cold this winter. I use the echo devices and associated switches and outlets to turn the heat on remotely before we head from one house to the other. That way it is warmed up when we get there.
Since we have both a furnace and portable electric heaters at both locations it is more convenient even to turn them all off as we are leaving than running around the house. Only heating one house at a time saved us several hundred dollars this year alone.
We also have some of them linked to quality Bluetooth speakers and use them with music streaming services like Pandora and also with both local and distant radio stations which stream their content. We can hear conservative talk radio programs that are not available in our area.
There are a multitude of other uses for the echo devices that I will not go into in this post. But anyone who dismisses their usefulness without actually understanding what they are capable of is displaying only their foolishness.
Back to the paranoid comments that this article was meant to provoke... Their is no evidence that I am aware of and certainly none that was presented in this article that Amazon uses employees to review Alexa logs for anything other than trying to improve the accuracy of the devices’ voice recognition capabilities. As I said previously, fearfulness that Amazon is trying to “spy” on you with Echo devices using Alexa is more a sign of a personality who has a deluded sense of self importance than any actual risk that private conversations are going to somehow be used against a hapless victim.
As I said in a previous post on another thread. If you are fearful that people you do not know or big government is listening on your private conversations... you should first leave your cell phone in another room and then go ahead and unplug your echo device. Many cell phone apps have the ability to transmit what their microphone picks up while the user is not talking on the phone. Cell phones are the tool that government and police agencies most frequently use these days to surveil those they really are spying on. They can also do the same thing with your tablet's, laptop's and desktop's cameras and microphones. Echo devices truly are small potatoes these days.