Would be fun to travel back in time to meet George Orwell and present this product to him: "Hi George, would you believe that not so many years after 1984, people will actually pay money to have a permanently eavesdropping device record all what they say and send it to some central server, where it is not only automatically recognized but potentially stored for eternity? And would you believe that people will do that just so they can be lazy and not have to press a button eventually? What a laugh your 'Televisor' is in comparison to this..."

And would you believe that people will do that just so they can be lazy and not have to press a button eventually

Well, it is whole idea. I am sure after few years it will be crime if you turn it off at any time of the day. And government will tell you that otherwise they could not fight with pedophiles and terrorists.

Btw, Siri, Cortana and Echo are mostly needed by corporations as for the first time the can get unprecedented number of data to move recognition to new levels.

Well, that means that a lot of us will be woken up by it in the middle of the night while they are dreaming.

Well, set other word.

"Ursa" is also not viable for me. Speaking in my sleep/dreams has always been my problem.

Available to everyone now

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X4WHP5E/

LOL.

90% will use this, as speech recognition and understanding progress is huge.

Things are even more serious

Alexa is the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice.** Today, Amazon announced that hardware developers can use the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to integrate Alexa into their Internet-connected devices with only a few lines of code.** No experience with natural language understanding or speech recognition is required. The Alexa Voice Service is free—learn more and sign up to be notified when the preview for developers is available at https://developer.amazon.com/AVS.

Examples of what developers can create with the Alexa Voice Service include:

• A Wi-Fi alarm clock that lets a customer talk to Alexa—“What’s the weather today?” or “What’s on my calendar today?”
• A car that enables a driver to press the Alexa button on the steering wheel and request anything from Alexa, such as “Read my book” or “Remind me to pick up flowers after work.”
• A movie ticket machine that lets a moviegoer say “Buy six tickets for the next showing of Jurassic World.”
• A countertop weather station that enables customers to get more information by asking “What will the weather be next weekend?” or “What was the rainfall in June last year?”
• A TV that makes finding tonight’s game simple—just pick up the remote and say “Turn on the baseball game.”
• A home sound system that lets customers turn on music just by saying “Play my barbeque playlist on the back deck.”

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2062557

This is the (ahem!) point where most of us decide to wait for the reviews to start coming in, while others buy one - either to find it's changed their lives or else to find a place for it in a cupboard-full of similarly promising devices.

Available for $149 now

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X4WHP5E/

Amazon's own devices did well during the holiday period, selling two times the amount they did last year: the company's Fire tablet became Amazon.com's best selling product, and the Fire TV Stick took third place. Those two products, along with Amazon's Echo speaker, made up three of the top five items ordered on Amazon.com using the Prime Now delivery option on Christmas Eve. Customers buying the Echo used it primarily for its music functions — "play music" was the most common request for the speaker's Alexa assistant, with "White Christmas" one of the most selected holiday songs. When it wasn't being ordered to play music, Echoes across the United States were also being used to order food, with Chinese restaurants getting the most Alexa-enabled custom on Christmas Day itself.

Oops.

A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon's Alexa -- the voice-controlled smart speaker -- and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list.

"They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!"

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/woman-says-her-amazon-device-recorded-private-conversation-sent-it-out-to-random-contact/755507974