I got an early invitation to buy the Echo and I bought it right away. I think it had been announced 3 or 4 days before I got mine. So I've had quite a bit of experience with it. However, I can't honestly say I use it much. My main use is for weather forecasts and I find it pretty handy for that. Actually my best use of it is to show it off to visitors. I've had a lot of fun with that. I'm not sure it was worth the $100 I paid for it but I've never been sorry I got it.
I find that it understands me correctly the first time about 95% of the time. I've suggested that other people give it commands and it seems to work about as well for them. The other 5% of the time simply repeating solves any problems. Now and then it simply gets it wrong.
Probably the biggest problem I've had with it is when it suddenly starts talking for no apparent reason. It doesn't happen often but now and then it does. Other than that the thing has been nearly flawless.
I just tried the TTS reading for the first time before I began typing this post. The book I picked was Michener's "Sayonara", thinking that might be a real challenge with all it's Japanese words. It didn't sound half bad as TTS goes. I'm not really interested in listening to TTS reading of books but if I had to I could enjoy this. Fortunately I don't have to.
I've followed TTS advances through the years in kind of a casual way. I used to do some contract programming on the side and one of my projects was to write a driver for an early Hitachi TTS chip which was to be used to quote stock prices on the phone to subscribers. The way it worked was that my driver had to convert text to phenomes which it passed to the Hitachi chip, which pronounced them through a speaker. I'd never even heard of phenomes before this so I had to do a bunch of learning.
Ever since then I've had a casual interest in the technology and about every year I try to get a chance to listen to the progress being made. It's amazing progress and I think the quality of the TTS reading "Sayonara" was excellent, as TTS goes. But it still has to get a lot better to make me interested in listening to books that way.
It handled the Japanese words about as well as the English words, which surprised me. The problem is in it's phrasing, which was better than I expected but still not good enough. If my eyes went today and there were no audiobooks I'd be glad to have this. I'm even more glad not to need it.
All in all I think the most fun part about the Echo is watching it grow. Amazon emails me every week or two with a list of the latest features. They're also listed in the Echo app. They're doing a really good job with this, in my opinion. Not a lot of the new features really interest me that much but it's still fun reading about them.
I have been considering getting a Wifi switch so I can tell Alexa to turn on the lights but I never seem to get around to it. There are too many more useful things to spend my little bit of money on. Still, I may eventually do that and have another way to show the Echo off.
Barry