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Originally Posted by CRussel
So, after several days with my new Fire TV Cube, I can safely say I'll love it -- just as soon as it's had about 3 or 4 firmware updates! Buggy?! Oh, yeah. It hangs up or gets confused about once a day. So far I've only had to hard boot it twice, but I've definitely had to switch to the remote at least once a day.
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Definitely glad a took a pass on the early testing of the Cube, in other words, decided not to be an early buyer/owner. I tried finding some stuff to watch on my Fire TV last night and was totally frustrated at the mess Amazon calls a Home screen. What a cluttered mess that is difficult to navigate!
Then I tried to pull up the A&E app and it could not get past the login screen. Likely A&E's lack of programming skills, but still it was another fail. I finally gave up and used Roku which is much easier to navigate, but it still needs a lot of thoughtful improvements as well. IMO, streaming boxes and services just are not well thought out as far as interfaces go, especially voice interfaces. Maybe it is because I don't think like a Millennial--but I'm glad I don't. After all I've 40+ years of life experience beyond them. I still find it much easier to discover things to watch on video services by using my eyes and looking. I do not see much use in trying to use my voice in the discovery process at the current time. I'm sure using voice search/discovery will improve over time, but at the current moment in time I spend more time arguing with Alexa and Siri than I do getting the correct results. Voice commands can work well if you know the title you want to watch, but they fail in the discovery process IMO.
This morning I tried to set up Alexa for podcasts, and I followed some online advice that suggested installing the AnyPod skill (app) in Alexa. Then I proceeded to try a simple command like "Alexa ask AnyPod to play
PD Stories" which is a PodCast series by Tom Morris Jr. who cohosts A&E's Live PD TV show. (Apparently AnyPod didn't have that one, even though the online gurus claim it has almost all podcasts available. More inaccurate reporting from tech guys, IMO.) Anyway, Alexa responded that she was going to play
OCD Stories for me. Perhaps listening to stories about people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is entertaining, but that is not what I wanted to listen to, so I said "STOP". That should have been the end to it, but no, Alexa then proceeded to ask me 3 or 4 more questions trying to figure out what I wanted her to do. It was annoying and useless as the questions had almost nothing to do with listening to a podcast and wasted my time. Multiple "STOP" commands later, she finally shut the heck up. Finally I opened iTunes on my MacBook Pro and quickly searched for, located, downloaded, and played an episode of
PD Stories. I should have simply done that to begin with. Much faster and cleaner, more intuitive, and my MBP didn't argue with me or get uber confused.