Amazon Echo Club

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Memories and elephants are playing in the band.

One of those words is not correct.

LOL! Indeed a good song to get lyrics messed up in our minds. There was a TV show about a decade ago that had participants try to fill in the missing words of song lyrics. It was pretty funny, and I'm glad I am not the only one to totally screw up so many lyrics with my bad hearing and even worse memory!

[Yolina]

Meh, more delivery woes, 4th time in 4 weeks, they're getting sloppy - this time it's an Amazon Logistics delivery so at least they've sent me an email...

"We promised to deliver your order on Wednesday, 30 November.
We’re sorry to tell you that there may be a delay in delivering your order. Please allow an additional day or two for the parcel to arrive. We will continue to monitor your order and if the parcel has not arrived by Monday, 5 December we will automatically issue a replacement."

So much for a guaranteed delivery date . Plus they already added an extra day to the usual Prime next day to give you the 'guaranteed' date which is, it seems, anything but...

[booklover6]

I got a 2 year protection plan for my Dot...some of the reviews speak of failing devices, so I thought it was for the best.

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by booklover6

I got a 2 year protection plan for my Dot...some of the reviews speak of failing devices, so I thought it was for the best.

In case anyone else is interested in getting a protection plan for their new Echos, it's not too late to do so. You have 30 days after it ships to sign up. The Dot plans are currently on sale. Remember, the Dot only comes with a 90-day warranty. The Echo and Tap both have 1-year warranties.

Legal Disclaimer

The Protection Plan + Accident Protection for Echo Dot is only available on an Echo Dot that has been shipped within the last 30 days and is only available for customers who are residents of the United States.

Protection Plans

• Amz Echo
  
• Amz Tap
  
• Echo Dot

[tubemonkey]

My Prime Music disappeared

Hello monkey,

You are no longer an Amazon Prime member.

Alright Amazon, make me an offer I can't refuse

[Catlady]

My Dot shipped early and is already at my local UPS facility, so even though the delivery date is now showing as Friday, I may actually get it tomorrow.

I thought I'd have a week to decide if I wanted to give it away or keep it!

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Catlady

My Dot shipped early and is already at my local UPS facility, so even though the delivery date is now showing as Friday, I may actually get it tomorrow.

I thought I'd have a week to decide if I wanted to give it away or keep it!

Keep it. I ordered 8 of them, but only keeping 3.

[Tarana]

Couldn't help it. Bought a little white dot. Not sure where I will put it yet. I already have an Echo and 2 Dots (1st gen). Well, technically, one is my brother's, but since it wasn't working for him, I stuck it in the kitchen.

[tubemonkey]

AWS Announces Three New Amazon AI Services

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced three Artificial Intelligence (AI) services that make it easy for any developer to build apps that can understand natural language, turn text into lifelike speech, have conversations using voice or text, analyze images, and recognize faces, objects, and scenes. Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition are based on the same proven, highly scalable Amazon technology built by the thousands of deep learning and machine learning experts across the company. Amazon AI services all provide high-quality, high-accuracy AI capabilities that are scalable and cost-effective. Amazon AI services are fully managed services so there are no deep learning algorithms to build, no machine learning models to train, and no up-front commitments or infrastructure investments required. This frees developers to focus on defining and building an entirely new generation of apps that can see, hear, speak, understand, and interact with the world around them. To learn more about Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, or Amazon Rekognition, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-ai

[tubemonkey]

Intelligent conversations with Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a new service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text that is built on the same automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology and natural language understanding (NLU) that powers Amazon Alexa. Amazon Lex makes it easy to bring sophisticated, natural language capabilities to virtually any app. Developers can build and test bots (conversational apps that perform automated tasks like checking the weather or booking flights) directly from the AWS Management Console by typing in a few sample phrases (e.g., “find a flight,” or “book a flight”) along with instructions for getting the required parameters to complete task (e.g., travel date and destination) and the corresponding clarifying questions to ask the user (e.g., “when do you want to travel?” and “where do you want to go?”). Amazon Lex takes care of the rest, building the language model and asking the follow-up questions needed to complete the task. Because Amazon Lex is integrated with AWS Lambda, developers can configure Amazon Lex to invoke the appropriate backend service (e.g., the flight booking service) through an AWS Lambda function. Developers can also use pre-built enterprise connectors that execute AWS Lambda functions to answer questions like “what are my top 10 accounts in Salesforce.com,” by fetching data from enterprise systems like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, Zendesk, QuickBooks and HubSpot.

Bots built using Amazon Lex can be used anywhere: from web applications, to chat and messenger apps like Slack and Facebook Messenger, or through voice in apps on mobile or connected devices. Amazon Lex handles the authentication required by different platforms and simplifies the user interface design by not requiring developers to write custom code for each platform. Moreover, developers do not have to worry about scaling their infrastructure as Amazon Lex scales automatically as traffic to a bot increases, and developers pay only for the calls made to the Amazon Lex API.

[tubemonkey]

Intelligent Speech with Amazon Polly

Amazon Polly makes it easy for developers to add natural-sounding speech capabilities to existing applications like newsreaders and e-learning platforms, or create entirely new categories of speech-enabled products – from mobile apps to devices and appliances. Amazon Polly is easy to use; developers can send text to Amazon Polly using the SDK or from within the AWS Management Console and Polly immediately returns an audio stream that can be played directly or stored in a standard audio file format. With 47 lifelike voices and support for 24 languages, developers can choose from both male and female voices with a variety of accents to make applications for users around the globe. And Amazon Polly’s fluid pronunciation of text content means applications deliver high-quality voice output across a wide variety of text formats. Amazon Polly is scalable, returning high-quality speech fast, even when converting large volumes of text to speech. With Amazon Polly, developers pay only for the text they convert, and they can cache generated speech and replay it as many times as they like with no restrictions.

The Washington Post is a Pulitzer Prize-winning media and technology company that publishes more than 1200 stories a day. “We’ve long been interested in providing audio versions of our stories, but have found that existing text-to-speech solutions are not cost-effective for the speech quality they offer,” said Joseph Price, Senior Product Manager, The Washington Post. “With the arrival of Amazon Polly and its high-quality voices, we look forward to offering readers more rich and versatile ways to experience our content.”

Just placed my first Alexa Deals purchase. Actually it was my first purchase of any kind via Alexa. As luck would have it I was looking at getting a UPS Battery Backup power supply yesterday. I picked out an APC model but never pulled the trigger to buy it, deciding instead to wait. This morning I was totally surprised to see the exact model via Alexa Deals for $12 off. That is a 22% savings. So I pulled the trigger via Alexa. One small glitch occurred when I was prompted for the authorization code and honestly did not remember setting up one when I set up Alexa to allow purchasing. I had to open the Alexa app on my iPhone and look up the code. Apparently it was a code that Amazon put into my account as I would never have used that one. I changed it to something I would remember, then asked Alexa a second time to place the order and it went through without a hitch. I probably had a senior moment (a brain fart to you younger folks) when I set up Alexa purchasing and somehow accepted a default code Amazon suggested. Oh well, it is set up correctly now and the code is definitely a good idea to prevent accidental purchasing. I hear it can prevent monkeys from ordering Dots on your account too!

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Just placed my first Alexa Deals purchase.

I did as well. She had a deal on the Garth Brooks Ultimate Hits 2 CD set (plus Auto Rip) for $1.61 (reg. $7.69) which I figure will make a good gift.

[Yolina]

I've just asked one of the Dot why another of my Amazon deliveries is late again (so that's now 5 in 3 weeks ) but it tells me that it doesn't understand the question

I won't be renewing my annual Prime when that runs out and I will just get a 1 month subscription a few times a year and that will be it.

Originally Posted by Yolina

I've just asked one of the Dot why another of my Amazon deliveries is late again (so that's now 5 in 3 weeks ) but it tells me that it doesn't understand the question

I won't be renewing my annual Prime when that runs out and I will just get a 1 month subscription a few times a year and that will be it.

If it wasn't for the Prime Music and Video I would probably cancel too. There was a time when Amazon was ahead of the others in offering free 2-day shipping with Prime, but now most larger retailers do this and they don't charge $99 + tax per year!