The Amazon Echo Dot I pre-ordered arrived yesterday. I Skipped all the previous models because the form factors weren’t what I was looking for. The size of Echo Dot feels just right, and it works better than the Alexa-Pi that I had frankensteined together for my works on Internet of things and virtual reality. As the A.I. continues to advance, conversational UI or verbal-API will be a big part of our daily life in the near future.
- Ability to give self-diagnose report when asked: Sometimes the song will stop playing by itself, and there is no way to find out what went wrong. It would be awesome if the user asked something like, “Alexa, What happened?”, Alexa could give a self-diagnosis report on the poor performance.
- More customizations: It seems like all the functionalities and options for customizations are geared towards a few specific user personas. I would like to see more custom options open up like keywords and certain canned responses.
- Real-time command execution: I would love Alexa to have a mode that executes verbal commands in real-time. I would imagine the user has to link keywords or key phrases to certain Alexa actions before activating this mode. When it is activated, Alexa would stay on and continue to listen for pre-linked keywords or key phrases and execute the linked action(s) in real-time.