先来看看：亚马逊回声：新奇物品或您的数字生活的准备就绪的黄金时段的一部分？

我们的亚马逊回音，语音控制设备，换一个更好的词，到达5月17日的匮乏和整个星期我们使用它已经。作为顶级会员，我们付出了我们的$ 100，但标价为$ 200。虽然某些部分做得很漂亮，在后端的信息服务，还有很长的路要走的回声比一个新奇了。

回声是一个沉重的圆柱体，大约九英寸高，直径为3英寸。颜色为黑色，它坐落不明显任何地方，你可以得到它的交流电源和Wi-Fi连接。（不包括有线以太网）大多数回声的是由扬声器，它给你的回声是最擅长的一个想法：播放音乐。

回波的有趣的部分是控制：你说话吧。开始与唤醒一句话，“Alexa的”（或“亚马逊”如果你想），然后给它一个命令或使用自然的英语，其他语言尚未公布提问。回声发出你的声音，亚马逊的云，那里的小侏儒试图解码你想要什么，并在着手运动。最初的命令集可分为三大类：演奏（和购买）的音乐通过回声的扬声器，询问简单的事实问题，并管理几个本地服务，包括待办事项和购物清单，闹钟，以及一个计时器。

Amazon also offers an Echo App, available on Android, iOS, and via web browser, which lets you control the Echo’s settings and lists, queue up music to play, review your history (and provide feedback to Amazon), and train the Echo to improve speech recognition—although it does exceptionally well out-of-the-box. Echo boasts an array of seven microphones and sophisticated noise cancellation that let us talk to it even when it was playing music.

For example, using voice commands, you can add items to one of two lists (To-Do and Shopping), or have Echo read back the lists. While you can intentionally trick Echo into making errors, speaking clearly give us about 75% success in issuing commands. The lists are also managed via the Echo App, which is how you’d delete items, or actually see them while you’re in the grocery store.

Asking the Echo factual questions (or the ever popular “tell me a joke”) works well for some questions, not so well for others. While Echo’s voice recognition generally knew what we were asking, the back-end service answering the questions didn’t know how to answer all of them. For example, Google could tell us “how far is it from Tucson to Phoenix,” but Echo wouldn’t unless we changed to “how far is it from Tucson, Arizona to Phoenix, Arizona.” Google knew how long it takes to go between Rome and Venice, Amazon’s stock price, what Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese is, how many people live in South Sudan, and how plastics are made, while Echo didn’t. On the other hand, while Google danced delicately around the question “is Taiwan a country,” Echo had a clear and unambiguous “yes” result. (Amazon is not shipping Echo to China yet.)

可通过回声音乐服务包括亚马逊自己的音乐总理，以及iHeartRadio，Pandora和TuneIn。所有的服务，但需要TuneIn该服务链接到的回波的帐户。我们开始时只有亚马逊自己的服务，亚马逊的“标准”和总理。随着亚马逊的服务，您将自动获得访问几乎所有你在物理形态上从亚马逊买了多年的音乐的MP3。

You can upload your own music library (for an additional $25 per year) to bridge the gaps. We ended up with confusing mishmash of our own music library and our own playlists, Amazon Prime playlists, and Amazon Prime stations. Simply saying “Alexa, play the Rolling Stones” will play a shuffled set of Rolling Stones songs out of your music library, if you have it. If you don’t, then the Echo looks in other services, including Amazon Prime’s music, playlists, and stations, working its way down the other services you’ve configured.

您也可以通过蓝牙与智能手机和平板电脑配对的回声，并通过它们播放音乐了回音扬声器。作为一款音乐播放器，回声的扬声器的质量会不会打动发烧友，但它的很多很好的背景音乐，并且音量不够大，无明显变形，以填补一个非常大的房间。

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As a way of navigating your music library, Echo leaves a lot to be desired. Yes, you can do cute show-off things like “Alex, play Layla,” but try any of the 15 ways to ask for Brahms’ Opus 102 Double Concerto, and you’ll get nowhere. If you’ve fully committed to loading your entire music library into Amazon-land and built your playlists there, you may find the Echo a wonderful addition. For those of us, though, who have already built other solutions for our music libraries, the Echo is less satisfactory. We found ourselves using the various stations available in Amazon Prime for background music---there are more than 150 of them---with best success.

Our ho-hum experience with music management repeated itself with other Echo features and highlighted the biggest issue: Echo isn’t connected to the rest of your digital life. You can add things to a To-Do list or Shopping list, which seems cool when you first try it, but we already have other online tools for these things that Echo doesn’t talk to. We weren’t going to break up our love affair with Evernote just so we could tell a tall black cylinder to add something to a list. Ask Echo about your calendar, and it’ll say it can’t do anything… yet.

有些数字连接都已经到位。开启和关闭，或调暗开关和指示灯 - 如果你有飞利浦色调或贝尔金微蒙家庭自动化，回声可以连接并控制灯光，以有限的方式进行切换。

Amazon’s current answer is a free service called IFTTT (If This, Then That), which can be connected to the Echo via your Amazon account. IFTTT recipes can provide the glue between Echo and other services. For example, using the Evernote example, you can write an IFTTT recipe that will add anything from your To-Do list to an Evernote notebook. Today, IFTTT recipes can watch your To-Do and Shopping lists, and questions regarding sports teams (including Men’s, but not Women’s, college NCAA basketball), then trigger various types of actions. It’s an interesting and extremely limited start, but it moves the Echo firmly out of “general tool” and into “hobbyist” territory. Today, there are 192 recipes up on IFTTT for the Echo, but this is very early stage: who wants to say “Alexa, what’s on my To-Do list” to ring their mobile phone?

Amazon酒店拥有的回声总是越来越好，因为繁重的工作在自己的基于云的服务来完成。这应该使容易的任务，如扩展类型的，你可以问问题，提高他们的答案，并链接到现有的数字服务。由于回声仅只是小量出货了一个星期，这是不成熟的匆忙做出判断，但它也为时过早建议购买的回声。