This article overstates Toni's role. Though she does own a good portion of the Alexa ecosystem, there were/are several other directors/VPs that ran/run different portions of the system.<p>I am not saying that Toni's contributions are negligible, rather that her and her team are part of a bigger organization that built and improves Alexa.<p>Source: work there
I would love to use such a device, and explore the possibilities.<p>However, it concerns me that every major player out there tries to create a locked playing field with their devices ("amazon home" vs "google home").<p>I really don't like the idea of buying home automation devices that are meant for one specific solution. Moreover, I also fear that I could become dependent on a corporate-owned device/service, with no direct alternatives (or with convoluted migration paths).<p>And that's not even mentioning the privacy issues, or (ok, I touched that a bit) the freedom to hack a bit the API (what if I would like to add a completely custom command, change the detection keyword, etc...)<p>There are some open solutions such as Mycroft, but I must confess I haven't looked much at it. I won't consider this technology mature or ready for use until those concerns are addressed, which could take some time: it also seems to me that those "personal assistants" are more suited to a central architecture (which raises the question: did this architecture influence their design, or is it the only possible solution for a reliable "personal assistant"?).
According to independent reviews, Alexa came in dead-last when compared to Siri and Google Home.<p>See comparison here: <a href="http://bgr.com/2017/05/18/google-home-vs-amazon-alexa-vs-siri-comparison/" rel="nofollow">http://bgr.com/2017/05/18/google-home-vs-amazon-alexa-vs-sir...</a>