Interesting indeed. But one thing I can't seem to find...can I rename the wake word? This is the single most frustrating thing about these devises. Branding is so important they will not allow you to change the gender or wakename/word!

You can at least do this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201971890

Corporate branding keeps these devices from becoming more personal. I did see Google Home/ assistant added both genders and like 8 new voices. They plan to add an option to name your device by years end. I hope Amazon follows suit.

I hope so too. I agree with your take corporate branding probably plays heavily in locking down the open renaming of the device and "wake word". It would look bad I guess if people (me) renamed their device a dirty word.

What kills me about this is that I have multiple Google devices (phone, watch, tablet) and they all respond at once unless I disable always listening on 2 of them, which limits the usefulness.

It's going to get more interesting as Amazon pushes their "Alexa chip" to common house hold appliance manufactures as well so you can say "Alexa defrost my chicken" - the microwave needs to be smart enough to respond and everything else needs to know there is no action to take.

I don't want to hear 50 Alexa voices blabbing back at me - or at each other! "I'm sorry I don't have the chicken skill, please check the skill store to enable chicken" - says the toaster "Playing Chicken Dance from Amazon music" - the living room dot "defrosting the freezer" - says the fridge "Here are local places that serve chicken, would you like me to order you chicken" - says your phone "Ordering more chicken on your Amazon prime account" - says your watch "I could not find chicken, would you like to play Jeopardy?" - the bedroom dot

@JustinRatliff too funny! Definitely a weird future it will be if we have all devices sharing the same name lol.

For those who prefer the Google ecosystem to Amazon, it looks like they are releasing a similar dev board this fall, as well as the existing integrations to RasPi and of course IFTTT which can be used with the maker channel and EZ-B https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/edge-tpu

Same issue that Justin described hilariously with a single keyword for all devices, although Google has made some noise (and assistant for Android breakdowns have shown some hints of) that they will be adding custom naming at some point.

Alan