Travels with Alexa
I was an early adopter of the Amazon Echo. I invited Alexa into our living room and soon she was a trusted member of the family. She would play music, give us weather forecasts, tell us the time, turn the lights on for us, and check our spelling. She would even tell jokes (almost as badly as I do).
Soon we added another full-sized Echo to the house to extend her ever-present helpfulness. That wasn’t without some complication — the team don’t seem to have yet figured out how to handle multiple Echo’s in earshot of each other, and handling requests when both are on the same account. Sometimes “Alexa, dim the living room light” results in a double response. Other times “Play last station on Pandora” doesn’t give me the last station from that particular device, but the last one on the account. But I’m sure the team are working on these scenarios.
I travel a lot for work, and having become accustomed to having Alexa always there (far more so that I am with Cortana, Google Now or Siri interestingly) I started to notice her absence in far flung hotel rooms.
My prayers were answered in the form of the Dot. Small, but equally powerful it took up hardly any space in my bag. The voice recognition works as flawlessly as it’s bigger sister, and even with a very diminutive speaker it’s easily on par with the portable music solutions I’d been using up until now. I would love to see it able to act as a speakerphone for conference calls, but I’m not sure it would do better than my Plantronics Voyager Legend which I think is hands-down the best bluetooth headset I’ve used.
But. The Dot is not yet a perfect travel companion simply because it’s so US-centric. Sure, it works fine in Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Dallas (all places it’s accompanied me so far), but in Sydney Australia … the cracks start to show.
Travelling in the US — a logical option for such a portable device — is flawed when you have to use the website / companion app to tell it the postcode it’s currently in. Which you need to do to adjust the timezone for alarms, clock and weather. This should be an easy fix with the number of IP-to-Geo services out there… if the Dot realises the IP address has changed and it appears to be in a new city how about asking me if I’m really wherever it thinks I am. Seems like a logical feature for a device where the primary UI is voice, not opening an app. While they’re in there adding location aware smarts, adding support for a wider geographical spread shouldn’t be too hard — after all, when I fall into bed in Sydney in a few hours time I don’t want to have to do the mental math to work out what time in Seattle I want the alarm to go off here. And tomorrow when I ask for the forecast I don’t want to have to remember to add “in Sydney” so I’m dressed right for Sydney Harbour not Lake Washington.
A feature I’d love to see enabled — especially given the good speaker and great microphone the Dot has — is the ability to act as a speakerphone. I spend a fair amount of time on conference calls when on the road (and back in my office) and having a hands free alternative to the Voyager Legend would sometimes be nice.
Another other challenge when travelling — and not just one Dot encounters — is hotel wifi and captive portals. How do you tell Dot what your room number and surname is so it can navigate the horrible captive portal experience many hotels force you to jump through… and because every hotel uses a different network (SSID) name you have to use the app to re-pair in every hotel... again, not a very voice friendly experience!
Enter my own trusty WiFi hotspot (no, not the whole picture, just the little blue square!):
I could put up with the login pain before I started travelling with DOT, but the added hassle of setting up yet another device (and often running out of allocated devices because you can only have 4,3, or even 2 concurrently active) drove me back to Amazon, this time for a tiny WiFi hub of my own. I got a TP-Link TL-WR802N which is just about a perfect fit for this task. It can either bridge an existing WiFi network (the hotels public/guest wifi) or an ethernet connection and allow you to set up your own secured hotspot. Because that’s consistent it doesn’t matter where you are, your Dot can connect to it (you just need to log into it once from a phone or laptop in order to deal with the captive portal, and then the hotel network sees everything as one device).
In the picture above you can see I managed to hide mine away in the network setup for the TV in my room. It gets power off a USB port on their router, and there was a spare LAN port to get me on the network. No more captive portal woes and, as the Marriott let you authenticate once per stay my phones, laptop, tablet and Dot all have easy connectivity until I get to the next stop.
One thing I would like to see with regard to WiFi connectivity for Dot though is the ability to store details for more than one WiFi network and step through them to see if it can get online. My puck has a different SSID to my primary network at home (because I sometimes want to use it for testing things at home) so that means either I need to fire it up when I’m home, or reconfigure Dot. Seems like a simple enough feature to add (after all, other Amazon devices like FireTV Stick and their tablets manage).
Long story short… the combination of a small WiFi puck and a Dot can go a long way towards making an anonymous hotel room feel a little bit more like home. Over to Amazon now to see what extra magic they can bring to the software…
