comparable to amazon echo?

[transparent]

I have both the Kinect, Echo (and a DOT for that matter), bit of a late reply, but perhaps this may help still.

The Echo has an amazing array of microphones and is far better at picking up voice commands than the Kinect (not to say the Kinect is bad). Especially over background sounds/music/other people talking.

The kinect works 90% of the time from anywhere in my office (800 sq feet) as long as there is no music with lyrics or TV. If there is any background noise I find myself repeating commands and yelling at it.

The echo seems to work for us 99% of the time, even if yelling from the other side of the house. I've been 20 ft away and have whispered "Alexa" and had it activate. I'm very impressed at how well it works.

That said, I have more control over the commands/trigger and functions with the Kinect /w plugin. With the echo you are limited to what its able to do with the skill, but its perfect for turning on/off lights and devices.

With the Kinect plugin I can create my own grammars which can be very powerful tool so that I can say "Control projector" and switch to a different grammar and then just give one or two word commands like "menu", "brightness", etc. Can't do anything like that with the Echo.

So to sum up - Echo is perfect for wife/kids day to day use. Kinect is great for my mancave/office to turn it into the bridge of the enterprise

Hope that helps.

Andrew

[amp3d]

Performance wise I mean.

I know the echo obviously functionality will obviously exceed what we can do here in just HS3 alone, but since I haven't tried either yet (and Echo isn't even available in Canada...technically), I just thought I'd ask here.

Does the kinect repond to voice commands and pass them through as accurately as a echo would? Just curious