Dave - Big guy, beard, likes software development

First week As part of my series on Alexa,  Alexa - Fad or Future , I wanted to check in after a week of using my Echo Spot and highlight a cool feature I've found myself using an awful lot. Conversions and cooking For those of you who don't know, I really enjoy cooking and have set our echo spot up in the kitchen/living room (open plan layout). I quite often find myself converting units of measure using Alexa, e.g "Alexa, what is 1 and a half cups to grams". Or "Alexa, what's 3 FL Oz in ml". No more stopping mid cooking prep to wash wash my hands and google something then carrying on, then repeating the same process 5 minutes later with the next ingredient on the list :-) I promised an unbiased review, so my counter to this previously would have been, "You can do that on your phone anyway". That's actually still true, however, my phone is set to sleep to save the battery and the screen locks automatically for security and g

My brother gave me an Amazon Echo Dot last Christmas (2016). I plugged it in, used it for about a month and unplugged it and left it in my drawer for the last 23 months 😳 I do feel a quite guilty about that but at the time, it was so new there weren't any skills available and I really didn't get it. I have to confess, I still don't get the Amazon Echo devices trend. I use the voice assistant quite a bit on my phone, and it's very useful, but a dedicated device seems a little excessive. I really worry, given the pace of technology development that my Amazon Echo Spot will become obsolete pretty quickly and just become another device that has to go in the bin/to the recycling centre. To challange my preconceptions, and given a little time has passed and the Alexa Skills cupboard is decidedly less bare, I've decided to do a little experiment and trial using it for 3 months and report back in a series of posts. I'll link to the rest of the posts in this series fr