Amazon crafts two more voice-controlled gizmos in its Echo chamber

Issues

So, for example, the Echo is used predominately for two things: radio and music. It plays the local radio station in the morning, and it plays streamed music – typically from Pandora but also from Amazon's own music service – during the day and in the evening. Occasionally, it is used as a timer ("Alexa, set a timer for five minutes"); very occasionally as a quick source of information – anything from unit conversions to the weather.

What it has not been used for is the more involving activities such as setting the temperature of the house (connected to the Ecobee) or ordering an Uber. Why? Because it often doesn't work.

When we learned last month that the Ecobee was now working with the Echo, we spent a good 45 minutes trying to get it to work. It never did. The Alexa app recognizes it, we think the Echo recognizes it, but no matter what combination of words we used, it would not talk to it. And after the fifth or six attempt to turn up the temperature, you start to feel a bit stupid when you could simply have walked over and done it manually, as you always have.

Here's another issue – the Echo service often goes down. Not every day. Maybe once every two weeks. That doesn't seem like much, but if your wireless router stopped working every two weeks, you'd start thinking about getting a new router. When the service is down, you ask a normal query and the machine goes "bum bom" and a red light appears on top. "I'm having trouble communicating right now," its sweet-sounding voice informs you. But you still get nothing.

One other issue: when we added a different person's account to the Echo, which brought in a new Pandora account and a new Amazon account, the machine simply stopped recognizing the original account. And stopped using it or giving access to it.

Repeated efforts to fix the problem failed. And when, a few weeks later, it came time to consider putting it away – the first step in a gadget's inevitable demise – this reporter emailed Amazon about the issue and got back a long and complex set of instructions. But – lo – within an hour of the request, it suddenly started working again.

Creepy?

What does this mean? It means that despite Amazon's best efforts – and they are good – to make the Echo as non-creepy as possible, it is retaining significant control of these devices and how they work. Enough to remotely fix an issue that could not be fixed with the physical device or with its app. And the Echo just edged back into slightly creepy.

On that topic, one thing it will do on occasion is think it has heard its "wake word" of "Alexa" and start listening to your conversation. Then, after a few seconds in which you're not aware it has been listening, the device will tell you out the blue "I'm sorry I didn't understand your request" – to bemusement all around. It doesn't happen that often – once a week maybe – but it is disconcerting.

None of that is to say that Amazon can't turn this into an extraordinary enabling technology. But there is lots of work to do and based on experience so far, the company may be building too fast on imperfect foundations. The more big-name services Amazon builds on top of the Echo, the more its failures to work will undermine the device's credibility.

That said, we are going to try again, one more time, to get it to work with the smart thermostat. Why? Because it is so much nicer to be able to say out loud "Alexa, turn the temperature up" than to have to walk to a specific device and physically interact with it. If Amazon gets this right, it is onto a huge winner. If it gets carried away and tries to go too far, too fast, it could kill off a promising technology. ®