So I'm sure you've heard about Amazon Echo... if you haven't, think Hal 9000 of the Amazon product line. She's basically like Siri or Cortana except the fact she's a standalone device. She exists as a black cylinder that contains dual downward-facing speakers that produce 360 degree omni-directional sound so wherever you are in the room you should (in-theory, let's see how well she sounds... especially with my wood panneling) hear her great. Not only is it a wifi device connected to Amazon's services it can also stream (from your smart device) via Bluetooth so you can use things like your Audible app, iTunes, Pandora etc to stream the audio to her.

Echo also can be controlled via an app available on Fire OS, Android, iOS and traditional desktop browsers. It has features like alarms, music, you can create shopping lists (I'll use this a lot, instead of getting out my phone while watching TV to remind myself of something I'll just say "Alexa add to list"), query Wikipedia etc. The best part is, from my understanding her brain is largely in the cloud meaning Amazon can easily add features and improve the software.

While some fear it will always be listening blah blah blah... I don't care, my phones could be doing that too, so could my iPad... in theory so could my Fire TV's remote!

Right now Amazon Prime members get special pricing on her as obviously the idea is she will be something that will help you shop within the Amazon system and hey that's fine with me I watch Prime daily via my Fire TV, I'm a long long long time Audible subscriber, I do most of my shopping on Amazon etc.