For several months now I have had Amazon's Echo devices, with the Alexa voice-operated assistant in the house. To test their effectiveness, I have the two main Echo variants - Echo and Echo Dot, plus a small Phillips Hue smart lighting system to see how the Echoes interact with home automation. I'll take each separately, starting with the full size Echo. Amazon Echo The Echo looks like a wireless speaker until you use the trigger word 'Alexa', at which point a funky blue glowing ring appears on top to indicate it is listening (the glow even attempts to point towards your voice). The Echo can cope with a vast number of 'skills' - responses to voice commands - from playing music to ordering an Uber taxi. Some of the skills are excellent, though I think it's fair to say that 95% of them are either too local to somewhere in America or too pointless to be of any use. Our most frequent use of the full-size Echo is playing music and radio. We opted for access...

I've had a couple of Amazon Echoes in the house for a while now. I will review these remarkable voice-activated devices fully in a while, but I just wanted to share an experience that shows we're still quite a way from being able to interact freely by voice with a computer. It's widely acknowledged that Alexa, Amazon's equivalent of Siri, has some syntax limitations. It occasionally takes two or three tries to get it to do what you want, as it's nowhere near as flexible as humans in understanding the different ways to ask for the same thing. But this example involved a very simple command that is meat and drink to Alexa - playing a piece of music. Usually, Alexa is great for this. I have the option that allows me to dip into Amazon's 50 million plus database of tunes. So to pull up, say, the latest Ed Sheeran, is the work of moments. I can even ask for something as obscure as one of Rick Wakeman's less popular prog rock albums. (Mmm, The Myths and Lege...