Homebrewing With The Amazon Echo

[Thorrak]

Sure enough - this got caught up in Amazon's submission process, and is now on round three of certification. One bit of trivia to note - there actually isn't support built into Alexa for decimal numbers. If you run into an app that accepts them, either the developers are taking some serious shortcuts to implement support (my solution) or have basically written their own code to attempt to translate spoken words to numbers.

 

[Thorrak]

Yay! This is now live. Somewhat of a single-tasker, but it gets the job done!

 

[lnyswonger]

I just enabled Hopstand on my Alexa, very nice! I'll definitely have to try this out during my next brew day. My BJCP Trivia app is held up for round #4 through the certification process. Dealing with proving I have documentation that I have the rights to use the IP from BJCP.

 

[PhinneyWoodBrews]

Yeah, you do sound like a commercial. I'm highly skeptical that you're not affiliated with Amazon. Why on god's green earth did you feel it necessary to TWICE mention that one can order pizza with this device? Maybe alexa can be helpful on brew day, but if you truly aren't an am-hole, stick to the relevant details.

 

[DNelson]

This is great. Thanks for sharing!

 

[markkinnj]

Coolio, I've been doing this for some time. I use Alexa for other things as well. But you can also do this if your iphone is plugged in by saying Hey Siri. So depending on what i'm looking to do, is what one I use.

 

[MagicMatt]

Don't worry, Google won't have a microphone in your house, let alone in your house 24/7. That's because this is an Amazon product. Google != Amazon.
Anyway, there is a button to turn off the microphone. So you can only turn it on when you want.

 

[MagicMatt]

You can't make ALL of your calculations prior to brewing. How can you convert your Brix reading of the pre-boil gravity or O.G. before you even take a reading?

 

[MagicMatt]

Because it's a cool feature? Because it's insight of things to come, technology-wise? If anything, I would think that you would think he was affiliated with Dominos, not Amazon.
I guess you've never bought something so awesome before that you just had to rave about it to people. That must suck, and I'm sorry for you.

 

[greg]

I don't eat Domino's pizza, don't use Uber, and don't need a device to turn off my lights or want the news read to me. This is just another pointless new way-cool trendy tech gadget just for the sake of technology in today's have to be entertained and distracted every nanosecond world. Like every other similar device, I have no use for it.

 

[dmenke]

1. You interact to "robots" every day, you just aren't aware of it.
2. The Echo doesn't know how to brew. You have to rely on your own organic computer for that. What he is doing is taking advantage of the next logical step in the evolution of the calculator to make his brew day more fun for him.
3. Intelligent devices like this don't make people dumb, but they do allow people who are less skilled at certain things do things better, or at all. They also allow people to make mistakes with greater speed and accuracy...
Every technological advance has it's upside, and downside. You learn how to live with them. Fire was once cutting edge technology.