Alexa! How art thou?

As some of you might know, I will be moving into my own new home with my wife very soon. I have been looking forward to it for the past three years - Yes! that's how long HDB now takes to complete a 16-storey flat. Those of you still waiting and planning for your home, ROM and wedding, I'll suggest that you plan it early as your home keys will most likely arrive much faster than expected.

Okay, HDB flats aside.

Lo and behold, the Amazon Echo, also known as Alexa, arrived in my mailbox about a month ago. I purchased it during the Amazon's Black Friday sales (USD 149) and its amazing...

The Amazon Echo (aka Alexa)

Consideration #1 - Alexa is designed for local content in USA

One of my main considerations into getting Alexa was that it's designed mainly to be used in the United States. That means that getting Alexa to work on local content will mostly be locked to USA contents (e.g. Timezone, weather and news). This can be fixed by specifying "Singapore" in your commands. Say "Alexa, how's the weather in Singapore" or "Alexa, what's the time in Singapore". There's also a setting in the companion app that you can use to indicate distances in KM instead of Miles, and temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.

[update]
Maybe you are fellow techie, you could hack it (see here for details) to change the time zone to Singapore instead. Then, you will get the correct local time when asking Alexa. However, not much luck at the moment for the weather information, you still need to ask Alexa by specifying "Singapore" in your command. Note: If you followed the link and have tried it, you can use "Asia/Singapore" for the timezoneid parameter.

Consideration #2 - Power voltage requirements

As most travellers would know by now, the voltage in USA is 110V, whereas most of the rest of the world uses 220-240V. Fortunately, Alexa is a dual voltage appliance, it means that it can accept the voltage here in Singapore too. You just need to get a plug converter to connect it to our 3-pin socket.

Summary

So there you go, Alexa is a niffy virtual assistant that works pretty well in recognizing our Singapore English accent and do its stuffs. To show the other useful features of Alexa, I will be writing a separate post about the home devices/appliances that are integrated with Alexa.