Has anyone here got an Amazon Echo? I'm interested in your opinion of it. At £150 I considered it a bit expensive as a novelty, but I see they now have the Dot at £50, which is more of an impulse buy price. I'm still figuring out my home automation system. It will be based around Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi. I just got some opto-isolator chips to test out for isolating the Pi from my existing PIR sensors. I want to re-use as much as possible from my existing system to keep costs down.
Image from Wikipedia.
Home Assistant has integration with the Echo. Having voice control of my devices would be cool. I'm just trying to avoid being reliant on any particular brand of equipment. I can live with it being more complex to set up, but I need to make it easy for the family to use day to day.
My existing controller is a Comfort that was installed many years ago and has no connectivity. I hope to make that redundant soon. I also have a Nest thermostat that will become part of the new system.
The home automation market seems to be taking off now, but it lacks standards and has some well publicised security issues. I'll be careful about what gets connected in my house.
Update: I see Google Home is out soon (in the US at least). I'm fairly tied into Google already with my music on there and a Nest. Looks like a competitive price. I'll assess in the run-up to Xmas and maybe treat myself.
