First impressions from Alexa

My wife bought an Alexa device and I was trying to play with the device on and off, since it was available. Still trying to figure out where is the adaptive behavior and what can be customized, now that everybody talks about machine learning. Not sure why there is a Settings menu when there is a speech interface. This menu could be at least set through speech maybe. Asking how many languages Alexa supports I got an answer: many, and was referred to the Settings menu. Going there I found that there were three entries: British English, American English and German. In fact these are really only two languages: German and English and they are in the same language group. I am sure more are coming, just need to be patient. The music coverage was good, but I got frustrated that some songs could not be played because of copyright issues. Since they are readily available on Youtube and other sources this is somewhat unexpected. My attempts to get foreign music were not successful so far. Then I moved to weather and am getting the same scripted response for the weather report for the day no matter how I ask. I was hoping to ask for customized output based on something like what is the weather in the next 4 hours, but maybe not yet. News coverage was definitely better, so was the timer function. Going back to music I found that specific musical choices seem to be clustered to a much more broad category and the results may not be what you want. For example if the user wants to play acoustic music then some additional prompts may help narrow the preferences down, so that we don't get country when we really wanted Spanish acoustic guitar. Stopping and starting something new by voice works well. The fact that in many situation you get the same response that Alexa does not know something that you ask her is kind of discouraging for the user. There are no additional dialog prompts that one might expect from a being, even a digital one. Finally, why can't the user change the voice of Alexa. Why not customize it more to their preferences. I did like Alexa though although she was fairly predictable in her responses, maybe this is the goal for this incarnation. Overall the device is an interesting concept and I see unlimited space for development in areas like language learning, music instruction and recording, tutoring, karaoke machine, etc. Looking forward to new software updates as the evolution of Alexa is ongoing. While this process happens we decided to give Alexa to our 14 years old niece who is going to practice her English language skills by interacting with Alexa in Bulgaria. This helps her replace the incessant You tube video downloads on her cell phone with a bigger and easier to operate device. My short interaction with Alexa is over. I am back to using my smart phone and laptop for everything I need for now until a future incarnation of Alexa and I meet again. In the meantime my wife complained that she misses Alexa. We thought that there has to be a way and sure enough if you have an Amazon Prime account and download the Alexa app on your smart phone you can have a good portion of the functionality. In fact everything that you can access via the Internet is available. Things like timers, etc. are not there, but the smart phones are abundant with apps of that sort. So we could part with a Alexa and still have her in our lives as a smart phone incarnation. I wonder what it is like to work on the Alexa software, some of it is even developed right here in Pittsburgh. Must be interesting, challenging and creative for sure. I will probably never find out.