Adventures with Echo

In September, we released our flash briefing and skill for the Amazon Echo. Since then, we’ve tried to figure out how people are using this device. Here are some of the things we’ve learned.

Alastair Jardine

Published on Friday, 9 December 2016

Advent developer blog 2016   Gadgets  

Amazon Echo review - blue lights
Amazon Echo review - blue lights Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

In September 2016, the Guardian released it’s flash briefing and skill for Amazon’s Echo. It’s a full featured news skill, giving users access to our news, reviews, opinion, sport and podcasts.

Not knowing a lot about how people were using the device, we put out a survey to start to understand usage. Data were collected between 19 October 2016 and 4 November 2016, and respondents were primarily recruited from callouts on Twitter.

What have we learned? Here are five things:

One: Location in household

If there is a single Echo in a household, it tends to live in a communal space, with 83% being located where multiple people can access.

Two: More than one Echo?

Whilst the product has only been released in the UK since October 2016, it’s been available for longer in the USA. In households with more than one Echo device, where does the second get placed?

Interestingly, it tends to migrate into personal spaces, such as bedrooms and offices:

This is from a smaller sample size (not many people have more than one Echo!), but intuitively makes sense.

Three: Primary uses

When asked what the Echo was used for, listening to music and setting a timer were extremely common usages, throughout the day, but especially so over the weekend.

Flash briefings were a popular morning use, but beaten by the weather with 70% of people asking for a weather update between 6 - 9am.

What happens when you move towards the evening? Between 6 - 9pm, listening to music, podcasts and the radio were the primary uses. Not surprisingly, timers also featured heavily: the assumption is whilst cooking.

Four: It’s a shared device

This is a no brainer, but when a device is placed in a communal space, it gets used by lots of people, including children. Who else uses it other than the primary user?

Five: The best experience is natural voice

Whilst text-to-speech has come on leaps and bounds in quality over the past couple of years, it’s still not ideal for long-form content, which is what much of the Guardian produces. Listening to for more than a brief period is hard work, and difficult to understand.

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