 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, we're a webcast, an online show. I don't know, it calls whatever you want. But we're here live, online, every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We record our show every week, so it is available on our website afterwards for you to watch. The live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do jump onto our website to see any of our previous shows, share with your colleagues. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, mini-training sessions, interviews, book reviews. Basically anything library related, we are happy to have on the show. We do bring in guest speakers to the show sometimes. And sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff doing presentations. This week we have Commission staff only. This is our monthly, usually the last Wednesday, last show of the month, tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael is our technology innovation librarian here at the Library Commission. Good morning, Krista. Good morning. And he usually comes on once a month and does something definitely techy related. Sometimes we may have things that are also tech related too. But if you're definitely into something, one or something like that, look for the last Wednesday month. It's always going to be something more technical. Geeky. Yeah, geeky. Geeky is even a better word, yeah. We're leaning to the geeky side. And sometimes he brings on interviews. Actually most of the sessions have been bringing in a guest speaker. But this week it's just him. But he's not alone. I am not alone. No. I kind of brought a guest. You did. Okay. Great. Michael has a guest with him today. And I'm just going to hand over to him and let him explain what's going on. All right. Thank you, Krista. And good morning to everybody watching live. And at least this morning now for those of you watching the recording. And our guest is with us, which you can see maybe sitting in front of me. Alexa, good morning. Alexa? Good morning. Good morning. Cool. So what Alexa here is, this is an Amazon Echo. So as you can see on your screen, I've got the webpage up for that. This is Amazon's, I want to say latest or newest, but it's their only voice controlled device, basically. If you are an Apple iPhone user, you might be familiar with Siri. If you are an Android phone user, you have Google now, Google voice commands. If you are a Windows phone user, all four of you, or if you are starting to play with the new Windows 10, Microsoft has something called Cortana, which is their voice control. And all of those voice controlled things are more applications are kind of built into mobile devices or desktop devices. Whereas, and I'll hold this up a little more for the video here. The Amazon Echo is this two-pound cylindrical device with a microphone, a speaker, and a microprocessor in it that is basically designed to just kind of sit in your home and act as kind of an assistant and information device and music player. So what I want to do here is kind of walk you through some of its features, talk about some of its questions. I've had it for about six, eight weeks now. We'll talk cost, we'll talk setup, things like that and how it works. So let me just give you a couple of examples here before I get into any further. And of course, if you can tell, my voice is a little rusty today, which I think makes it really ironic for doing a voice control device. So we'll talk about some of that. So, Alexa, who are you? I'm an Amazon Echo. You can choose to call me either Alexa or Amazon in the Echo app. Alexa, how old are you? I was released November 6th, 2014. So as you can hear and you can see, when you wake it up, this little light ring kind of shows up at the top there to tell you it's now listening. And we can talk about the listening technology in a little bit. It does have some canned responses. It was originally released back in November of 2014. So this is a really new device. You can find out more about it if you're interested in getting one at Amazon.com slash Echo, which is the website I have up here on the screen at the moment. And one of the things you can't see behind our video is at the moment, if you want to buy one, you have to request an invitation. So you basically have to apply to get one. Now, you don't have to really do anything. It's basically like, yes, I have an Amazon account and I would like one. Please send me an email if and when you'd like to sell me one. You don't have to tell it, you know, any background or anything like that. I just basically said, hey, I want one. I got my invitation. I actually signed up for my invitation back in November of the moment. It signed out. I didn't sign up. I didn't know if I was going to want it. I wasn't sure what the cost was going to be, but I just got my name in really quick. And then in mid-December, I got my invitation via email and it basically said something like, you have about the next two weeks in which you can buy one if you want or else we will send your invitation. So I talked to the wife. The list price for this is $199. If you have an Amazon Prime account, it is discounted at $99. And considering Amazon Prime I think is now $80 a year, you actually, it's cheaper than buying lists if you get a Prime account and then you buy it for $99. And there are some benefits to using this if you have a Prime account, which we'll definitely talk about when we get into some features later. So I said, yes, I would like it. And I got an email back saying, thanks for charging your credit card. You should see yours in about March. And I said, okay, I guess it's going to take a little while. And then mid-January I got an email saying it's been shipped. And I went, okay, fine, send it to me soon. So it showed up in the house and setup is actually really simple. You first turn it on the very first time, or if you press and hold the power button up at the top, it will go into a setup mode and the ring will glow orange to show you that it's in a setup mode. And what you then need to do is either on a laptop or on your cell phone if you install the Echo app, you connect to it over Wi-Fi. So it is sending out its own little Wi-Fi signal to say, you know, I'm Echo number XYZ. You connect to it and you give it what Wi-Fi you would like to connect it to in your home regularly. So I told it, here is the signal for my home Wi-Fi and here is the password for my Wi-Fi. You then disconnect from it and then it connects to your home Wi-Fi. So when I bring this home and plug it in, it will go, hey, I know that Wi-Fi signal, I know the password, I'm not connected to the local Wi-Fi. When I first brought it into the office, I had to go back up in the setup and say, here is the Wi-Fi signal at the office I want you to connect to. Here is its password. New place, new Wi-Fi. What's really cool now is when I bring it home and bring it to work, it just knows. It learned it the first time and it remembers, so I don't have to give it that password every single time. Well, that's like my cell phone does the same thing. I can go to a friend's house who I've been to before if I've already told it, here's the Wi-Fi and it will automatically connect. Exactly. Even back to my mom's house in New York. Yeah, it remembers. Now you can go into the settings and clear that information out if you want to, but not necessary. So setup actually takes, other than installing the app on your phone, the setup of the device takes all of about five minutes. That's really not that bad. Once it's connected to the Wi-Fi, it then starts listening. And if somebody wants to ask me about how creepy something listening to you is, we can get into that towards the end of the show. Let's just assume this is how it works. So it does listen for that particular keyword. In this case, you have two choices, but I've left it the default, which is Alexa. And when I say that, Alexa, you'll see that ring kind of lights up and it now says it is listening to you. And at the moment, it's going to cancel out. Pause. And after I gave that keyword, it was listening to me. And because I said cancel, it did actually cancel, but eventually it'll start going, things like, I don't know what you're talking about because I haven't really given it a command or asked it a question. So there are a whole bunch of commands built in. And I just want to talk about some of those that are kind of useful. And then we'll talk about questions and things like that. Basic commands, time and weather. So you can say, Alexa, what time is it? Alexa, what time is it? It's 10, 15. Okay, great. Alexa, what's the weather? In Lincoln, it's 41 degrees with cloudy skies. Today, you can look for showers with a high of 48 and a low of 23. Yeah, I know. Wait, two weeks ago we were having great weather. I know. Yeah, okay. Now you can also ask it things like, Alexa, what time is it in San Francisco? The time in San Francisco. California is 816 a.m. Alexa, what's the weather in Detroit? Right now in Detroit, Michigan, it's 38 degrees with rain. Today's forecast has clouds and showers with a high of 54 and a low of 39. Now, I kind of give you some examples there with locations. It does know where I am in the case of when I asked about the weather, it knew I was in Lincoln. But unlike some of the other services like Siri and Google Now, it doesn't really work well with getting you like local information. Like I can ask my phone, you know, where's the Starbucks? And it knows I'm in Lincoln and it will find me local Starbucks. Alexa, I just woken up. Cancel. See, this is the fun part. I wasn't able to understand the question I heard. My rough voice is not helping here today. Let me show you what I mean by this. Alexa, where is Starbucks? I can't find the answer to the question I heard. See, it doesn't really do geolocation sort of information. I can say something like Alexa, how far is it from Lincoln, Nebraska to Omaha, Nebraska? Lincoln is 47 miles 75.6 kilometers from Omaha, Nebraska. What I can't ask it is directions. And if you kind of think about it, this is not something you would bring in your car anyway. Yeah. So you wouldn't necessarily want to get directions out of it. Now, could you say to it, where is a Starbucks in Lincoln or no? Alexa, where is a Starbucks in Lincoln, Nebraska? Sorry. I can't find the answer to the question I heard. Yeah. See, it doesn't really do that now. Like now, if I said Alexa, how far is it from Lincoln to Omaha? Alexa, how far is it from Lincoln to Omaha? Lincoln limited is 4,280 miles 6,890 kilometers from Omaha, Nebraska. What is Lincoln limited? Right. Okay. I don't know what Lincoln limited is, but I didn't specify. So that's where when I first asked, I said Lincoln, Nebraska, Omaha, Nebraska. It figured out Omaha, but it didn't figure out the correct Lincoln. It didn't associate the fact that I am in Lincoln, Nebraska. Now, you could also ask it fact-based questions. The distance was what I asked. Alexa, how tall is the Empire State Building? The Empire State Building's height is 1,250 feet, 381 meters. Alexa, what is the capital of Alaska? Alaska's capital city is Juneau, Alaska. It is really good at fact-based questions. So if it's kind of an open-ended question, not going to work so much, but it is going to work well with fact-based questions. Two of the other features that are available in it are lists. There's a to-do list and there's a shopping list. And I'll be honest, this is how I sold my wife with the shopping list. Because we have that age-old difficulty of making sure something gets on the list that we need to buy and you have multiple people in the house. So I can do things like, excuse me, Alexa, add carrots to the shopping list. I've put carrots on your shopping list. Alexa, add soap. I've added soap to your shopping list. Now, in a few minutes, I'll bring up the website and you'll be able to see where that list is actually going. But one thing you can't do is you can't remove things from the list. Alexa, remove show, cancel. Cancel. Alexa, remove carrots from the shopping list. To clear your list or remove an item, visit the Echo app. So you have the ability to add things to the list, but you don't have the ability to remove things from the list to be a voice command. Yes. I'm kind of assuming that they'll get that eventually. There's also the to-do list. Alexa, add hang pictures to my to-do list. I added hang pictures to your to-do list. So you do have a to-do list and you can have it now, read back those lists to you. Alexa, what's on my shopping list? You have two items on your shopping list. So, carrots. Alexa, what's on my to-do list? You have three to-dos. Hang pictures. There's no dates on the to-do list. Test to-do list. Now that middle one you heard it says there's no dates on the to-do list. The one thing I'm not impressed with the to-do list is there's no sort of way to assign when you need to do something. So it is a very great things on a list. And then through the app or through the website you can check things off the list. There's no way to say remind me to do something at a certain time. There's no way to remove things off the list via voice. Speaking of my voice. Wow. So I'm a very to-do and oriented list person, to-do list oriented person, but I put things have to be done on a certain date, things have when things need to be completed, and I don't necessarily have the ability to do that through this list. But if you just want a simple list of things that need to be done around the house, this could be a way to do that. Excuse me. Sorry, a little short of breath there for a second. The other thing that it will do that I've been very impressed with is music and radio and podcasts. And this is where it does benefit you significantly to have an Amazon Prime membership because there's the Prime Music service built into it. So let me talk about music, then I'll talk about radio, then I'll talk about podcasts. The way the music works, as far as I can tell, and the reason I say that is this is through a lot of experimentation, there's very little instructions available online. There's like a two page FAQ and that's about it. There is the Prime Music service, which is all of the music you have access to if you are a Prime member. And then you also have the ability to upload your own music into your Amazon account. Also that covers music that you may have bought from Amazon that gets you the MP3 version also, kind of puts it into your music library. So there's kind of a hierarchy of how it finds music. It will first look for music in your account and if it has any, it will play it. If there's not music that matches in your account, it will then go to the Prime Music service. If the music you're looking for is not then in either of those, it will play you a sample if it's something they sell. Ah, trying to silly a stuff. Okay. And I'll tell you one thing. One of the things I did in the settings was I turned off the ability to purchase stuff using this device. Oh, that's a good idea. You do have the ability to order content through this device. And I went, you know what, I'm just going to turn that off. I don't want to go there. I can see that being a little too risky. Yeah. Too easy. And it depends on who's in your house too. So that gets a lot more interesting. So if I was to say Alexa, excuse me, try that again. Alexa, play Miles Davis. Alexa, play Miles Davis. Shuffling music by Miles Davis from Michael's Music Library. Alexa, stop. Okay. Now I don't want to play too much music because I don't want like, you know, YouTube get this for copyright issues eventually. Anyways, we talk about volume real quick. You can say Alexa louder or softer. And I just woke it up again. The top dial here does actually turn. And it gets brighter or softer depending on how loud you are. You can also tell it volume controls on a scale of 1 to 10. Okay. So we're going to kind of not play with that too much for the live show here. So you can hear there that it went to my music library. Okay. Now if I said something like Alexa, play Blues Traveler. Shuffling Blues Traveler from Prime Music. Alexa, stop. So in that case, you heard it was coming from Prime Music. It does tell you where it's getting. Yes. It does tell you where it's getting it from. Okay. Now we had a lot of fun a couple of weekends ago. A younger daughter's boyfriend has a five year old and she was over at the house and this was point entertaining. Okay. So, you know, what kind of music does she want to listen to? Well, she wants to listen to Disney music. Okay. So let me give you one example we found out this way. Alexa, play Beauty and the Beast. Here's a sample of Beauty and the Beast by Angela Lansbury. Alexa, stop. Now, obviously, you kind of swinged at her pronunciation of Lansbury. Yeah. But in this case, it's said, you know, In this case, it said playing a sample. So my guess is, is that Disney music is not in the Prime Music Service. Right. But you can buy Disney music. So it plays about a 90 second sample before it cancels out. Some of those, you can, when you just go on to Amazon, you can see those samples went from the albums and songs. Exactly. So I've been using this a lot actually. I mean, first of all, I'm kind of picky about my sound quality. I've got, you know, the surround sound hooked up in my living room and whatever. And this is a mono device. There's only one speaker in here. But the sound quality is really good. It does come through nice and crystal clear. I've been very impressed with it. I did go in to look into uploading more music into my Amazon account like you can do with Google. And excuse me. It turned out it told me something like I could upload 250 songs for free. And if I wanted to upload up to another 25,000, it was going to cost me $25 a year, which I decided I didn't want to pay. So if you want to upload music into the system, it is going to cost you money. But if you've bought a lot of music through Amazon that gets you the digital versions, a lot of your music might already be in here. And then if you want to take advantage of the Prime Service, there is tons of music in this system. So it does play that music pretty well. Excuse me. Wow. Radio. It does use a service called tune-in. And so if a radio station is available through the tune-in service, which is a service I was not familiar with, but I have since kind of gotten to know it a little bit better, it will pull up the live radio station from that service. So, for example, Alexa, play NPR. Omaha, public radio on tuning. More and more. Making it easier and easier just to swipe your phone or your... Alexa, stop. So in that case, I didn't necessarily specify a particular station, but it did pull up the Omaha NPR station. Right, it found Ann NPR station. Alexa, tune-in to KBCO. I couldn't find a station KBCO on tuning, searching iHeartRadio. 97.3 KBCOs from iHeartRadio. A rush of blood to the head. They viewed at number one in the UK in 2002. Alexa, stop. So in this case, not only does it have tune-in, but it also has the iHeartRadio network. So in this case, because that station was available on that network, it was able to pull that in. The CAG hit the new classic rock station and Lincoln is also on that network. I heard Radio. Yeah, I think so. So, a lot of radio stations available. And I'll show you on the website in a few minutes how to find all of this stuff also. And then also through tune-in, there are podcasts. So I can say, Alexa, play this week in tech. Alexa, play this week in tech. Getting the latest episode of this week in tech. Here it is from tune-in. It's time for twit. This week in tech, Harry McCracken. Alexa, stop. So as long as a podcast is available in there, you can also pull it up. Now, this is where I ran into something very interesting. The words we use to get things. I went in and got the Encompass podcast in the tune-in. So that we could play the Encompass podcast through the device for the show. The problem is it has a complete inability whatsoever to search or recognize the word Encompass. Really? Yeah. But we can still make it work. I can still prove it. It'll happen. And I'll use that to show. No, it is not a real word. I know it's there. Let me show you what happens. Alexa, tune in to Encompass. See, it didn't even... Alexa, play the Encompass podcast. You'd like to play the program called the Encompass, right? Yes. 95 BFM breakfast with Zach. Getting the latest episode. Here it is from tune-in. That's not us. Alexa, stop. So, yeah, it just... Trust me, I've tried everything. Short of changing the name of it, which I think we can do in that service. I just ran out of time figuring out how to do that before the show. So, there is that there. So, actually, are there any questions come through from the audience at this point? Give my voice a rest for a couple of seconds. Just a couple of comments, I guess. Someone says they think prime accounts went up to $99 now. Okay, that's possible. It's been a while since I've paid. Yeah, I know there was a change there. Okay. And it would be a little freaky if your pet was also named Alexa. If I yelled at my cat, Alexa and Echo answered, I'd faint. Sorry about my mind loss. Yeah, or if you named your cat, Echo viewed. I decided to use that. Are those only two choices? At the moment, those are the only two choices. You can't name it something you want. No. Now, I've read that eventually you will. There's a developer program that they've started. They're going to open up, actually. Just a funny note, Mary and I have been watching the new season. Just rename your cat. Rename your cat. Okay, that might be easier at this point. Mary and I have been watching House of Cards Season 3 lately. And the Russian president is Alexi. Oh, gosh. And I heard online that somebody, for some people that was waking it up, and it happened to us the other night. The show, the way she just pronounced it just right, actually woke up our device from the television. It's close enough, yeah. So one of the things I want to mention here, and this is a good thing about it. Another comment about the tuning, she says, also it's great for local stations and even BBC stations. Okay, yeah, BBC. So that would be something. And when we cover news, I'll talk about that in a few minutes. You can train it, but you don't need to. Notice you just said it a second ago and it just woke up. Whereas things like Google Now on your phone, they want you to train it so like everybody who walks by isn't waking up your phone. This is really designed to not need training. Now we can tell a couple of times it's choking on my voice a little bit. And it did do pretty darn well with a five-year-old girl too. Her problem was that she would start to ask a question and then try to rethink what she was going to ask and pause and it would think she was done. Yeah, I did notice when you've got to really watch the light because you have to say, Alexa, and then you have to make sure that it's actually on when you say the next thing. Cancel. And if it doesn't, if you don't say it right at the right time, it just shuts down or doesn't recognize it or gets confused. You have to repeat something at the right time. They take a little practice and they want to design it. You shouldn't have to look at it and look for that way. So I can say something like, Alexa, what's up? Alexa, what's up? Here's Michael's flash briefing in PR news for tuning. PR news in Washington, I'm Corba Coleman, the leaders of France, Germany, and Spain. Alexa, stop. So let's just talk what I did there with the what's up. One of the settings you can set up is kind of news headlines. And I will show that setting. We're getting close. I'm going to bring up the website here in just a minute. And so I can turn on or off what I want to be in my news briefing. So for example, I turned off sports. I did turn on NPR. I turned off BBC. And so the way I've got my setup is it will give me the top of the hour, five minute NPR news briefing. It will then start to read me headlines from the other categories that I've turned on. So if we had played NPR for five whole minutes there, you would then start to hear how it is when it's just reading headlines. So you could turn on sports. You can turn on BBC and turn off NPR. You can get the different things in the news. Another little thing you can do is traffic. And so let's see. I just learned this one the other day here. So I need to remember what the command is. Alexa, how's traffic? The fastest route takes about nine minutes by West of Street and Rosa Parksway. Okay. Now obviously that didn't say much. Well, it didn't say much because I've told it where home is and I told it where work is. And that's three and a half miles away. And that's what I'll tell you traffic for. Yes. Yes. It will only tell you traffic for the route between your home and your office. Or whatever you told it to. Yeah. Okay. So you could if, you know, home can be whatever address you want it to be. Work can be whatever address you want it to be. I noticed that it also had West of Street, which for anyone who's, many people are not from Lincoln Streets and Lincoln and certain in our A Street, B Street, C Street. So what it was trying to say was West A Street. Exactly. So again, Google kind of does the same thing. I think Google's gotten better. But Google used to think I lived off of West A Street. So, you know, it kind of works like that. Let me mention one other thing about music that I see on my list here that I forgot to mention. Alexa, play Blues Traveler. Shuffling Blues Traveler from Power Music. Alexa, what song is this? This is Mountain's Win Again from Live at Lowell to Loser 2006. Blues Traveler by Blues Traveler from Power Music. Alexa, stop. Now, I know Emily's in our audience here at staff. And she said she's getting one of these. And I've talked about Max, her two-year-old, and I want to really see how he works with this thing as he becomes more and more verbal. But she was mentioning that what he's been doing a lot lately when they play music online is asking what song is this. Well, now you can ask it, what song is this? I immediately went home and tested that and it worked. And I thought that is either going to be the greatest thing or the craziest thing in the house to drive you absolutely nuts. So just start a song and ask, start a song and ask, start a song and ask me. That will be a two-year-old's fun. You can also do what I haven't done. You can do next track, previous track. You can tell it to pause. There are kind of your various voice commands that you have going along with that. One other thing I'll mention here is I'll hold this up here. It does come with a remote, runs off of two AAA batteries. It has kind of your play, pause, next, previous, volume up and volume down. So if you're a little too far away or you don't want to say something out loud, you can do that. It does also have a microphone button. So if you're at the, for example, yeah, on the remote, which can work it so that if you're, say, too far away from the device that you don't want to yell. So you keep this in your office downstairs or something like that. You want to use it to just play music loud throughout your house or just add something to the list. You don't have to go upstairs to where the device is. Tell it and then go back downstairs. You can talk into the remote and tell it what to do on that. You kind of just trust that it worked. Because there's no speaker in this thing. So you don't know that it worked. Demoing the remote while I'm sitting in front of it is kind of silly. But it does work. I did try it the other day. To be honest, we haven't actually used the remote. We kind of keep it in our living room. But if we're somewhere else, it's not, you know, we don't really have the need for that. Okay, so let me show you the backend website for this. So the website you've got here is the Amazon Echo site. If you go to amazon.com. The other site I'm going to show you is if you go to echo.amazon.com. And at that point, you have to log into your account. So if you don't have an echo, you're going to get a login screen. You're not going to go any further. And this will kind of hide our video here for a little bit. So I've logged in. And one of the things that may surprise you, here I am on that home list, is it is keeping track of everything I've done with the device. So here is, I just played Blues Traveler. And if I scroll down here is my traffic. And there's my NPR hourly news. And there's our breakfast with Zach. And there's this week in tech. And there's KBCO. And there's Omaha Public Radio. Here's sample of beauty and the beast. It is live keeping track of everything that you've done. So if I was to say, Alexa, how deep is the Grand Canyon? Sorry, I don't have the answer to that question. OK, I didn't try that one before. But you can see. Don't tell the, what did you ask them? It knows the Empire State Building but not how deep is the Grand Canyon. But as you can see right here on the website, and I also want to keep reminding you that this is also on the app on your phone. You have kind of a live record of what it has done. Excuse me. Go ahead. I do see you can tell it if it did it correctly. Yes. Is that a way of helping to telling developers to fix the problems? Right. Or is this just your own? So the voice feedback here is did it hear you correctly? Not did it answer your question correctly? OK. Yeah. So it says in her, how deep is the Grand Canyon? Which is exactly what I told it. It just failed to answer the question. That's right. Two different things. Did it hear you and could it answer? Right, exactly. So I can do this, did echo hear you correctly? And I can say yes. OK. And I can send more feedback if I want to. That would be where I would say but it didn't know. But it didn't know. Right, exactly. It seemed to be an issue because it would really be nice if it didn't know that. Now what it did do here though is it does say, OK, learn more on Wikipedia or search Bing. Remember, not Google, it is Bing. Yes, Bing is behind this. So I can click and send it and then here's my answer. So that's not, you know, that's the greatest solution. But it does give me the ability to potentially still find the answer to my question. I'd be curious if, well, I guess I am curious then. Where is the echo getting the answers to these questions? Like where did it go to look to find out how tall the Empire State Building is and to find the answer to give to you? And where did it try to look for this and it couldn't find it? But obviously when one click you can. Right. So I am 100% clear on that. So let's try that. Alexa, how tall is the Eiffel Tower? The Eiffel Tower's height is 1063 feet, 324 meters. Now, again, it links us to Wikipedia. It links us to Bing search. The picture is from Wikipedia. I've got to be completely honest. I don't have an answer to your question. I haven't figured that out yet. I don't know if it has its own core database. I got to admit. It's just searching the internet and finding an answer. It is happening pretty darn quickly. It is. Yes. So my impression is that it's something in Amazon somewhere. It's not performing a search, parsing the results, and then figuring out those results and sending them back to you. But again, I don't have an exact answer to that question. This thing, it's kind of a black box, although it's more of a black code cylinder at this point. But yeah, they haven't really explained that at least enough that I've been able to find. So it is keeping track of everything you've done, and you can go back through and find out. You can remove the card. So if I wanted to forget that I asked about how deep the Eiffel Tower is, I could click Remove Card. From here, I can continue to control what it is playing. So down here at the bottom of the screen, it says it was playing mountains when again. I can do next track, previous track, play, shuffle. I can control the volume. So if you're too far away from it, you don't have the remote, I can pull this up on my app or on my desktop, and I can just, I'm going to go ahead and click Play on the screen. Pause on the screen, and that controls what's playing on the device itself. Some did have a comment from our commission staff here, which I was thinking of that as well. There's not, well, perhaps there's not one specific answer to the depth of the Grand Canyon. What you maybe want to ask is, what is the deepest part of the Grand Canyon? Because it's going, there's not going to be one answer. So it may be what, maybe this, do we just want particular issue? No, no, no. That may be the, yeah. Alexa, what is the deepest point in the Grand Canyon? Hmm. I can't find the answer to the question I heard. Yeah. So, I mean, and now try doing this with a five-year-old. Yeah. This, this was entertaining. I gotta say, you gotta figure out how to phrase a question. Right, yeah. So in the interest of time, we won't keep trying that, but you kind of get the point. Okay, the to-do list, here's my to-do list, and there are the three things on my to-do list. I can add things to the to-do list right from the app or the website, same with the shopping list. Like I said, we really use the shopping list now. We just did our groceries the other day. So, you know, it's pretty clean. It just has what I added here. You can set a timer and an alarm on this thing. So if I set Alexa, Alexa, set a timer for 30 seconds. 30 seconds, starting now. So timers are, and as I pull it up here on the screen, here's my countdown. So we'll be able to see when it's gonna show up. You can set an alarm. You can talk to set an alarm for 6.30 in the morning and use it as your alarm clock if you want to do that. I have not actually done it. We keep it in the living room, not in our bedroom. So we'll just see here in about eight seconds what the alarm is like so you can experience that. It's kind of subtle. Alexa, stop. And I didn't turn it up there for that second time. So it's, you know, it's not a blaring alarm. No, look at this. It is more of a chime, so to speak. So we have also here, here's the now playing so you can get more information about the music that is in this case currently playing, although we have it on pause. Amazon Music. So here is where I can search my library of music that is in there. Now what we've also done in the setup is if you have more than one person with an Amazon account, you can create what are called like family connections. So we've linked Mary's account and my account both being able to use this service. Just kind of the other reason why I turned off the being able to buy things because I wasn't quite sure whose account it would charge. So we kind of left it at that. You can search the iHeart radio and the tune in. So actually if I go into tune in Type-N Compass, you will see that it is actually there. We are there. We are there and it will play. I just cannot voice control it at the moment. I'm working on it. But I was hoping to surprise you with that. I couldn't quite work that out. Settings. So this is where you can kind of control certain levels of access. So for example, whether or not you can buy something. It's one of the options here. Music services, if it has access to, like I said, Amazon iHeart radio and tune in, you can create accounts in these services and do things like bookmarking favorite stations, things like that. I have not played with that all too much with that. Voice purchasing, like I said, I turned that off. I just did not want to go there. Flash briefing, here is where you can turn on and off various items. So if I go ahead and turn off NPR news, and so now what I have here is just the headlines. Okay, I'll let you hear what that sounds like. Alexa, what's up? Here's Michael's flash briefing. In top news, Washington on Wednesday trying to repair relations with the U.S. Afghan president Ashraf Ghan told Congress that his country osa quote profound debt to the more than 2,000... Alexa, stop. So in that case, because I had NPR turn on earlier, I played the NPR first and then it goes in. I'm not 100% sure on where it's pulling those headlines from. So before anybody asks, I don't know. But they're headlines. It's really just designed to be kind of a, heads up here is what's going on, morning news briefing, that sort of thing. Traffic, I'm not going to go in there just because I don't want to bring up my home address on the recording, but that's where you can set those two addresses for traffic. When I first got this, traffic was not there. They're kind of adding features. You don't update this. If it gets an update from Amazon, it updates itself. So that was a feature that was added recently. And then you can see here where we have the, you can add people to your household account. I have got an email from Amazon asking me if I wanted to join a beta developer program. So people have asked me, well, can you install apps? Can you add features? No, but I think that's coming. It's brand new. It's super new. Exactly. I did not join mainly because they wanted you to check, like, off of a list of what programming languages you know. And I don't know any of them. I mean, I could dabble, but I didn't feel to. So I didn't know they're looking for developers. Yes. People who wanted to do something. Exactly. Maybe that's a whole different program eventually. Yeah. So I'm guessing there's going to be a developer platform. So, you know, I've just gone through all the settings. There's not a lot here, but I'm thinking eventually there will be. And just to kind of wrap up, I just want to play with a couple of other things that have been fun about once a week. I get an email from them that has said, hey, you know, you should try this. So let me just have a little fun here with a couple of things. Alexa, roll a die. I rolled a die and got six. And it's only a six-sided die. Yeah. Can't do it. Alexa, roll a d20. Sorry. I can't. It's just rolling out. Alexa, play rock, paper, scissors. Okay. Let's play three, two, one, scissors. Oh, it was a tie. Okay. So you can have it play rock, paper, scissors with you. And I've turned our camera back on so I can see that. Alexa, I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. So I can tell jokes sort of. Alexa, tell me a joke. Why don't people eat clocks? It's too time consuming. Then tell good jokes. Alexa, I am your father. No, no, no, no. Star Wars. Yeah. She doesn't know how to scream. So, Alexa, what is a Lorax? I'll tell you, but first I'll need 15 cents and a nail in the shell of a great-great-great-grandfather snail. So, you know, there are things that are kind of built in. The movie lines were added around the Oscars. The Dr. Seuss stuff was added around his birthday a couple of weeks ago. So they're, you know, yeah, they're canned, but they're kind of fun to play with. Yeah, they play with all these things. Yeah. So, Alexa, live long and prosper. Change is the essential process of all existence. So, you know, with Lonerney-Moise passing. So, that's kind of the core of how this thing works. It just kind of sits there. You use it. One of the reasons I wanted to show this is, one, not a lot of people have this. Two, voice command and control of computers is getting better every day. I mean, 10, 15 years ago, trying to use, you know, drag it naturally speaking to actually control your computer was doable, but kind of a long-term painful process of training and trying to figure out how to get it to work. And you had a nice powerful computer behind it. This is just a device that just kind of sits there and does some of the similar things as Siri and Google Voice and Cortana, but kind of in a self-contained device. So, oh, I want to get kind of some of the other little stories there. One of the ones I want to mention is when we first got it mid-February, and I started asking to play different artists, I think Tony Bennett was one of them, Michael Buble was another. And the first track that came up was Christmas music. That was a little frustrating. It was not what I was expecting. So I would just say next track and it would give us something else. The other one was I had it play Genesis, which 80s band Phil Collins played the first song great. The second song that came up was Very Religious in Nature. It was not the same Genesis. So I was a little unclear as to how it's picking that sort of thing. It will do some playlists. Alexa, play 80s music. 80s playlist from Prime, 50 great 80s rock songs. Alexa, stop. So, you know, you just kind of play with an experiment and I think the kind of lack of instructions was intentional. On the screen here, there is this things to try and it will kind of walk you through a lot of the things that I've talked about. And like I said, I get this email every week or so saying, hey, you can try these new things. Hey, we added traffic. But there's no like distinct document that says here is everything that this device will do. Well, they're constantly updated, but they can do that online. I mean, when you know, when traffic was added, I didn't know that it did something. The only way I knew was they sent an email. So it's kind of they are kind of in control of this device. The one other thing I've noticed with this is I think and we were gone for a couple of days. And when we came back and had kind of put itself into I'm not listening anymore sleep mode. And I had to hit the power button to kind of wake it back up again. I don't know what timeframe that usually needs. If somebody's wondering about the fact that it's always listening, I did pull up the terms of service and kind of the FAQ about how it works. Yes, it is constantly listening. But it only sends data or keeps track of data after it hears that wake up word. So at the moment, technically, yes, it is listening to me. But according to their terms of service, it is not collecting or sending anything that I am currently speaking until I say that wake up word, then it starts paying attention. And it's that visual signal. Yes, but it's yes. So if I say, Alexa, are you recording me? I'm not sure what you meant by that question doesn't have an answer that question. But the fact that the ring lit up means it is now paying attention and recording what you're saying and transmitting that data off to the Amazon servers. And that's also that you can see on the web page you're showing in the account. The history of what it, yeah, that's what it exactly what it's done. Right. It echo heard, are you recording me that that's all it said off. Now, I'm taking their word for it. If you want to be paranoid, go right ahead. You know, Amazon probably already knows more about me based on what I bought from them than anything else. Anyways, so there's that. So that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk about. And I get people to. Yeah. Would somebody like where I get my voice is just going. It would anybody like to try asking it a question, see if our speakers are loud enough for it to pick up. I guess that that would that would be my, my interesting thing. We can we can crank up our volume a little bit and see if that works. If you do have a microphone, raise your hand or somebody on staff there wants to try. We can do that. For those of you who are on staff, I am going to leave this in my office at least the rest of today. So if you want to swing by and try it out, be happy to let you do that. I may not be here. See how I feel when this is all over, but it'll stay here at least through today. So nobody volunteers hearing. Okay. Any other questions or comments from the audience? I don't know. Not right now. Anybody have anything else you want to know? And if you want to hear it, see it or hear it do. Yeah. Oh, one other funny story with the five year old is her two stories actually. Oh, she did. She did figure out, you can ask her how to spell things. Okay. So I was actually joking that I want to program it to say, go look it up in the dictionary. But she kept saying, how do you spell Brad, B-R-A-D, which is her dad's name. And it come coming back with R-A-T. It was just how she was saying Brad. It was hearing rats, which we thought was just hilarious. The other one was is he, he got it to play Divo. And after about five seconds, she figured out she could say, Alexa, stop. She just didn't like that music at all. We did have, NLC staff says, can we ask you a question? Yeah. Sure. Okay. I'm meeting you guys. You should be able to try something. Okay. Alexa, how deep is your love? Okay. Try to get, you paused a little too long. Okay. Alexa, how deep is your love? I wasn't able to understand the question I heard. Yeah. It might be the volume coming through the speakers. It's a little weird. Let me, let me try it on this end. Alexa, how deep is your love? Alexa, how deep is your love? We're living in a world of fools. Okay. And if we look up here, I think what it just was, is it heard? How do you, do you know? So in this case, I think it was the fact that you're coming through the speakers. It was just getting a little distorted. It wasn't quite picking it up, but it did, it did hear Alexa. Yes. It woke up when you said that. Cancel. So it did get that far. We have a question. Yes. Does it speak foreign languages? English. To my knowledge, no. However, I can say I don't. So I haven't tried. Like there's no way to adjust its language. No, there is no language setting. Exactly. So let's, let's say Alexa. Okay. Pasa. Yeah. No. I think we did try a couple of, oh, it defines words also. And I think I remember on that the weekend we did try to get it to define some foreign words and it didn't work. So I'm pretty sure it is English only at this point. Any other questions? It's fun. I got to say it's, it's, it just kind of sits there. My wife is very polite to it. Barry will say please and thank you. She's Southern. So I think that it doesn't care. Yeah, it doesn't care. You do kind of have to learn how to ask you questions. But yeah, it's, you know, whether it's worth $99 to you that that's, that's up to you, but I'm getting my money's worth out of it. So now this is a library show related to libraries. Well, yeah, I, I, I, like I said, I, I think it's just kind of the, the introduction to kind of the next stage of voice control technologies. Windows 10 is going to have something like this built into it. Cortana is coming. So people already do have, I mean, like we were talking about Siri and things in the phones and Google now and whatnot. It's all there on people's phones. Can you ask it stuff about like libraries? Like, where is the, or the hours of the library? Well, at the moment, no. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's kind of that where is something. How do I guess, because it's fun. I've watched Mary ask it some questions because she knows how the, it works on the phone and with Google, Google is very low. And I'll only speak to Google. I won't speak to Siri because I just have no experience with Sarah who goes very location aware because your phone has the GPS in it. Yeah. No GPS in this thing. And Google has the mapping service. So you can say like, where is the closest gas station? And it knows where you are. And it has the mapping service. You don't really have that with the echo. So I think I saw in our records, she said something like, you know, is Joanne's open right now? And you can ask that of Google because it can figure out where Joanne's is and where you are, and it can pull up its hours. This is more kind of fact based. Like an encyclopedia. Yeah. Yeah. For the Q&A. So. But like I said, with the developer stuff that's going on, it may be some, like I said, apps. We've got people are creating mobile apps for the library on the phones and tablets and things. Maybe this will be something that libraries will have to think about programming apps that have recognition. Yeah. I mean, you know, if I had the ability to ask the echo. I don't want to say the other word. If I had the ability to ask the echo if Lincoln City libraries had a book, that would be pretty cool. Yes, it would. So now it's a library application, but not in the library. So in the place of hold. I mean, you know, how far could you go with that? I think that would be pretty cool. This is the beginnings maybe of this kind of things you see in Star Trek. Yeah. Computer and it knows everything and totally understands every question anybody ever asked. It never doesn't understand. But no, we're not there yet. Yeah, we're not there yet, but we're getting there compared to what it used to be. Well, no other urgent questions have come in. Yeah, I think I think my voice is at it. Okay. And he did say you told me earlier no news of the. No, no. Yeah, I have been under the weather or so. I don't have any additional news to share this. All right. Well, thank you very much Michael for our tech talk, which was a lot of talk. Yeah. Yeah. I'm talking to Alexa. And thank you very much everyone for attending that. We'll wrap it up for this week's show. It has been recorded and will be available later today, most likely for you to watch and share with your colleagues. And so I hope you translate next week when our topic is it is April 1st next Wednesday. Lucky for us. And our topic is how to kill your book club or never be asked back again. This was an idea from Lisa Kelly. We're going to be talking about our, the reference here at the library commission. We do book club talks and things here in my book club kits. And she wanted to do something April 1st, April Fool's Day theme. So we're going to be having her on with us. Vicki Wood, who's from Lincoln City Libraries, and Siri Daniels from our librarian in the area, talking about how to have a horrible book club. Now we've done shows about how to do good book clubs, how to do the right questions, the kind of books and things to do for both adults and kids. So hopefully join us next week for some more fun show or for any of our future more series shows. Also, Encompass Live is on Facebook. So if you are a Facebook user, please do go ahead and like us there. I post notices of when the show is starting. Here's a little reminder from today's show. People are logging on the fly. And when our recordings are ready and available, I post them on here as well. So you'll have a notification of that. So if you're big on Facebook, do go ahead and like us there. All right. Other than that, that will wrap it up for today. Thank you very much for attending. And just some comments, very cool stuff. Thanks for the demo and the info. Good. All right. That will wrap up today. Thank you very much. And we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.