My brother-in-law gifted my husband and I and Echo Dot for Christmas last year. ALEXA is the bomb. Well, most of the time. When I open my ALEXA app on my phone, two things prevail.
- Weather in Redondo Beach
- Lullabies from the Movies
These two things are constants because ALEXA lives in our children’s room and those are the two things that we ask her do to on a daily basis. But ALEXA does so much more. Shopping, Radio Stations, NPR, Sports stats, Wake-up/Bed-time alarms… But what I personally think ALEXA is great for, is an extra voice to handle my child’s incessant questions. If you have young inquisitive children, you may relate, because my 4.5 year old is a talker. He talks all day, and talks all night, and the kid has a kajillion exhausting questions about the world around him. Our conversations are peppered with questions. About everything.
Enter ALEXA.
If I honestly don’t know the answer to something, “Go ask ALEXA.” If I’m too tired to give a crap, “Go ask ALEXA.” Just a word of warning though: ALEXA does not always have “good” answers for everything.
Example –
R – “ALEXA, what’s a paleontologist?”
A – “A paleontologist is a specialist in paleontology.”
Well no shit. I could have told him a better answer. How about, “a scientist who digs up and studies dinosaur bones.” I mean, come on.
So yes, sometimes she necessitates more talking that I have to do, but all in all, we love our little hockey puck gadget. We definitely have fun using it and get a good laugh once in a while.
R – “Mommy, why is the four legged land walker an AT-AT? Wh—-y? Are the land walkers with two legs an AT-AT?”
M – “A what-what? What are you talking about? What do I look like? An encyclopedia? Go ask ALEXA.” (Oh, no… I set myself up for this one…)
R – “What’s a psycho-pedia?” “ALEXA, what’s a psycho-pedia?”
A – “Sorry, I couldn’t find the answer to the question I heard.”
Right… so now my kid thinks I’m a psycho. Actually worse, a psycho-PEDIA.
M – “ALEXA, what is an en-cy-clo-pedia?”
A – “The word ‘encyclopedia’ means a reference work (often in several volumes) containing articles on various topics (often arranged in alphabetical order) dealing with the entire range of human knowledge or with some particular specialty.”
And then on and on with the million questions about what ALEXA just said…
BTW, not that you care, but a four legged Star Wars AT-AT stands for All Terrain Armored Transport and a two-legged land walker is called an AT-ST (All Terrain Scout transport) or an AT-DP (All Terrain Defense Pod) Thank you GOOGLE. And I guess there are many many others that it honestly makes my brain turn off.