The Verge's Amazon Echo Review

David Pierce:

Maybe it's a good thing that Amazon is so slowly rolling out the Echo to customers — you can only get it by invitation, and if you do so you should know what you're getting into. Right now, once the honeymoon ends, I suspect most people will stop using the Echo for anything other than occasional music and podcast listening. After a few days of trying to come up with things to ask Alexa just for the fun of the thing, my Echo became mostly a slightly faster way to set a timer or do quick conversions while I cook. It’s great for those things, but those are small things.

Yet this is the future, I’m sure of it. Several times a day, the Echo blows me away with how well it converses, and how natural it feels to interact with a machine this way. I just hope Amazon can marshal the considerable time, support, and developer firepower to one day turn this odd black cylinder into the smartest thing in my apartment.

This is exactly what I expected from the Echo. It's a great idea, almost definitely the future, but an extremely primitive implementation of what that idea is and that future will be.