Gadgetory

- If you're watching this video, there's a pretty good chance that you have an Amazon Echo or a Google Home. And you know what, it's a pretty safe bet that you probably have a television, but here's a question, are those two things doing a good enough job of talking to each other? So I want to talk about one of the biggest trends in tech this summer and that's basically a bunch of companies are trying to figure out a way to get an intelligent assistant into your living room. In this video, because there's just a million things we could talk about, I want to focus specifically on uh... Lexa. In videos, we're just gonna call it Lexa so it won't turn on your Echo, you're welcome. Lexa, buy some toilet paper. Nothing? Good? Good, cool, we're moving on. The way that most people get Lexa into their living room is they buy an Echo or an Echo dot or, I don't know, this cute little thing, the Echo spot. I love it, it's cute. It's got a little screen and it's round and... Anyway. The problem with that is you end up with another gadget in your living room. Maybe that's not a big deal, but you've also got other gadgets in your living room. You've got a TV, you've got maybe a sound bar, you've got a console, a set-top box, and you want all that stuff to talk to each other. Frankly, it's complicated. Welcome to the world of HDMI-CEC and HDMI ARC and a million remote controls and (sighs), IR blasters. It's a lot for regular humans to figure out how to get all that AV equipment to talk to each other and throwing a digital assistant into the mix just multiplies that. So what I want to do is look at how a few different companies are trying to get Lexa into your living room. The linchpin for the whole experience is getting a Fire TV. Now if you just get a Fire TV 4K or just a regular old Fire TV, the problem there is you've got to hold down this little microphone button on the remote to talk to Lexa. Nobody wants that. You just wanna shout commands into the room and so then you have to get something on the side like an Echo Spot or an Echo Dot. Or, you can get this cute little dude. This is the Fire TV Cube and we reviewed it a little while ago and it's fine. It's got those annoying IR blasters and whatever. Now I know it doesn't work with YouTube because Amazon and Google are fighting and the world is terrible and maybe they'll solve it someday. I can't solve that problem. But here's the thing, your TV probably has crappy sound and you might not want it on when you're listening to music. And I think the best solution for that, honestly, is gonna be these sound bars because these processors, they're not gonna need to be that powerful to run these things. So I don't think they're gonna get obsolete in a while and it means you get to bark at the room and you get good sound and they do talk to your TV in a relatively smart way. The one everybody knows about is the Sonos Beam. We did a big feature on it. We reviewed it a little while ago. I think it's great but it is a little expensive. It's $399. There's another sound bar that's just coming out, it's called the Polk Command Bar and I actually want to spend a little bit more time talking about it because the Polk Command Bar really encapsulates all of the problems of trying to get a digital assistant in your living room. Alright, so this is the Polk Command Bar and its associated sub, whatever. It is $299 and if you look at it, it looks like there's an Echo Dot slap in the middle of it. It's not that, it's custom circuitry, but two years ago that's what they thought they wanted to do so they started that way, Amazon gave them special permission, whatever. The reason this thing is interesting is it has a different solution for getting Lexa working on your TV. It's actually in the middle of the HDMI chain instead of hanging off on the end of it. So to explain that, we've got to talk about inputs and outputs. Okay, so if you look at the inputs on this thing, it's pretty standard. Two HDMI in, one out, there's an optical in, normal stuff. But what's interesting is because the Alexa is on this sound bar, it is able to do the HDMI switching with your voice because it has direct control of it. You'll also see that this channel is really big and that's because they designed it specifically to fit a Fire TV stick. It has an always-on USB port and so everything can be hidden in there, except they designed this two years ago and now everybody wants the Amazon Fire TV 4K, which is really big and then when you plug it into this thing, it kind of hangs out in a really dopey way. So they didn't really think that through. Oh hey, one more thing. It's a sound bar, how does it sound? I don't know. Fine. It's really aggressive at making you hear the center channel and basically nothing else. The sound is not very rich or immersive, it's kind of flat. But you know, it's a hundred bucks cheaper than the Sonos, I guess. Okay, so that's how the Polk Command Bar does it, but after looking at all these different solutions, which one do I think is actually the best for getting Lexa in your living room? Well, honestly, remember that we're still very early in this process. What do I mean by us being relatively early? Well, here's just one example. Up until recently, if you ask Lexa to play you a show, it wouldn't play the show. You'd have to pick the remote and hit play to actually watch it. They just fixed that. I mean, all this stuff has basically come out in the last six months and they all have radically different solutions and who knows what it's gonna look like six months from now? Here's a story. Do you remember the Xbox Kinect? It did all of the stuff years ago. You could yell commands at your TV and ask it to do stuff and turn it on and turn it off and everything worked and it was great and you know what happened to it? It went away. And who knows? This other stuff might go away too. So if you really want a digital assistant in your living room, I don't think it's a good call to spend a ton of money on it right now because who knows if that solution, the thing they tried, is gonna work? Polk made a bunch of weird bets two years ago that I don't think played out very well today. So maybe the Beam is okay. The Beam is okay because you get to buy into Sonos. But for everything else, if you really want Lexa in your living room, you know what my advice is? Just get a Dot. Two million subscribers, we just hit two million subscribers and I'm blown away. Thank you, thank you for smashing that sub button, fam. And thank you to everybody at The Verge. We work super hard on these videos. It's not just me. There's people behind the camera. There's tons of other people making videos and they're hard. And the fact that you're watching them, it just makes us feel really good. I know you've seen a million of these corny thank you videos but we all mean it. I mean it. Thank you. (bouncy music)