Echo Dot (3rd Gen, 2018 release) – Smart speaker with Alexa – Charcoal

I hate this little device from hell. I used to love it. I bought one for every room in my house, my office at work, and they were good. But now, despite Amazon’s alleged spying, some genius at Amazon decided to allow this thing to wake you up all hours of the night with a loud obnoxious noise and a bright yellow light. It will say you have a notification. Oh good, it must be a really good reason for Amazon to notify me of something mid sleep at 2 am on a Tuesday you ponder so you wake up the rest of the house by saying Alexa play notifications. Here’s the best part, this little Alien Intelligence Robot without feet from hell will say Please rate the pair of shorts your wife bought last week, we need your review. Well I sure do love reviews, but at 2 am after being woken up to leave one, sadly I don’t give a flying poopsicle about the shorts and a bug 1 star rating is all the revenge I can muster. This has been going on for weeks now. And it’s enough to drive you mad because, you will contemplate unplugging the dirty little money siphon and cutting your losses, but you’ll give the demon one more chance and she will allow you to sleep for a length of time in which you will forgive her treachery but then Boom, like a theif in the night a Hurricane will be boiling out in the Atlantic and this little weather girl from hell will want to notify you of the eminent doom 3 days ahead when the storm will be in your state. You will think how nice it is for all of the warnings you have heard thus far in social media,, television, and every news outlet in existence to be repeated to you as you climb into bed, but it gets even better. As soon as you listen to this golden nugget of doomsday propaganda and ponder how it is that you will sleep now because 3 days may not be enough time to dig a deep enough hole to hide from impending doom, she lights up again, oh my maybe flying dragons are headed this way, I better play the new notification, when your wife wakes up and says stop she has been doing that all evening, they literally keep changing the time of the storm by maybe an hour this way or that. Well by all means, the information could save one of our spoiled lives and we wouldn’t want anyone to not know at which precise moment the raindrops will occur, but I do miss life before the artificial noises and alerts, bright yellow lights and bad news desserts. You may say that this is a growing pain with Alexa and AI technology kinks in the programming. I say with the amount of money I have poured into this monopolistic conglomerate, I should at least expect a decent night’s sleep in return. You may say in page 74 paragraph D of the updated and revised owner’s pamphlet there is a way to turn this “Feature” off, I welcome that comment but feel the need to say that I am not looking to become even slightly better educated on the device, I simply bought it to use as a voice controlled radio, this extra bologna does not appeal to me and has made me regret this purchase and every other from the brown box hq who secretly reads my mind, except when it comes to allowing me sleep, although kudos for recommending the sleep sounds, but it rarely works. We just need to be mindful of the 6 hours that most people like to not be disturbed. I regret selling my Amazon stock at 2400 and I regret purchasing all of these Alexa devices, and don’t get me started on teenagers and Alexa devices, the combo that don’t mix. They always, always, always leave the device at top volume, so when you walk into the bathroom at dawn and whisper Alexa what time is it, you then need to set an appointment for a blown eardrum and apologize to everyone for waking them up while the teen sleeps soundly through it all. Congratulations Amazon, you have destroyed my sanity. Weird goal but excellent execution.