I have had reservations about the Echo line because of the whole "always listening" thing, regardless of what anyone's said about how it's not recording, how I can unplug it, etc. The whole "always listening" thing isn't what interests me about playing with Alexa.
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time with hardware, I think this is what will make me tinker with the Alexa service - I am interested to see what it can do and I like keeping up with Amazon's hardware projects. I've got all the parts lying around to throw this together without spending anything, so it's a neat way for them to grab some interest from a different user demographic. This also should be fairly easy to get running on a BeagleBone too, which I tend to lean towards (more I/O, PRU can be useful)
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time with hardware, I think this is what will make me tinker with the Alexa service - I am interested to see what it can do and I like keeping up with Amazon's hardware projects. I've got all the parts lying around to throw this together without spending anything, so it's a neat way for them to grab some interest from a different user demographic. This also should be fairly easy to get running on a BeagleBone too, which I tend to lean towards (more I/O, PRU can be useful)