I have five echo dots (two 3rd gen, three 2nd gen) scattered throughout the house. All had been working well for years until the last couple of months. Since then, mic directionality (is that even a word?) has gone to crap and the wrong device frequently acts on voice commands. For example: I'll be in the living room and say "Alexa; lights 15%" and 75% of the time the lights in adjacent echo dot room group come on/dim. And while I can say "Alexa; living rooms lights 15%" this kinda defeats the point of creating groups for the dots and devices.
Today, Alexa started confirming commands with "OK" even though brief mode is enabled (and has been for years).
Anyone else's Alexa devices acting nuttier than Jeff Bezos?
My 2 echo dots and 1 echo have been acting weird for about a week. Similiar symptoms, the main one is Ill ask for something, the light will acknowledge she is listening but either nothing happens or its delayed like 30 seconds -- and in that 30 seconds I ask again, and then you get into the confused Alexa state.
This is in general and not related to acting with HE. Simply just playing music
Besides the run of Amazon updates, outages and 'fixes' over the last, let's say, 6-8 weeks, a recent Echo Ball (gen 4) obtained at Christmas was installed. After 3 weeks - a call was made to Amazon to replace the unit as directional mic was so bad it was unusable.
The replacement? Also not usable. I find it doubtful that 2 new Echo Balls are bad in the same manner, which leads me to think it's a recent 'update'. The older gen 2 and 3 models in our house are not as bad BUT as soon as I read your post, I realized I too haven't been as happy as I used to be, with Echo Show units (10", 8" and a 5") all picking up each others commands.
I can stand in the Kitchen, issue a voice command and the Living Room will bing. As bad, when my GF tells Alexa to turn off her office as she's leaving for work, MY office goes off!
So... me thinks you're onto something here and I'm in it... whatever that is.
At Christmas, I replaced a 1st gen Echo that was on the pass through window between our kitchen and family room with an Echo Show 5. The 1st gen Echo (you can see it here) was great - I could talk to it from either room and also hear the result. The Show not so much; it's great when I'm in the kitchen, but the directional speaker and mic really make using it from the family room subpar. I'm thinking of putting the old Echo back.
I'm having the same problems with my GH-devices since the Sonos-lawsuit... All 2nd Gen and some not even a few months old. Preparation for throwing out new devices with matter?
After asking Alexa something, she just asked me "Im trying to make sure Im answering from the right device, was this the device you wanted" (or something like this)
Yeah, this has happened to me a couple of time. Ironically though, on both occasions the correct device had answered. But the fact that it's asking makes me think that Amazon is aware of the problem.
Doubtful. I have several GH devices at my primary residence (the dots are in a vacation home) and the GH devices have never worked well. In some cases I'll be a couple of feet away from the GH in the kitchen and the one in the family room nearly 20 feet away answers. I hate the GH devices and would scrap them in a heartbeat if Amazon could get their $%&@ together and support multiple locations. Not holding my breath though.
