We’re spoiled with artificially intelligent companions today. It started with our phones, which were once used for talking to others but are more often spoken to nowadays to set times and send texts. Then computers and tablets joined the discussion. Today, Bluetooth speakers are our latest conversational partner, and TVs are catching up.
The latest version of the Amazon Fire TV is the first major streaming media player to harness an AI brain in the cloud to improve your experience in the living room. On top of faster processors and 4K output, Amazon packed its digital assistant, Alexa, into the streaming box. She now powers voice searches and lets you look up information like sports scores, weather, traffic and trivia.
But based on our testing of the device, Alexa still has a ways to go on the TV screen. Right now, she seems like a small layer built on top of the core streaming experience. She can’t do all that she can on the Amazon Echo, like set timers or play the latest news, and she sometimes gets in the way of searching by trying to be too smart.
For example, when trying to search for the TuneIn radio app, she jumps in to play the last thing you were listening to on TuneIn, but the app itself doesn’t launch. Instead, a card takes over the screen (as it does any time you activate Alexa) to show you what you’re listening to, and if you navigate away, the music or podcast stops playing.
To find the app, I had to type it in by scrolling around an onscreen keyboard with the direction pad — a slow and frustrating experience that should be solved with voice control.
She also isn’t quite as smart as some other virtual assistants. She didn’t understand my question about the last Blackhawks score, but the exact same question to Siri returned exactly what I was looking for. Also, searching for “Friends” didn’t return the NBC sitcom until the fourteenth result, well after My Best Friend’s Wedding and a collection of Barney episodes.
I assume that, just like Siri, Alexa will learn more commands over time, but right now she fails at some of the most simple questions.
That’s not to say Alexa is worthless. She’s great for checking the score of a game you’re not watching, finding out the weather and checking out some of the latest trivia. The ability to add to your shopping and to-do lists is nice as well, although I’d rather have the ability to play the news. Much of the benefit Alexa offers over Amazon’s previous voice search technology can also be accomplished with your phone, which you may be more comfortable talking to if you’re a frequent Siri, Cortana or Google Now user.
Another bummer about the Fire TV is that it doesn’t have the excellent 7-microphone array that the Echo offers. That means you’re stuck holding the remote up to your face every time you want to talk to Alexa. While that may cut down on the creep factor, it misses out on the convenience found on the Echo or even the Xbox One with a Kinect.
I consume the vast majority of my video content through the Xbox One, and am frequently talking to it to pause, change volume and find content. The benefit of not having to find the remote when you need to take a bathroom break or turn down the volume during a particularly loud gun fight in an action movie is huge, and Amazon could have brought that to the Fire TV with Alexa.
At just $99 for the Fire TV, I can understand why the company left out some of those features, but it would have been nice to see Amazon step up with a premium product that used their already developed microphone tech. Instead, you’re stuck wiping the popcorn grease from your fingers when you need to play the next episode. And you still need a second remote to change the volume.
While the Fire TV is a letdown when it comes to voice-controlled interaction, it is great in other areas. The WiFi remote doesn’t require a line of sight, so you can hide the Fire TV away on a crowded media center.
And the speeds are crazy fast, enabling smooth animations and fast loading times. Amazon’s new high efficiency video coding, which makes it smoother to stream 4K content, also makes 1080p content look great and load quickly, especially when combined with Amazon’s ASAP pre-fetching service that starts loading content it thinks you’ll play next.
With built-in streaming through Amazon Video and Prime Music, along with an Android core that runs a ton of great games, the latest Amazon Fire TV is a consummate streaming device. And with 4K streaming, it’s a future-proof device even if you don’t have a Ultra HD TV right now.
But if you’re looking for a device with a little more brains, you might be better off with an Echo instead right now. Or you could wait for reviews of the Apple TV, which may be a little smarter when it comes to finding streaming content.
Update: Apparently, the new remote uses WiFi to speed voice processing. Thanks for the correction Riley.
