Originally recorded April 10, 2024.

A couple of years ago, I bought an Amazon Echo Connect. The product, which I originally thought was useless at first, ended up being extremely useful. I bought it on closeout; Amazon had discontinued the device, though the service to run it was available. This didn't seem completely unreasonable, less and less people have a home phone anymore and instead rely on a $1000 SINGLE phone on their person which can easily be damaged, which is about the dumbest idea I have ever heard. But I digress; fact of the matter is many do not have a home phone anymore. They would have no use for the item.

Because of the heavily discounted price, I decided to give it a shot. The setup process was completely beyond ridiculous and required that I actually download and install the Mozilla Firefox browser to set it up. Apparently some "hook" in the software was used that Firefox understood.

Once the setup was out of the way and the unit was operational, it afforded me the following things:
1. The ability to place a call through an Alexa device to any number in the US, utilizing my home phone service.
2. The abiliy to place a call to 911 for emergency purposes, a feature the device itself does not have.
3. The ability to receive a call through an Alexa device, acting as a speakerphone
4. All Alexa devices speaking the name and/or number of a calling party.

Feature 4, the talking caller ID, made it all worth it for me. I have 10 Alexa devices around, and whenever the phone rang, wherever I was in the house, I could hear who was calling. I know some modern telephones have talking caller ID, but the voice certainly is not as clear, nor would it be able to announce throughout the entire house.

And then, February 29, 2024, with minimal warning, they pulled the service out from under the device, leaving the device wothless and useless. There was absolutley no reason I could possibly think of that caused this. The software was stable and reliable, there was no upkeep, no maintenance, no nothing. It cost Amazon nothing to keep this service running. Yet they pulled it. I could understand pulling said service in order to then charge monthly for something similar, effectively "jumping on the bandwagon" of making things that you'd buy outright become subscription based. But no, the device is orphaned and useless.

Does anyone have any ideas as to why they may have done this? It so seems this had a much greater impact than I realized. A lot of seniors were using this device as a voiceactivated telephone. Some could no longer use their hands, but they certainly could operate a phone by voice. Others were hard of hearing, and this would allow them to hear who's calling. But they just yanked hte service out, giving virtually no warning, leaving all of these people scrambling for a new solution, and there really isn't any. It was a niche product that filled a niche market.

The wif and I really liked the talking caller ID, and we greatly miss it now. But since the device serves no purpose, it's time to remove it from service.

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