Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is my first smart thermostat. I've been waiting for a long time for something truly compelling to hit the market. I like the aesthetic of the Nest, but it lacked features. I especially wanted something that could account for temperatures in the back room upstairs which tends to get hot in the summer and cold in the winter. I have SmartThings, but didn't want to rely on a cloud service for controlling my thermostat, too unreliable. I'm also a regular user of Echo/Alexa, so this seemed like the best option. As far as thermostats go, it is outstanding. It has all the capabilities you could possibly want. Like you would expect, you can program modes (home, away, sleep), schedules (what time to trigger modes), and remote access using the app. It also seamlessly integrates with my other automation systems like SmartThings and IFTT. You can also fine tune lots of little aspects, like the ability to run the fan for so many minutes every hour or how long to run the fan after the AC turns off to help circulate air. The remote sensor is also very useful. You can set the main temp on the thermostat to be the average of all the sensors combined. This allows the thermostat to base it's heating and cooling cycles on all the rooms. I plan on adding a Keen Smart Vent to one of the rooms that gets too hot, but now the thermostat will never over heat or under cool that room. It's not perfect though. These are the reasons I took away 1 star. Hoping they can fix some of these things in the future. - Presence sensors aren't very effective. You need to have one in every room to use this feature. It seems to lose track of you when you're sleeping. - Far field microphones aren't as good as the Echo's. It hears you no problem if it's quiet, but seems like you need to speak loudly if there is any noise in the room. Echo is much better at hearing you through ambient noise. I am sometimes standing right next to it and it misses the wake word. - It seems strange that when I finished the intial setup and tried to adjust the temp via Alexa, she had no idea what I was talking about. Out of the box, Alexa didn't know it was a thermostat. Beyond the initial guided setup process on the thermostat, there was additional setup needed in order for Alexa to be able to find the thermostat on the Alexa app. This setup wasn't referenced anywhere in the manual or the guided setup. Seems silly that a thermostat with voice control doesn't know it's a thermostat from the get go. - Alexa isn't fully functional. She is missing certain capabilities. You can't change her name on the thermostat, she must be called Alexa. You can't play some 3rd party music apps like Pandora or Spotify, but most seem to work. You can't receive or send messages. You can do all of these things on the Echo.