Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I ordered Echo specifically for music - I’ve had a huge music library on Amazon for years. But it didn’t take long after installing Echo to find out that there is now an annual charge for having over 250 songs, so only a small portion of my library is available. But OK - since subscription is to be expected these days, I decided to pare down my library down to fit and get Echo to play only the songs that are free. But I found Alexa will not play them. When I ask to play something from my music library, it plays unfamiliar songs that I know are not in there. If I ask for one of my playlists instead, more often than not she’ll just start playing crappy Prime music. When that happens, I just keep saying “Alexa, next” until maybe 7 tunes later, it produces something I can actually tolerate. Another 7 or so crappy tunes, and my blood pressure is rising, so I figure it’s too much work to listen to any more music on Echo. I say “Alexa, stop.” When I ask for a specific song, I might get it to play because it’s actually in Prime (I’ve been a Prime shipping member since the beginning). But more often, I will get a pitch for the “Unlimited” music at $8 per month, and a short sample of the song I wanted to hear to try to upsell me to an expensive service I don’t want. I’ve found that all of the Prime services are quite limited – not only Music, but Video and Books. It’s especially hard to find anything of any real value in Books - mostly it’s stupid romances and mysteries. Video has a similar low ratio of classics to dreck. Now I've discovered the same problem exists in Prime Music. And compared to Prime services, Google Play and Google Search are a pleasure. They have enough good content that I use them at work constantly. I was expecting something similar for my home from Amazon. But back to Echo. Another battle I had with Alexa was that I assumed she could hear me at all. It’s quiet in my small house, and my office is just down the hall from her, but often I got no response to my voice commands. So I figured I’ll try using the Fire TV remote device to feed in my commands directly. I bought Fire TV initially because of the suggestion somewhere on the web site that it would work with Echo, which I planned to buy later (I don’t particularly like Fire TV, but at least it wasn’t expensive.) I could see from the Alexa app how to do the pairing, but had no luck, so I called Support. After a while I was told I have to un-pair it for TV and set it to work for the Echo instead, so we spent about an hour trying to do that over and over without success. I wouldn’t mind switching pairing back and forth if it would work, so I gave it my best shot. Finally I got escalated to the Echo team and learned from that team member that the Fire TV remote will never work. Instead I have to buy a remote that is specifically for Echo. Already I wasted hours on several support calls trying to get Echo to play my music library, then another hour trying to get the Fire TV remote to work, and finally I learned it would cost me another $30 to get Alexa to hear me if I’m in my office, only about 12 feet away. What a waste for something that shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. As for troubleshooting the music library, several very nice Support team members tried to help me get it to upload. I first got a rep who says she’d give me a 30-day trial to verify that it would work before I subscribed. So I spent a couple of days editing my copy of my library (on an extended drive) so I could try dragging them into Amazon’s Music’s desktop app to upload them. But then, the upload from my desktop would not work. Instead I got an email that the trial had already expired -- in two days instead of thirty. Another rep tried to get the trial going, but I got another two-day expiration (I do have other things to do, so I wasn’t working on it during those two days). So again, uploading my meager library did not work. I even got a third expired trial, but by then I was past caring. Actually, all of the support reps are very earnest, charming, polite, and accommodating, but they seem to have a very small knowledge base to work with. There is no documentation available to them, much less customers, so they have to guess – that’s probably why it took forever to find out the Fire TV remote wouldn’t work. The 30-day trials didn’t work either, but it made sense that there would be a way to accommodate customers who do want to give it a chance before investing heavily in the necessary upsells. I guess upper management didn’t think of that. As noted by other Echo reviewers, the bugs are apparently not yet worked out, and it seems to me that the support process has apparently been defined only for garden-variety issues. I get the feeling that this product was just released too early, and the customer service process was not coordinated with the release to deal with the inevitable problems customers would have with Echo. I hope Amazon will learn from this review and fix these problems for others, but it’s too late for me. While going through all of these remarkable hassles, I was constantly re-evaluating my commitment to this device. I was deciding whether to spend up to $235 for what is essentially just a voice-activated speaker - $180 plus $25 for the subscription, $30 for an additional remote. But the other services are marginal at best. As in the other reviews here, I found that Alexa knows practically nothing (Bing search engine?), so getting questions answered successfully is rare. Alexa does set a timer and reports the weather competently, but I have an iPhone, so why would I care about those small conveniences? All I really wanted was voice-activated music. If I ever had gotten my library in there on a trial basis, I’d probably have gone ahead and used it – maybe even paid for a subscription, though certainly not Unlimited music. But Amazon’s trial software doesn’t work yet to show me that my music library would ever work, so why should I keep banging my head on the wall trying force Echo to work as advertised? Recently, I learned that Google is releasing a competitive device in a couple of weeks, and the online review says I can easily upload my music library to it and use Google Play and Search instead. Plus it’s going to be about half the price of Echo, and considering all the upsells needed to make Echo work, it seems like a no-brainer to just give up on Alexa and Echo. So sorry, Amazon, I love you -- I’m one of your oldest customers, and have probably spent over $100,000 on your site since 2000. But this product has become a paperweight that I don't even try to use anymore. I’m sorry to say that it’s time to throw in the towel and just send it back.