Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
There are mixed opinions about the purr-fectly amazing Alexa in Chris’s household
Iwrote a while back about the newcomer to our house, Alexa, or more officially the Amazon Echo, a clever device that sits quietly in the corner until you say the wake-up-word “Alexa”, at which point she perks up and immediately answers your query. For instance, I can ask for my local football team’s latest result, and Alexa will tell me exactly how many goals they lost by this week.
She’s also uncannily good at understanding whatever you say, however you say it. A Scottish friend said to me that she didn’t think Alexa would work well with strong local accents. This obviously led to me sitting beside Alexa for an hour attempting to confuse her by badly imitating various regional accents, until my daughter finally snapped, ran from her bedroom and smacked me round the head with a pillow.
Fair enough I suppose – doing your homework while somebody sits outside your bedroom shouting in mock Lancastrian can’t be easy.
Back to the point though… only once did Alexa fail to understand, and I suppose she couldn’t be expected to know Cockney rhyming slang, especially considering I had no idea what I was actually saying anyway.
I had to concede that she’s amazing and told her so, receiving the instant reply “Thank you. You’re pretty amazing too” – an answer that caused much laughter from my daughter’s room and the shout, “So she does get some things wrong then!”
It has to be said that not everybody appreciates Alexa. Just ask the demographic that makes up almost three quarters of our household… the pets. There are some very mixed opinions from them.
Jojo, our aloof and mostly angry tortoiseshell cat, for instance, becomes even more enraged every time Alexa speaks. Bodmin, our hard-asnails gnarled tomcat seems to see Alexa as a formidable adversary, ever-present but invisible. A single word from her as he walks past sends him into wary attack-pounce readiness – particularly when Maya asks Alexa to make cat sounds. Bad Maya.
On the other side of the fence sits Spooky, by far the coolest of our cats. Spooky loves those same cat noises and will sit happily meowchatting back at Alexa for ages… probably forever if Maya didn’t stop her.
There’s split opinion among the rabbits. Billie loudly thumps her back foot at every Alexa word (rabbitdefence mode) while her partner Ted, of course, adores Alexa. He particularly loves her weather forecast, which sends him into an instant blissful sleep. As does her news briefing… and her TV listings and… OK, perhaps everything puts him to sleep.
The two goldfish meanwhile, are largely indifferent, and being non-mammalian and living in their alien underwater world, I doubt they understand a word she’s saying.
I bet she’d understand them though.
It has to be said that not everyone appreciates Alexa the way I do
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