David Gillon

My sister and I picked up a couple of Amazon Echo Show 5s on Prime Day (half price at £40 and I had a couple of £25 vouchers to use), on the theory that they're potentially simple enough my mother will agree to have one - zero chance of getting her to use a smartphone or tablet, never mind a desktop - and so be able to see me even if we're stuck at opposite ends of the country.

So we've just spent two hours trying to get them to talk to each other. As soon as we'd gotten each other into our Amazon contacts they'd happily call our phones if we said "Alexa Call <sibling>", we just couldn't get them to call the blasted Shows instead and couldn't work out what we were doing wrong. So eventually we agreed to give up for the minute and I'd go off and do some research.

So I queued up the youtube vid I'd watched before buying, hopped to the bit where he calls his dad, immediately stopped it again, and *headdesk*ed a couple of times, because the command isn't  "Alexa Call", it's "Alexa Video Call". *headdesk*

I suppose it does show the limitations of Amazon's documentation style, which in the case of the Show amounts to four not very packed credit card sized pages, but that's still annoyingly obvious.

From the Amazon Web Services Guidelines:

"57.10 Acceptable Use; Safety-Critical Systems. Your use of the Lumberyard Materials must comply with the AWS Acceptable Use Policy. The Lumberyard Materials are not intended for use with life-critical or safety-critical systems, such as use in operation of medical equipment, automated transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, aircraft or air traffic control, nuclear facilities, manned spacecraft, or military use in connection with live combat. However, this restriction will not apply in the event of the occurrence (certified by the United States Centers for Disease Control or successor body) of a widespread viral infection transmitted via bites or contact with bodily fluids that causes human corpses to reanimate and seek to consume living human flesh, blood, brain or nerve tissue and is likely to result in the fall of organized civilization."