What is Alexa and what are its top alternatives?
Alexa is a popular virtual assistant developed by Amazon that utilizes voice commands to perform various tasks such as playing music, setting alarms, providing weather updates, and controlling smart home devices. It also offers skills and integrations with third-party services for added functionality. However, some limitations of Alexa include privacy concerns related to always-on listening, limited customization options, and occasional misunderstandings of commands.
- Google Assistant: Google Assistant is a virtual assistant developed by Google that offers similar features to Alexa. Key features include voice commands, smart home device control, and integration with Google services. Pros include strong integration with Google products and services, while cons include less third-party skills compared to Alexa.
- Siri: Siri is Apple's virtual assistant that is built into iOS devices. It offers voice commands, integration with Apple services, and personalized responses. Pros include seamless integration with Apple ecosystem, while cons include limited customization options.
- Cortana: Cortana is Microsoft's virtual assistant available on Windows devices. It offers voice commands, reminders, and integration with Microsoft services. Pros include integration with Windows ecosystem, while cons include limited third-party skills.
- Bixby: Bixby is Samsung's virtual assistant available on Galaxy devices. It offers voice commands, device control, and integration with Samsung services. Pros include deep integration with Samsung devices, while cons include limited availability on non-Samsung devices.
- Mycroft AI: Mycroft AI is an open-source virtual assistant that focuses on privacy and customization. Key features include voice commands, skills marketplace, and open-source community contributions. Pros include privacy-focused approach and customization options, while cons include smaller skill marketplace compared to proprietary assistants.
- OpenAI: OpenAI provides an open-source platform for developing virtual assistants with advanced AI capabilities. Key features include natural language processing, machine learning models, and customizable skills. Pros include advanced AI capabilities, while cons include steep learning curve for development.
- Josh.ai: Josh.ai is a premium virtual assistant designed for smart homes. It offers voice commands, smart home device control, and privacy-focused approach. Pros include high-end smart home integration, while cons include premium pricing.
- Hound: Hound is a virtual assistant developed by SoundHound that focuses on fast and accurate voice recognition. Key features include voice commands, natural language understanding, and fast responses. Pros include fast and accurate voice recognition, while cons include limited third-party integrations.
- Sherpa Assistant: Sherpa Assistant is a virtual assistant that focuses on personalized recommendations and predictive suggestions. Key features include voice commands, context-aware responses, and personalized recommendations. Pros include predictive capabilities, while cons include limited availability.
- Viv: Viv is a virtual assistant developed by the creators of Siri that focuses on advanced natural language processing and dynamic program generation. Pros include advanced AI capabilities, while cons include limited availability and customization options.
Top Alternatives to Alexa
EchoIt is a high performance, extensible, minimalist web framework for Go (Golang). ...
TwilioTwilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. ...
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's. ...
Amazon SESAmazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. ...
MailgunMailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly. ...
MandrillMandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp. ...
Amazon SNSAmazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint. ...
OpenAICreating safe artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity. Our work to create safe and beneficial AI requires a deep understanding of the potential risks and benefits, as well as careful consideration of the impact. ...
Alexa alternatives & related posts
- Easy to use11
- Highly customizable10
- Performance10
- Open source9
- Lightweight9
- Middleware7
- Minimal3
related Echo posts
- Powerful, simple, and well documented api148
- RESTful API88
- Clear pricing66
- Great sms services61
- Low cost of entry58
- Global SMS Gateway29
- Good value14
- Cloud IVR12
- Simple11
- Extremely simple to integrate with rails11
- Great for startups6
- SMS5
- Great developer program3
- Hassle free3
- Text me the app pages2
- New Features constantly rolling out1
- Many deployment options, from build from scratch to buy1
- Easy integration1
- Two factor authentication1
- Predictable pricing4
- Expensive2
related Twilio posts
Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.
We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.
We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.
What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.
Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...
Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.
Searching for options for SMS that integrates with SiteLink and will allow personalization of text and tracking of both incoming/outgoing messages with reporting (Time, date, call#, etc) Have been looking at Twilio, and seems most leaning toward this. Are there any other options known that integrate into SiteLink? Also looked at Clickatell.
- Easy setup190
- Cheap and simple137
- Easy email integration!107
- Reliable86
- Well-documented58
- Generous free allowance to get you started28
- Trackable25
- Heroku add-on21
- Azure add-on15
- Better support for third party integrations13
- Simple installation6
- Free plan6
- Helpful evangelist staff4
- Great client libraries4
- Great support3
- Better customer support than the competition3
- Great add-ons3
- Nice dashboard2
- Scalable2
- Web editor for templates1
- Cool setup1
- Within integration1
- Easy set up1
- Free1
- Great customer support1
- Google cloud messaging1
- Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific3
- Shared IP blacklist removal takes months1
- Shares IP blacklist removal0
related Twilio SendGrid posts
At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.
We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail
Nexmo vs Twilio ?
Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.
When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.
Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.
Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.
Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.
- Reliable102
- Cheap97
- Integrates with other aws services57
- Easy setup52
- Trackable18
- Easy rails setup2
related Amazon SES posts
We decided to use AWS Lambda for several serverless tasks such as
- Managing AWS backups
- Processing emails received on Amazon SES and stored to Amazon S3 and notified via Amazon SNS, so as to push a message on our Redis so our Sidekiq Rails workers can process inbound emails
- Pushing some relevant Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to Slack
I would like to know how I can implement a transactional email, or if it is possible to do so, like Mailchimp, using Amazon SES. I want to have the flexibility of creating emails like MailChimp, with a bulk email sending capability. Is it as simple with AWS SES as it is with MailChimp? If so, then how can I implement that for my own product? Thanks!
- Quick email integration178
- Free plan148
- Easy setup91
- Ridiculously reliable67
- Extensive apis53
- Great for parsing inbound emails30
- Nice UI25
- Developer-centric22
- Excellent customer support15
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy to view logs of sent emails4
- Email mailbox management for developers4
- Great PHP library2
- Great documentation2
- Great customer support, love rackspace2
- Better than sendgrid not ask too many question1
- Cost2
- No HTTPS tracking links supported2
- Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun1
- Cannot create multiple api keys1
related Mailgun posts
We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.
However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.
Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.
Mandrill
- Simple installation189
- Great api141
- Generous free allowance to get you started123
- Cheap and simple114
- Trackable99
- Well-documented59
- Doesn't go to spam54
- Great for mailchimp users47
- Webhooks32
- Client libraries28
- Heroku Add-on7
- Easy to use6
- Meaningful Metrics5
- Free5
- Advanced Tagging and Reports3
- Mobile Access3
- Status Update3
- Very chimp-like2
- Great Documentation2
- love this service2
- Free Plan1
- Webhooks for bounce mail1
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1
related Mandrill posts
We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.
However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.
Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.
Hi, I've noticed my Mandrill emails are being received fine but my Mailchimp emails, about 75% are going into junk mail. I was wondering is it possible I have missed some sort of integration or can I send my Mailchimp marketing emails via mandrill?
Need help to somehow reduce the number of my emails going into junk mail, can someone help?
- Low cost12
- Supports multi subscribers6
related Amazon SNS posts
We decided to use AWS Lambda for several serverless tasks such as
- Managing AWS backups
- Processing emails received on Amazon SES and stored to Amazon S3 and notified via Amazon SNS, so as to push a message on our Redis so our Sidekiq Rails workers can process inbound emails
- Pushing some relevant Amazon CloudWatch metrics and alarms to Slack
Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.
We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.
We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.
What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.
Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...
Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.