I have to say that Flic's comments in this thread are HIGHLY disheartening. I used to be a tech journalist (with major pubs) and have seen pretty much everything from companies, and this is certainly one that deserves calling out. Flic CLEARLY decided to create a marketing stir by energizing two of the bigger automation gurus on youtube with very personalized packages clearly stating their work towards seamless, simple Alexa routine integration. The headlines of both videos either bare that out, or represent two very unlikely missteps from both channels.
It's clear that many, many people bought kits under the assumption that this functionality was just a hop, skip and maybe a jump away. I broke my own rule of never buying any product based on potential future functionality. Add to this that your products are not exactly in the impulse-buy realm.
To respond to those of us that jumped in to support you with vague comments like, "We're looking into it" and suggesting that it may not ever happen ("if it can work"?), is really concerning and reeks of a bait-and-switch campaign to simply get a bunch of us to jump in on the hopes that we'll end up loving the product as it is today and allowing you to clear a bunch of inventory. I hope that's wrong, but that's how it reads from your responses.
Did Paul and Brian's videos make it clear that this functionality is "not yet available"? Sure, but that ignores the much bigger messaging from both videos. Brian's video states, "Flic just BLEW UP the smart button market with this", and "INCREDIBLE NEW FEATURES". Forgive me, but those very much dwarf the, "it's not quite here yet" messaging. Plus, in the letter you sent to both it states quite directly, "we're launching some new and really exiting features". It doesn't say you're "looking into" those features or that , eh, maybe they'll show up... maybe they won't. Paul's video says, "A button for Alexa!! - This changes everything!". Does it? If your stance is, eh, maybe we can do something..... then does that really change anything? Your marketing department clearly initiated a campaign to energize them in this way -- and it worked.
Look, we understand that you don't want to make any promises you can't keep, but right now it feels like your marketing department is playing games that your developers aren't quite up to speed with yet and we've been cajoled into becoming first-adopters without our knowing it. If you didn't intend to mislead people then simply saying something like, "We're proactively working on providing this functionality as soon as possible as it is a huge feature request. At this time, however, it's still not ready and we can make no promises beyond that" would suffice. Instead the tone is, "How could you possibly be so stupid?"
Gee, thanks for that. I've spent nearly $200 and the first interaction I see from your company is that sort of tone? So noted.
