It's interesting to hear that there are people who were still unaware of the electronic bugle for the rendering of "Taps," although as a military trumpet player, it's going to be at the forefront of my radar. This has been going on for a while now, and it came about for a couple of reasons, the main one of which is the fact that so many military bands have been deactivated as part of several base realignment and restructuring initiatives that have been going on since the early 90s, so there aren't as many military trumpet players available to do it.
As for the electronic bugle itself, it's basically what you see - there's a speaker in the bell, and the bugler simply holds the bugle up to their face, pretends to play, and then pushes a button. And, like with so many other things that are electronic, it's never a matter of IF it will fail, it's a matter of WHEN, and it has failed - there are bunch of e-bugle fail videos online, and it's pretty sad when you consider that many of those videos were taken at funerals where military honors were being rendered.
A couple of years ago a coworker of mine passed away after a brief battle with an aggressive cancer. He was retired Navy, so I knew that he was going to have an honor guard detail at the funeral, but I didn't know if they were going to have a real bugler, so I brought my trumpet and asked his wife if it would be ok if I stepped in if the honor guard didn't have a real bugle. She readily agreed.
After the funeral service was over, I took off on my own rather than to follow the processesion, and I touched base with the honor guard. The conversation went a bit like this:
Me: Hey - how are you guys? I just wanted to ask, do you guys have a bugler with you here today?
Detail leader: Yes we do.
Me: Is it a real bugle, or is it the electronic bugle?
Detail leader: ...well...it's the electronic bugle.
I gave him my background - former active duty Army trumpet player for 10 years, I've played "Taps" at approximately 500 funerals, I still play, etc. He had to get permission from his leadership to allow me to do it, and it was only on the stipulation that it was ok with his next of kin/wife. I played a flawless rendition of Taps that day, and it felt good to know that my friend had been honored as he should have been.
Unfortunately, just because you have a "real" bugler doesn't always mean that it's going to be a good rendition of "Taps."
When my wife's uncle passed away, he'd been a bugler in a senior drum & bugle corps in his earlier years, so two of his friends decided they were going to do an Echo Taps at his funeral.
In a word, it was terrible.
Suffice it to say, their horn chops weren't exactly in shape, plus, they didn't know how to do a proper Echo Taps. (Never mind that Echo Taps is technically not authorized for a funeral service.) They thought that for Echo Taps, one guy was supposed to play the whole thing from one location, then another guy was supposed to play the whole thing from another location after the first guy was done, rather than having it be a proper call/response. While I can appreciate that they wanted to try to honor their friend that way, we sat through two godawful renditions of "Taps" - diffuse airy sounds, splatters, missed notes, barely having the chops to make it through, wrong rhythms, etc. I was a bit put out because it wasn't like they didn't know I had been an actual military trumpet player. After that debacle, I was a bit offended that I hadn't been asked to do it.
This is a recording of Echo Taps I threw together one night in my home studio and set to a slide show before publishing - the whole thing took me about 30 minutes. I did it on a lark, and I had no idea when I put it out there that it would get the kind of response it has gotten, but at present I've got 160K+ views on it. (The trumpet player at :52 is me for my local Memorial Day service - I was 17 in that pic.)