When I reviewed the Amazon Echo 13 months ago, I predicted that people would want one in every room. The Echo can control your home’s lighting, play music, estimate your commute time, operate a timer, answer trivia questions, read books and news bulletins to you, tell you which movies are at your local theater, and so much more. You can order a pizza from Dominoes, a ride from Uber, or virtually anything from Amazon. You’d want one in every room so you didn’t need to walk to the room it was in to use it, or yell “Alexa!” from across the house to get its attention. I’m sure Amazon loved my idea, but it was never going to happen on a broad scale at $180 a pop.
So Amazon got wise and iterated on the concept, introducing the battery-powered Echo Tap and the puck-sized Echo Dot in March 2016. But the Dot still cost $90, and the $130 Tap lacked the voice activation that made the Echo so useful. It was easy to take the Tap from room to room, but needing to push a button to get Alexa’s attention spoiled the magic.
The second-generation Echo Dot reviewed here is the best of them all—even if you buy only one. Amazon removed the original Echo’s large speaker and volume-control dial, replaced them with a chintzy speaker and a pair of buttons, and sliced the price to $50. It costs even less if you order six at once (you get one free, bringing the per-unit cost to about $42). So for $250—40 percent more than the cost of a single Echo-—you can put Alexa in just about every room. That’s exactly what I’ve done.
The Dot has the same far-field voice recognition technology, supported by seven microphones on top (six in a circle, one in the center), as the original Echo. If more than one Dot hears you say the Alexa wake word, they’ll all wake up, but only the one closest to you will respond. That prevents simple problems, such as having a cacophony of Alexas all talking at once, as well as bigger ones, like ordering one pizza and getting six delivered.
One shortcoming I’ve discovered with the Echos’ mics—I’ve tested the original and the Dot—is that they have difficulty hearing you when the TV is loud or when loud music is playing (on either the Echo itself or from other speakers in the room). When Editor-in-Chief Jon Philips compared the original Echo’s microphone performance to that of the new Google Home, he found that Google’s product was much better at filtering out ambient noise. He also reported that Google Home’s microphones delivered much better range. Deploying Echo Dots fixes the second problem, but it won’t address the first. I handle the problem by either pausing the TV or the music, or just getting closer to the Echo I want to use. Neither is a terrible inconvenience.
Music options
So the Echo Dot can do anything its more-expensive siblings can do for much less money. But there’s one thing you won’t want it to do: play music—at least not on its own low-end speaker. It’s just fine for playing Alexa’s voice or even listening to weather forecasts or news bulletins, but it doesn’t have the dynamic range to reproduce music with any kind of fidelity. There’s an easy fix for that: Pair it with a self-amplified speaker or an A/V receiver using either a cable or Bluetooth.
A home full of Echo Dots is no substitute for a genuine multi-room audio system, however, because you can’t play the same music in sync on multiple Echos of any type. Each one plays music independently. And while you can connect your Spotify Premium account to Amazon and play music on an Echo, Spotify will only stream music to one device at a time. That’s a restriction imposed by Spotify.
With more sophisticated speaker systems—Sonos is a good example—you can group speakers together to play the same music. You can’t do that with any of Amazon’s Echos. Certain other applications are synchronized. You can verbally add appointments to your calendar and items to your shopping list and to-do lists on any of your Echos, and they’ll all be combined on one list. You’ll see the aggregate results in the Alexa app on your phone.
Adult members of your household can create their own profiles and maintain their own calendars and lists, but each person will need to have their own Amazon account. This is one of the reasons that children can’t have profiles—they can’t have Amazon accounts. I imagine there’s a legal thicket of other reasons for Amazon’s policy to not allow children to have profiles.
Meanwhile, managing multiple profiles for adults sounds like it would be a pain in the neck, because you’d need to ask Alexa which profile is active each time you want to manage your lists, use a connected service like Spotify, or order something.
The Echo ecosystem
Amazon has been aggressively building an expansive Echo ecosystem by encouraging third parties to develop “skills” that enable the Echo family to work with their products. Amazon doesn’t make thermostats, for example, but any of the Echos can control Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell, and other brands of smart thermostats. Amazon doesn’t make smart lighting products, but any of the Echos can control Philips Hue, Lutron Caseta Wireless, and other brands of smart lighting. I’ve linked the Echo to my Logitech Harmony Elite universal remote control and can control all the gear in my entertainment system.