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.
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