Amazon Echo review

Amazon can take a lot of the credit when it comes to the smart speaker market. The original Echo leveraged the power of the cloud to deliver real-time information using natural language, a move that technology behemoths Google and Apple jumped to copy. And the Amazon Echo is at the core of Amazon’s smart speaker family.

Design

The Echo has seen some minor design upgrades since it first launched in the US in 2014, and the version that’s now available is the sleekest to date. Available in a choice of three fabric finishes (charcoal, heather grey and sandstone), the Echo is cylindrical, standing 5.8 inches high with a diameter of 3.5 inches.

That makes it a bit taller than the Google Home — albeit narrower. With a similarly customizable design to Google’s Home speaker, Echo has its own style and is neutral enough to fit in with many different styles.

The top of the Echo is where the action happens. Four buttons intersect across the surface, offering volume control on the top and bottom and an activation button to use instead of saying “Alexa.” Then there’s there “Privacy” button that mutes the integrated microphones.

Speaking of microphones, there are seven, spaced around the top allowing the speaker to pick up commands from every angle. Discreetly hidden inside the speaker, nothing but seven pin-sized holes on the top indicate their locations.

Surrounding the top rim of the speaker is a series of LED indicator lights. When you press the privacy button, the lights glow red, but when you say the activation keyword “Alexa,” they spin in blue to indicate that the speaker is listening.

Toward the base of the speaker, the AC power connection and a 3.5mm stereo audio jack can be found hidden under a small rubber flap, allowing you to connect to another set of speakers. The Echo also offers Bluetooth.

Audio performance

While the Echo’s major attraction is Alexa and the power of voice interaction, it’s still a speaker at its core.

Inside the smart speaker, Amazon’s packed a 2.5-inch subwoofer and a 0.6-inch tweeter. The end result is audio quality that feels about right for the price point. At low volumes, the audio quality is fine — a gentle partner to an early-morning wake up call or an easy-listening background music device.

But if you give the command to turn the volume up to 10, the speaker struggles to perform. It loses bass and gives a tinny reproduction of your tunes.

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On the upside, there isn’t much distortion and the volume can crank fairly loudly. Amazon gives users the option to push out audio to a more premium set of speakers. And the microphones have an excellent ability to pick up a quiet voice from across a fairly noisy room.

But as a speaker, the Echo plays second fiddle to the Google Home in a direct comparison. You can connect the Echo to Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio or TuneIn, but there’s no direct support for Apple Music, Google Play Music or Tidal from the speaker itself. You can set the default services as well, so you don’t need to dictate which service to play from with every command.

Digital assistant performance

While the speaker in the Echo is serviceable but not spectacular, the real star of the show is more than the sound reproduction. That would be Alexa, the digital assistant designed to answer your questions, control your home and keep you organized.

Connected to the Internet 24/7 unless you mute the microphone, the Echo is a useful tool for everything from quick math problems to getting answers to trivia questions and even translating phrases to other languages. For cooks, you can set alarms — and name them to match the task you’re timing — or create a shopping list of ingredients for dinner.

Getting weather updates, creating to-do lists and listening to music are all super-easy to do by asking Alexa. The Echo’s microphone array does an incredible job of picking up your voice over ambient noise, even when it’s playing music.

But these functions are par for the course. What makes Amazon’s ecosystem stand out is the availability of third-party skills — apps that integrate with Alexa to give you even more functionality. Some of these skills are global — things like a Philips Hue integration to let you control your smart light globes from your speaker or being able to order an Uber with a simple verbal command. And as a massive coup over the likes of Google, you can make and receive phone calls and send text messages with the Echo speaker once you’ve set the service up in the Alexa mobile app.

But where the Echo — and Alexa as a whole — disappoints is in the features that haven’t launched yet. Amazon’s Routines — grouped instructions under a single activation command — are limited.

You can’t get the speaker to give you a rundown of your daily calendar when you say, “Alexa, good morning.” You can only control what Alexa says back to you from a preselected series of options, such as turning on the lights and getting updates on the weather, news or traffic.

Even music integration is missing from routines — who wouldn’t want their speaker to give them a quick update first thing in the morning before launching into a series of uplifting songs? So as impressive as the Echo is, it’s still got a long way to go before it truly acts like a real personal assistant in a digital body.

Smart home control performance

Given Amazon’s history as one of the pioneers of the smart home speaker, it’s no surprise that smart home functionality is a key component of the Echo.

To get started, you need to download the appropriate skill. I downloaded the Philips Hue skill to connect to the network of lights I already have installed in my house. From there, you can create custom names for the rooms they’re in, as well as specific commands to control each light or multiple lights at the same time. For example, I created a routine called Story Time that turned both my kids’ Hue globes on and to the “read” scene when I say the command, “Alexa, story time.”

But as with the general Alexa controls, you’re limited to the current skills that are available. For instance, I’m testing a heap of Elgato Eve products at the moment, but they only integrate with Apple’s HomeKit, so I can’t use them with Alexa.

I expect this list will grow with time as more companies invest in smart home technology, but for now, it feels like the actual marketplace for smart home skills is a little thin on the ground.

Verdict

Overall, Alexa seems to be a much more developed platform for voice control than Google’s voice assistant. As a command, “Alexa” rolls off the tongue in a way that “Hey, Google” doesn’t. This might sound nit-picky, but the truth is that if you expect to start talking to a speaker in your home when there are other people around, you need the process to feel seamless.

Sound quality isn’t spectacular, but it’s also not the main selling point for a speaker like this. Alexa doesn’t yet do everything you might want it to, but it does an impressive job of understanding you.

From a privacy perspective, the mute button is easy to access and obvious when activated — thanks to the light ring.

Overall, the Echo is probably the best example of what Amazon has achieved in the smart speaker space so far. The Echo Dot has poor audio quality, and the Echo Plus doesn’t quite match the price for extra features or sound quality.

But the truth is that it’s only going to get better with time. And that makes it worth checking out.