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Amazon appears to be pretty serious about making couch potatoes out of us all. With innovative gadgets like Amazon Echo, the company is farther ahead in voice controlled systems than any of its competitors. Today, we will take a look at the Amazon Echo Dot Review and why many people go so far so as to call it the best thing Amazon has ever produced.
In case you haven’t yet happened to cross paths with the Amazon Dot, it is a Bluetooth/Wi-fi enabled speaker capable of doing everything Echo can do, and with significant less stress on your pockets. It looks like Amazon used a big knife to cut a slice off Amazon Echo, and it reflects in the gadgets price as well. Small, compact and Alexa enabled, if the dot was any smarter, it would probably write a poem. From listening to music to ordering up some quick Pizza, the dot has it all.
Features of the Amazon Echo Dot
How can the Echo Dot be the one thing you need? The Dot, for one, promises some stellar voice recognition capabilities, that makes listening to the music a whole lot more fun.
- Just like the Echo, Amazon’s premium offering, Dot also uses the Alexa Voice Service to do stuff like play music, provide information, read the news, set alarms, control smart home devices and so on.
- Play music from a variety of portals like Prime Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn.
- Check out the headlines of the day from sources you choose curated into a “flash briefing”
- Has built-in speaker so it can work on its own, but if you need some extra power for a party, just connect it with external speakers through Bluetooth or a cable.
- Hears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even while music is playing. Nice, right?
- Users can control all kinds of smart electronic gadgets including lights, switches, thermostats, from a range of providers including WeMo, Philips Hue, Samsung SmartThings, Nest, ecobee, and others.
- If you think Dot is good today, well Amazon keeps updating it. So it is probably going to be even better a few days later.
The Good for the Amazon Echo Dot
Okay. So the dot is definitely good. There are reasons why people call it as better than Echo, despite its smaller size and lesser sound output and those reasons combine to make a pretty cool device. Let’s take a look.
The Echo Dot is basically the Echo with a significant portion of its noise output removed. So basically, the smarts are all there but the speakers are just less powerful. However, the Dot’s price tag — which is almost half the Eco’s — gives you plenty of left over to buy a dedicated pair of speakers to hook with the Dot using bluetooth or cables, whenever you need to party.
This also takes care of the audio issues we had with Echo, since you can use your own speakers, there are no issues associated with quality. But any quality you want and plug them up with the Amazon Dot for the best possible experience. Or if you would prefer, you can use the in-built speakers that come with Amazon Dot.
The Echo Dot is always on and is always listening out for your commands. So you can shout out for Alexa to do something from across the room, such as order a Pizza,Play some music or even book you a cab. This also highlights a significant advantage the Amazon Echo Dot has over Amazon Tap, since you don’t have to press any button to use Alexa. Within the Alexa app, you can activate the device by either shouting out to Alexa, Echo, or Amazon.
And The Bad for the Amazon Echo Dot
There simply is not much bad to be said for the Amazon Echo Dot. Perhaps you could ask the bass to be a little bit more than it is. But you don’t buy the Dot for its sound quality alone – you buy it for the complete package it offers, and there simply is no competition to that.
The device is pretty cool, packs all of the best stuff from Amazon Echo. The device is pretty cool and at $90 is relatively inexpensive as compared to the Echo, which comes in at a hefty sum in the neighbourhood of $150. The only major shortcomings we could find would be the fact that its speakers are rather less powerful and you would probably need to bring your own if looking to party.
Also, you can’t synchronize multiple units to play together, although that is one shortcoming that may be corrected by Amazon through a simple software update.
The Final Verdict:
Overall, the dot is a good way to spend $90 that you have just sitting somewhere. It manages to combine the best of both worlds and takes away some of the biggest shortcomings associated with some of the less popular, Alexa-totting Amazon speakers — for example, the Amazon Tap.
A word needs to be said for Amazon’s marketing strategy here though. The company, for some strange reason, is not laying as much stress on the dot as it did on the Echo. However, don’t let it fool you. The Dot is one of the best things in smart audio since sliced bread and if you are thinking of buying a pair of smart speakers, we seriously recommend you to give Amazon Dot a look.
The Echo Dot also has everything the Echo offers including long range, far-field voice capabilities, a microphone off button, an action button, volume ring control and so on. All these features bundled up at a $90 price tag are certainly pretty awesome.
Good sound on its own and the potential for even better by pairing it up with speakers, a moderately high price tag, Alexa’s powers and extreme levels of portability. There is really very little to complain about with the Amazon Dot. Go get a slice of some hot, audio technology!