The Echo is Amazon's latest futuristic gadget experiment. It's one part Bluetooth speaker and one part personal voice assistant. And it blew my mind.
You control the Echo with your voice; you can tell it to do things like play music, read news briefs aloud, add items to your to-do and shopping lists, and tell you the weather. In other words, the Echo is like the realization of HAL 9000 in a black canister, only without the frightening pulsating red camera eye, and not nearly as intelligent.
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The $199 ($99 for a limited time if you're an Amazon Prime member) wonder tube is intriguing because it's one of the first of what will surely be many AI gadgets duking it out to control the connected home.
Apple has Siri; Google has, uh... Google Now; and Microsoft has Cortana. Now, Amazon has its own personal voice assistant — only it's not trapped inside of a smartphone.
The black tube
The Echo's tech bits are housed in a 9.25-inch tall plastic tube. Perforated speaker holes adorn the lower half of its cylindrical body. There are only two buttons on the Echo, and they're both for turning things off, not on: a microphone-off button and an "action" button. You press the microphone-off button to block the Echo from listening for voice commands and the action button for turning off alarms and timers.
The twistable volume dial at the top is adorned with a light-up indicator ring. The light ring glows blue to indicate it's ready for your commands and red when it's muted. Otherwise, it's off. Rotating the volume ring increases and decreases the volume.
The Echo isn't portable; it has to connect to power in order to work. That's fine if you plan to have the Echo stationed in, say, the living room or kitchen and don't plan to ever move it. While the 6-foot long cord is generous, it also means the Echo needs to be placed relatively close to an outlet and moving it between rooms is cumbersome, unless you buy multiple Echos.
Getting started with the Echo is simple. You download the Echo app (for iOS, Android or Fire OS) or log into your Amazon account on a computer and follow a few prompts to set up Wi-Fi and you're done. There's no need to train your voice or anyone else's, which is super.
Alexa, do my bidding!
Before we dive in, it's important to get one thing straight: The device is called the Echo and the lovely voice assistant inside is called Alexa. The device will start listening to your commands the moment you speak her name, "Alexa...." You can change her name to "Amazon," but you should only really do that if someone in your household is named Alexa. (The Echo's Alexa will think you're talking to it if you don't.)
Back to Alexa. What exactly is she? She's a personal voice assistant, much like Siri, but I like to think of her as a digital intern — she knows how to do some things but not everything, and she's always learning from me every day. She keeps everything I ask her to do stored in her Amazon Web Services-powered brain that lives somewhere in the cloud so she can be on point next time.
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You can say "Alexa, play music" and she'll start playing a Prime Playlist she thinks you'll like based on your music preferences. She can play music from Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio and TuneIn. You can also tell Alexa to play specific songs, artists and genres.
If a song or artist isn't in your Amazon Music library, she'll find an iHeartRadio or TuneIn station instead. It's easy to buy songs as well: After listening to a preview, you can say "Alexa, add this song."
The Echo can also stream music from a smartphone or tablet via Bluetooth. To my surprise, I found you can even control Spotify and iTunes with Alexa. Usually, third-party services that connect through Bluetooth don't have access to a device's voice commands (i.e. Netflix on Fire TV and the Nexus Player).
Controlling music playback with your voice feels natural because it's so responsive and easy to do. It's wonderful when you're cooking, doing the dishes or singing in the shower. I don't think I can go back to remotes and apps after trying out the Echo. This is how controlling music at home should work.
There are a few other things Alexa's good for: Getting the weather, creating shopping and to-do lists, setting alarms and timers, and reading news summaries from either NPR or the BBC. I enjoyed using all of these features during my morning routine and before I went to sleep.
Alexa's brainy too. You can ask her to search Wikipedia for something or someone, convert units like currency and weights, define words (just make sure to enunciate clearly) and look up general facts and trivia. And she's funny. "What do you call a fake noodle?" she asked me. "An impasta."
Like I said before, she doesn't know everything. Alexa knows certain famous people, but not others. She knows when Daft Punk's "Something About Us" was released (2003), but doesn't know the same for The Strokes' "Hard To Explain" (2001). When I asked Alexa who Jeremy Lin is, she told me about Jeremy Lynn the former professional wrestler. But when I told her to Wikipedia him, she told me the correct blurb about the NBA basketball player.
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Alexa feels like the future because she has great hearing. She's equipped with seven microphones which let her hear you call her from 15-20 feet away. Sometimes, she can even hear whispers. You can also talk into the included remote if you're too far from the Echo or in another room, but that's not nearly as fun.
Loud and clear sound
There are a million different Bluetooth speakers to pick from. My favorite go-to is still the $199 Logitech UE Boom. It's a very loud speaker that blasts music out in 360-degrees and has very good sound. I love mine.
The Echo has a 2.5-inch woofer, a 2-inch tweeter, and a reflex port. Great, what do these parts do? The woofer is for projecting deep bass, the tweeter for delivering clear high notes and the reflex port is there to enhance the woofer's bass and help reduce audio distortion.
I'm not too fussy with my Bluetooth speakers -- I just need one that can pump it without making my ears hurt and play softly when I'm alone and don't want to wake up my entire building. As a speaker, the Echo is on the better part of a spectrum filled with junk. Its sound output is omnidirectional just like on the UE Boom.
Besides using the volume ring, you can control the volume by saying "Alexa, turn it up," "Alexa, volume 6," or "Alexa, softer." The Echo has 10 volume levels; Level 10 is enough to fill a tiny 500-square-foot apartment and still rattle the walls and Level 4 is gentle enough for close-range listening. Not bad for a black Pringles can.
A glimpse of the future
The Echo is a very promising piece of technology. When Siri launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, she was limited in what she could do. She wasn't the snappy context-aware darling we know today. The Echo's Alexa is like Siri was a few years ago: She only knows a few tricks.
And that's perfectly fine with me right now. The Echo's a better Bluetooth speaker than I expected and using your voice to control music feels intuitive and natural. To me, that's already worth $99 (I'm a Prime member).
Would I like it if Alexa could tell me more pertinent information like if I'm going to be late to work or to read my unread email while I'm brushing my teeth? Hell yes. Wouldn't it be great if I could tell Alexa to order Chinese take-out or turn on the lights or TV. Absolutely, and that's the dream.
The Echo's not there yet, but Amazon says the plan is to get developers onboard to create devices that can connect to it and work with Alexa. The Echo is untapped potential. It's an infant and with proper developer support could blossom into a serious smart hub for the home. For example, the Echo could change the way we shop online. While you can buy songs right now, it's possible, as my colleague Samantha Murphy Kelly suggests, that a future update to the Echo could let us actually order things off Amazon. After all, Amazon is in the business of selling goods.
Even at $199, the Echo offers a lot of value; the UE Boom costs the same and it's only a Bluetooth speaker. And if you're not a Prime member, why not become one ($99 a year) so the Echo drops to $99? You'll get the Echo, two-day shipping on thousands of items, Prime Instant Video and Prime Music for $198. It doesn't make any sense to buy the Echo for the full $199 at all when you can get Prime and Echo for the same price.
I'd love to buy an Echo, but there's only one thing preventing me from doing so: Amazon hasn't invited me to buy one yet. And for some people who did get invited and decided to take the plunge — well, their Echos aren't shipping until this summer. The Echo shows you a pleasing glimpse of our connected future, but Amazon is taking its sweet time painting the full picture. If Amazon doesn't start shifting the Echo's smart home connectivity into high gear, Apple's HomeKit and Google's "Works with Nest" program could leave it eating their dust.
Amazon Echo
The Good
Voice recognition is fast and responsive
Volume can get very loud
The Bad
Must be tethered to an outlet
Invite-only to buy
Isn't context aware
Only comes in black
The Bottom Line
The Echo's an impressive voice assistant and voice-controlled DJ, but Amazon's only scratching the surface of what it can do.