Amazon Echo Review

Amazon Echo
-In this article I'm going to review Stay tuned. Hey, what is up guys Ayush here. If you're new to this blog let me just give you guys a quick background about me. My name is Ayush Shrivastava. This is it the device that started it all the Amazon Echo was the first true smart speaker to come out onto the market and become widely adopted and very successful now we've had one for over the past six months now and in this blog we're going to dive in and see how it's held up over the past six months what features make the Amazon echo standout and what features we've used the most over the past six months let's dive in first let's look at the design the Amazon echo that I bought is a second-generation refurbished Echo the second-generation Echo comes with improved sound over the first generation as well as a new seven count far-field microphone array at the top these microphones and Amazon's beam forming technology allowed the Echo to clearly hear you no matter where you are in aroom or how loud the environment is what a really cool thing about this design isthat when you say the wake word the Echo will light up with the brightest part of the ring near the microphone that heard your voice the best in my experience theecho has been able to hear me with just a faint whisper or over very loud musicit's performance has been comparable if not better to a Google Home speaker now speaking of Google many of you out there who are familiar with our channel may beasking yourselves right now like hey wait a minute aren't you that Google guyyes I've done many videos on the Google assistant and Google home devices and Ihave chosen Google assistant devices as the predominant devices in my residencehowever that doesn't mean I don't enjoy my echo or Alexa but for this video Iwill be focusing on the echo and Alexa but I will bring in Google into the conversation when it's relevant so let's get back to the Echo and its externaldesign one of the things I want to talk about is the echos trademarked blue ringwhen I was first deciding which smart speaker to get a few years back the bluering on the Echo just looked a little to space-age for me compared to the Google home that's at least what I thought at the timeafter living with the echo for over six months now I have to say I quite likedit it does look a bit space-age and futuristic sure but Amazon's execution and design here really stand out I really like the way the ring lights upfrom the back to the front of the device and how Amazon uses different coloredrings to symbolise different things my favorite color is yellow which I'm nowconditioned to be excited anytime I see my echo glow yellow since I know that'smy cue that something from Amazon has just been delivered one thing I really like about the Echo is its audio quality especially with music playback I found that its audio quality is a little bit crisper than my Google home and it'sbass is more finely tuned Amazon also has a leg up over Google currently asthe echo is now able to play both Apple music and Spotify although it doesn't link to YouTube music or Google Play like the Google home does Amazon hasalso gotten better in its design of Echo devices to match the aesthetic ofdifferent rooms the mesh fabric they use feels a little bit more premium than the first-generation Echo and just looks better you can also get different colored echoes which I like so I just opted for the black one since it matchedthe colors of the room that I was planning to put in it well the design ofthe smart speaker is good it's not the thing that makes people fall in lovewith their echo devices and that's really in part because of Alexa the smart assistant on the Amazon Echo now as I said before I used the Google assistant predominantly throughout my home in all of my smart devices but overthe past six months I have challenged myself to use the Google assistant and Alexa 50/50 and this has given me some really important observations one bothof these assistants do very similar things however there are quite a few and important advantages that Alexa has over its competition here are a few observations right off the bat the echo is faster at controlling my smart lights than Google this is likely due to Amazon's choice to keep some of the computing on the echo device itself while Google's devices are mostly cloud reliant related to lights Alexa has a cool feature called brief mode withbrief mode in response to your query Alexa will just give you a couple ofmusical notes instead of its normal response to your query this is usefulfor situations where I'll turn on the lights and don't need an assistant tobsay okay turning on your lights every single time here's what that lookslike turn on the lights shopping with Alexa is something I foundmyself doing a lot more than I thought I would now you can't actually see what you're shopping for with the echo like you canwith an echo show because it has a display with the echo there is nodisplay but what Amazon and Alexa do is when you try to buy something with anbecho it will use your Amazon purchase history to make recommendations for youand this is just a very smart feature if you're someone like me who buys a lot on Amazon and a lot of everyday items like batteries or toilet paper let's just sayfor example you're buying toilet paper I can just shout out my echo to buy moretoilet paper and then Alexa is going to say based on your Amazon order history bhere's what we recommend and I'll recommend the toilet paper I have bought previously and then give me the price and I can buy it it just makes theexperience very smooth and just very easy to buy with your voice you ofcourse will get a notification on your phone when you buy something throughAlexa so you can double-check and make sure that it is ordering the right thingand if it's not you can quickly cancel it but most of the time I found thatAlexa's recommendations based on my order history are just spot-onone nice thing I liked over the holidays related to shopping were the delivery notifications that the echo gives you during the holiday season Amazon wouldnot tell me what the delivery was just in case because it didn't want to spoilany holiday gifts arriving to my house another Alexa feature I found veryuseful was the drop-in feature with drop-in you can listen into an Alexa device in your residence either from another Alexa device or yoursmartphone it basically turns all of your Alexa devices in your residence toan intercom system and it works really well you can also use the Alexa app onyour phone to drop into an Alexa device as well and the audio quality of thedrop in call was surprisingly decent one area where I wasn't impressed with theaudio quality with the echo and Alexa was when I asked Alexa to play pod castsoddly enough it was typically playing all the podcasts I was asking - -through the Tune in service but the audio quality just sounded bad it wasnot crystal clear like I'm used to playing either through my Google homedevices or just through my Apple podcasts app and the audio qualitythrough the Echo with Tunein was definitely worse than if I just streamt he podcast from my iPhone over to the echo over Bluetooth Alexa also has anannounced feature similar to the Google assistant broadcast feature where youcan play a message across all of your Alexa devices like dinner's ready oryou're going to be running late or if you're out of the shower another Alexa feature that I found myself using a lot is the shopping listfeature with Alexa you can just tell it to add certain items to your shoppinglist and it'll do that but it takes it one step further where you can have different types of shopping lists so let's say that you want to have aseparate target run shopping list from your main shopping list with Alexa you can do that and here's an example method daily cleaner to target run list me thoddaily cleaner added to target run another major feature of Alexa that I found myself using quite a bit is the routines feature with routines Alexawill perform a series of different actions and you can set all of these up within the Alexa app overall the experience is very quick and the appdesign is pretty intuitive it's more snappy and responsive than Google'snow that doesn't mean that the Alexa experience with routines is superior however I have found a few downsides with using Alexa routines the first one being that I cannot figure out how to make a single routine that will bothtrigger from a phrase and a time it seems with Alexa that you can onlycreate a routine that will do one or the other but it will not trigger for both aphrase and a time also I don't like that you can't add additional phrases thatwill trigger the routine like you can with the Google Assistant for yourmorning routine a user may want to use a variety of phrases to trigger theirwakeup such as good morning I'm up let's start the day etc Google's frameworkoverall here seems a bit more flexible than Alexa when it comes to routines nowback to the Alexa app overall I think the app is great and easy to use somespecific things I love about it are that Amazon has an alarm section making iteasy to see all of the alarms you've set on your devices the communicationssection with calling drop in and messages is pretty well organized in themedia section where they have tuned in and audiobooks integrated is anotherfavorite that just makes it really easy to play media on your echo some areas ofthe app do need some improvement especially the area around setting upsmart devices when I set up all of my Philips Hue devices in the Alexa app itwas a real pain I had to add each light one at a time and when you have 20lights to add this takes some time another area of the app that could usesome improvement is choosing which news sources you'd like Alexa to play for youin Alexa's news flash feature news flash can be especially useful whencreating an Alexa routine the news sources are a bit buried in the settingsalso puzzling was why my echo was defaulting to play the New York Timesobituaries as one of my news sources out of the box one other bizarre thing withnew sources specifically is that you can't just choose new ones you have toenable each news source one by one as an Alexis skill before adding it toyour newsflash which just makes no sense I mean why add this extra step over thepast six months I've really enjoyed using my Amazon echo I use it for thingslike music and media playback setting timers controlling my smart home devicesand of course shopping on Amazon and as someone who has both a Google home andan Amazon echo I've gotten to experience both of these platforms advantages anddisadvantages if you are someone like that who's looking and want to comparethe Amazon echo to the Google home we have done a video of that I highlyencourage you to watch it I'll link it here in the video you can click on thecard that pops up and go watch that also drop a link to that video in thedescription below overall I think the Amazon Echo is a solid choice for anyone wanting to bring a smart speaker into their home Amazon's refinements to the second-generation echo over the previous generation have made the device well worth it and have paid off greatly in their design it just makes the device something that I could recommend to almost anyone looking to bring a smart speaker into their home and of course start off a smart home. thanks for reading the blog if you liked it Stay tuned to this website to get notified, so you'll be the first to know whenever I post a new blog. As always, thank you guys for reading this article and I hope to see y'all soon. peace.
Amazon Echo Dot price - 3,499.00
https://amzn.to/2ERXMkG
Comments
Post a Comment