Amazon Echo (Generation 2)
Who needs a control pad when your voice will do the job?
This is basically Amazon’s answer to the Google Home speaker. Like its competitor, it’s a standalone Wi-Fi speaker with a built-in microphone. As such you’ll need to connect it to a Wi-Fi network, as the voice recognition is done over the cloud, and not internally on the device.
There’s one caveat to this device though; unless your TV directly supports it, and the list of these isn’t huge, you’ll need another TV controlling device such as Logitech’s Harmony Hub to actually control your Home Theatre. And even then, it’s not the greatest experience. While it can fire up apps like Netflix, actually navigating through these apps using your voice is rather painful. It’s not just that the Echo’s voice recognition is a little iffy; you also need to program the hub to be able to scroll through each app. This is a long and annoying process, but it’s also the same issue we found with Google Home. Most of the time we found it easier to simply reach for our Logitech TV keyboard, which is also a far cheaper solution.
On the flipside, the Echo is capable of controlling way more than just your HTPC or smart TV, with a huge variety of smart devices that can be patched into your Wi-Fi network. Want to dim the lights without touching a grubby light switch? Simply ask Alexa to do so – provided you’ve got Smart LED lighting, this device will do it all.
But as a pure HTPC or smart TV controller. Hmm, not so great, though with time and updates it could certainly come into it’s own as a useful HTPC device.