Amazon Echo
SKILFUL LITTLE SPEAKERS
AMAZON WAS THE first to market with a smart speaker back in 2014, but it didn’t actually make its way Down Under until earlier this year with the local launch of the Amazon store.
While the full range of Echo smart speakers isn’t available in Australia — notably, the niftier models with built-in colour displays are absent — there are still more models on offer than the competition, namely the Echo Dot, the Echo, and the Echo Plus. What’s more, Amazon has been in the market long enough to have gone through two iterations of its product range already, with the first two aforementioned speakers now in their second generation.
The number of years that Amazon has had to work on the Echo also means that, in many ways, it’s the most advanced smart speaker of the lot. As well as the standard bread-andbutter voice assistant capabilities that come with every smart speaker, the Echo has access to the Alexa Skills marketplace, which boasts more than 10,000 additional skills that the speakers can perform.
Skills are much like smartphones apps in that they extend the Echo’s base functionality, and while there are plenty of duplicates and duds in that collection (much like you’d find in a smartphone app store), there are a fair few gems in there that let use your voice in novel ways. You can hail an Uber, order a Domino’s pizza, check the surf conditions, and even find out what your bank balance is — although you need to phrase the voice commands exactly right for the Echo to understand what you’re asking for (see page 68 for some examples and techniques).
The Echo also boasts broad support for smart home devices using the aforementioned Skills, but the annoying thing is that some of these aren’t available in Australia. So while you can connect smart home devices from the likes of Philips, LIFX, Logitech, D-Link and Telstra, products from Belkin, Nest, Sonos and others are yet to arrive Down Under.
The premium model in the range, the Echo Plus, comes with a built-in ZigBee hub that theoretically simplifies the process of connecting smart home devices. But many popular gadgets don’t use the ZigBee standard, which renders the built-in hub useless. Worse, devices that are supported — such as the Philips Hue smart lights — don’t have as many features available when connecting them via the ZigBee hub.
Of course, you’ll probably use the Echo most for music playback, and in that regard it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It offers native support for the ever-popular Spotify music streaming service, along with Amazon Music Unlimited and Deezer, and if your preferred platform is something different, you can take advantage of the Echo’s Bluetooth capabilities to stream that music from your mobile device. You just won’t be able to use the Echo’s voice commands to control music playback.
Sound quality is the Echo’s Achilles’ heel. The puck-shaped Echo Dot is notably inferior to the Google Home Mini, and while the regular Echo is capable of a bigger sound than the Google Home, it does distort quite noticeably at the higher volumes. Its saving grace is that all models can connect to external speakers, either wirelessly using Bluetooth or using a 3.5mm audio jack, making them flexible compared to the current competition.
We’re annoyed that Amazon didn’t make all of the Echo’s skills and features available Down Under, but hope this will be rectified soon. In the meantime, a combination of a mature feature set and the ability to connect external speakers directly makes the Echo platform our pick of the bunch.
THERE ARE A FAIR A FEW GEMS IN THERE THAT LET USE YOUR VOICE IN QUITE NOVEL WAYS. YOU CAN HAIL AN UBER, ORDER A DOMINO’S PIZZA, CHECK THE SURF CONDITIONS, AND EVEN FIND OUT WHAT YOUR BANK BALANCE IS.