Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2020
I bought this mostly to supplant my 3rd gen Echo Dot (actually I'm moving that to another room) - also the fact that the Echo was on sale at a reasonably modest price didn't hurt either. For this price tag though, I would expect this Echo to slightly over-perform on 2 latest generation Echo Dots (as of current price, this Echo is a little over twice the cost of an Echo Dot) - does it deliver on this front though? My opinion is somewhat of a mixed bag on this. Keeping in mind I've only had this Echo for the weekend, but I certainly wouldn't say that it "overperforms" versus 2 Echo Dots. At best it probably has the power - in terms of speaker decibel and voice range, I suppose - of 1 and 1/2 Echo Dots. So possibly in the end I would peg it as worth 1.5 echo dots, when costwise its definitely around 2.5 echo dots. However, I think I wouldn't grade this Echo harshly purely for that reason. The speaker volume is still fine, and I'm not sure about the hearing range as that was a concern of mine going in - our house living room is somewhat sprawling, and sometimes echo dot can't hear me - but on the box I read it listens in a "far-field" range, whatever the heck that means, and overall I would say the hearing range is slightly improved over the echo dot. So already it recuperates on the 1 star that I would otherwise take off for its speaker - I would bring that down to 1/2 star down so far though.
The main minus point to me is the Alexa integration. This is truthfully not a problem with the Echo at all, but with Alexa itself. Alexa is still somewhat primitive, I would liken it to a conversational Neanderthal human I suppose, so it doesn't really do many useful things for me at present. Of the things it can do, it's sometimes frustrating to use it. To give a few examples:
* It commonly misinterprets what I would say, perhaps of my accent (I am to blame here I suppose, as well?) even though I have set up my voice profile on Alexa app. I've also set up voice profile of another household member, but when they confirm it with "Alexa, do you know who I am?" it responds with "I'm not sure, but you're on <my name>'s account". I understand it's a continuously learning and evolving software or something, so I suppose that doesn't really warrant any stars to be taken off at this point, at least by itself. The real kicker is it responds really stupidly to some common questions you might ask a (presumably) smart AI. For instance, we were worried our dog might have a concussion as she hit her head while running around in a dog park. "Alexa, what's a concussion?" got us some drawling utter rubbish about a movie or some piece of entertainment which we don't want to know. Follow this by an "Alexa, stop that", wait 2 more boring second, and follow that up with a slightly reworded "Alexa, what's a medical concussion?" and finally it spit it out a (reasonably) favorable answer. It still didn't give us a short abbreviated and useful headline though - Google on my phone had it beat in that regards. Another mildly annoying thing is it prefixed its long drawn out response with a "here's, what I found, on <source>". Alexa, goddammit it, it's a simple question, I don't honestly care where you find it. I suppose this might be useful in the interests of complete transparence, but often times I wouldn't care to hear it. I mean, I can just whip out my phone and type in "concussion" on Google and scroll to read the headline under the top result by the time she gets to the part of it that i want to hear. I would take off 0.5 stars for just Alexa being Alexa and inconveniencing me by either misinterpreting or just ignoring me when I ask her something (this happened to someone else in my household as well). Sometimes blue light goes when I say "Alexa" and it immediately turns off, sending everything else I say that follows the wake word into a black hole of oblivion, for all intents and purposes. I would just hope it gets a little more intuitive, and less stressful, to use Alexa voice control in the future.
* I set up an Alexa-sourced contact (in the Alexa app) and gave it the name, shall we say for an example sake, of "Joodas" (this is based on how you'd pronounce a name, here 'Judas'). I have an existing contact in my phone under the name "Judas Johnson Barber Shop" (just a fake name, but assume it's just anything starting with the key word). After I set this up, when I speak "Alexa, call Joodas" (again, spelled how you'd pronounce it) to call the new Alexa-sourced contact, I would expect it to follow through on this unambiguous command without requiring any confirmation of any sort - right? Unfortunately, Alexa is not very bright on this. Instead, it asks me, "Judas Johnson Barber Shop, right?" I'm a little pissed here, because I just created a contact that is spelled exactly how you'd pronounce 'Judas'. But Alexa, under no circumstances, will ever use that contact - it's fixated on my old "Judas Barber Shop" contact for some reason. So fast forward, me trying a couple things. I added an underscore to my existing phone contact, (foolishly) thinking it would stop Alexa from following the trial that really leads nowhere good. Instead, in response to my request to call Joodas, she instead prompts, "underscore Judas Johnson Barber Shop, right?" I'm slowly but incrementally getting a bit more pissed, and someone else suggests me to reorganize the words in the contact itself. So yeah, a little bit painful (and not my ideal solution at all), but I rename the said phone contact to "Johnson Judas Barber Shop". FINALLY, Alexa starts responding as expected when I say to call Joodas. However, I would note she does prompt me to confirm: "Joodas, right?" Yes, my dear Alexa, there is only one contact in my phone by that name, and I recently added it to the Alexa app itself (not even as a nickname, just the name of the contact itself!) So yeah, all in all, not my greatest experience - or my greatest moment either, judging from how I handled it. I would translate that to maybe 0.2 off my rating on this.
* Setting cooking timer with "Alexa, set a timer for <duration>" sometimes misfires, requiring Alexa to reprompt "Ok, for how long?". After timer expires, I realized after a while she does this weird thing where her blue light keeps glowing, and she plays some beep sound really really softly. For the life of me I can't understand why the timer alarm is so soft. I couldn't barely hear it one of the times, but luckily someone else hear it and they cancelled the alarm. I really have no clue why it's so hard to hear it, even on high volume.
* There are a few other issues that we might have experienced but I can't remember off the top my head.
Overall, I would giving this a rating of 3.8 / 5. But for fairness sake I have round it to 4 star, and also as most of my complaints are to Alexa and not the Echo device itself. For the Echo, I would also rate it as a solid 4. Most of the rating that I took off is due to its pricing as I do not believe it is worth 2.5 echo dots as it is currently. However, it's still a solid device and I suppose a little better than the echo dot that we previously had, at least. I don't really notice a huge difference, however. Still, can't really go wrong with a device like the Echo though - I would say that it does well for the features that it is touted to have. Overall, i would rate it as a "meh", but end up saying that in a slightly spirited and uplifting voice, so it's definitely a step up from the 3rd gen echo dot at least.
