Amazon Echo is one of the first devices with Amazon's voice assistant – a rival to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana – which allows you to control music playback just by speaking to it and a whole lot more.
Amazon Echo is three devices in one. It's a voice-controlled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker capable of playing music from Amazon music, a Spotify premium account or a smartphone, tablet or computer connected via Bluetooth.
It's also a smart voice assistant called Alexa that's capable of answering queries, setting timers, doing calculations, telling you the weather or what's in your calendar and other bits you might expect from Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. It also has third-party app integrations that allow users to interact with the National Rail app for train times and other similar services.
Finally, Echo is smart-home controller that can turn devices on and off, set scenes and other internet of things functions just by saying: “Alexa, turn on the living room light.”
All you need to do to activate Echo is say its wake word - Alexa, Echo or Amazon, you get a choice - and it will begin listening to your dulcet tones.
Say “Alexa, play some Tycho” and it will start playing a playlist of tracks from Tycho from Amazon Prime music, presuming you have a Prime account or Amazon Music Unlimited if you’re a subscriber. In the UK you can also listen to music from a Spotify premium account, which can be set to default or be used instead of Prime by just saying “from Spotify” at the end. TuneIn for radio or the Radioplayer are also available if you're just after some general music.
Once music is playing, saying “Alexa, turn up the volume” does what you might expect. The remarkable thing is that the array of mics picks you up even when it is blasting music at full volume. Or in my case, playing music loud enough to drown out the cooker hood extractor fan.
You can skip tracks, of course, switch to radio through TuneIn, or play music via a Bluetooth source. It can do other useful basic things, such as set timers, alarms and tell you the time, which is more useful than you might think if you're cooking.
Alexa has access to a wealth of data too. You can ask it questions, get the weather, the latest news or sport scores, find out when the next game is on or check a calendar that you’ve connected through the Alexa app on your phone. Here is where Echo is both amazing and not quite there.
It can answer more questions correctly than Apple’s Siri in my testing, but can’t quite match the sheer volume of data that Google's Assistant has access to. Alexa will normally understand the question, but doesn't have the answer. It's not like it can simply show you a web search.
Amazon also supports third-party apps called “skills”, which are installed using the Alexa app on your smartphone. Once added, asking Alexa to open or ask the skill a question provides you with all sorts of features.
The National Rail skill can give you an update on your commute via rail, or specific train times. Out of the box Alexa can give you traffic updates for road commutes and the weather, of course. The Tube Status skill does what it says on the tin, but if it's all horrible then the Uber skill can order you a taxi.
There are cocktail skills tha' can read out the ingredients for a Tom Collins. Anything much more complicated than that though and you'll need a pen and paper - at which point you might as well use your phone. The Jamie Oliver skill reads out recipes, but suffers from a similar problem, so it's a lot easier to enable the Just Eat skill and ask Alexa to “ask Just Eat to re-order my last Chinese”.
There are more trivia, fact, joke and other random entertainment skills than you can shake a stick at, while the Sound Machine skill can give you applause on demand for when you need a pat on the back.
Alexa also has integration with Samsung's Smartthings Hub, which means that anything supported by Smartthings, which is basically everything, can be hooked up to the Echo through the Smartthings Hub.
Setting it up is both simple and complicated. Going into the Alexa app and adding skills is easy, so is setting discovery, or you can simply say “Alexa, discover devices” and she'll do as required. They're all listed in the Alexa app, which if you have even just a few smart bulbs can easily produce a massive list.
For instance, each scene available for each bulb is listed as a separate entry. I easily had more than 150 entries in my smart home list with duplication - Hue bulbs showed up once from the Hue skill and again from the Smartthings Hub. You can configure what's visible and what isn't to Alexa within the various skills, or make Alexa forget them directly. You have to do it one-by-one, which is rather time consuming.
The Amazon Echo is a device that once you get into your home you'll find more and more uses for it. The question is really whether it does something that's interesting or useful enough for you to buy it.
It’s a pretty good speaker, but not the best. It has fantastic voice recognition and can hear you from anywhere over anything. It will pretty much always understand what you’re saying but can’t always help you out with it. It has third-party apps for most things and more appear each day.
