Amazon Echo review: Well-equipped, but you’ll want premium accounts

Amazon Echo review in full

I haven’t really taken to digital voice assistants. Whenever I’ve used Siri, Cortana or Google Now, they either don’t work properly or they haven’t proved useful enough to become an integral part of my life. Ultimately, they’re a bit of a faff, with it usually being quicker for me to type a query into Google or open up a relevant app. It doesn’t help that I feel like an idiot barking orders at my phone.

Truth be told, talking to the Amazon Echo, which offers Alexa voice commands and smart speaker functionality, continues to make me feel a little silly. And yet, this is the first time that I’ve been convinced by any voice assistant; Amazon Echo not only works well, but it does so much more than its phone-based rivals.

Amazon Echo review: Design

For now, though, Echo is the only smart home assistant you can buy right now, and it’s pretty darn impressive. Rather than relying on the microphones inside your phone, Echo is a proper, 360-degree speaker that uses Amazon’s far-field voice-recognition technology to help listen through the noise of everyday life. It intelligently filters out general household chatter to deliver news, calendar updates, music, traffic information, sports results and provides answers to various questions on demand. It can struggle to perform with loud background music, or when the phone is ringing (although it heard me once I raised my voice), but for the most part, it responds quickly, and on the first time of asking.

^ You can also control Echo via its rotating volume ring and two physical buttons (one to put it on mute, and another to start listening)

This is no doubt due to the Echo’s seven dedicated microphones. Six are placed at equal intervals around the top of the speaker and one in the middle, enabling it to hear you from every direction. It means that the unit can be placed either in the centre of a room or off to the side without jeopardizing its listening abilities. You can tell it’s working, too: the blue light ring along the top of the unit will change to a lighter shade of blue around the relevant microphone when it’s listening to you, giving you a neat indication that it knows where you are.

Amazon Echo review: Features

It’s easy to setup, too. While you’ll mainly be interacting with Echo via voice commands, there’s also an Alexa app that acts as Echo’s main control centre. Here, you’ll be able to connect Echo to your home network and set your wake word, which you’ll need to say every time you want to interact with it. It’s “Alexa” by default, but you can also switch it to Amazon or Echo if you prefer.

The app provides a complete rundown of each and every request you’ve asked Alexa, as well as several different menu screens for managing Echo’s various functions. There’s a Now Playing list for when you’re listening to music, a Music and Books tab for setting up Prime Music, Spotify (Premium members only, I’m afraid), TuneIn Radio and Audible, options for setting a timer and alarm, a Skills list (more on that shortly), and a Smart Home menu. You can also peruse the Shopping and To-Do lists that you’ve dictated to your Echo.

The Smart Home menu can be used to control compatible smart thermostats and smart light bulbs, and there’s support for Nest, Netatmo, Samsung SmartThings, Honeywell, Hive, Tado, TP-Link’s Kasa, and LIFX lightbulbs. I haven’t been able to test Echo as a smart home controller yet, but I’ll update this review as soon as I’ve had the opportunity to put it through its paces.

Amazon Echo review: Skills

Even if you don’t have any smart home gadgetry, Echo still has a pretty impressive feature set, and its Skills list allows you to further expand its abilities. Think of these as additional apps it can use. You’re limited to what’s available in Amazon’s Skill store, of course, but there’s a decent selection available.

For instance, the National Rail skill will let you check in on your commute, while the Guardian, Telegraph, Daily Mail and Sky News skills will be able to provide brief new headline summaries from your favourite newspaper. There’s also a Radioplayer skill, recipe tutorials from Jamie Oliver, and Just Eat support, where you can ask Alexa to simply re-order your last Just Eat meal. There’s also a Skyscanner Flight Search for checking flights, Laundrapp and Uber, to name just a few.

It isn’t perfect, though; in my opinion it’s still missing support for a few key services. Avid Evernote or Google Keep users, for instance, will be disappointed to learn that you can only use Amazon’s shopping and to-do lists. There’s always hope that a Keep or Evernote skill might become available in the future. After all, if it can tap into Google Calendar as your main schedule and appointment tool, then hopefully Keep integration won’t be too far behind.

Amazon Echo review: Sound quality

Echo is also a competent 360-degree Bluetooth speaker. Its sleek, cylindrical design lends itself well to projecting music around the room, and its 2in tweeter and 2.5in woofer work well together to produce a clean, balanced sound. It can be quite neutral in tone, but that isn’t a bad thing. It’s neither too warm or too boomy in rock and pop songs, voices are clear and intelligible, and music sounds pleasingly crisp and detailed.

Busy orchestral works didn’t fare quite so well, with instruments becoming muddled at higher volume levels, but it’s certainly no worse than other £150-£200 Bluetooth speakers I’ve listened to, such as Panasonic’s £170 SC-All05. Likewise, Lang Lang’s rendition of Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 was perhaps a touch restrained at times, sounding a little soft in places as opposed to being tight and controlled, but this is a solid performance for the money.

Amazon Echo review: Using Echo

The key to using Alexa well, though, is learning how to talk to it properly. While it’s certainly very good at picking up natural rhythms of speech, such as “Alexa, how’s my commute looking?” or “Alexa, what’s the news this morning?”, there are times when you still have to be quite specific.

For instance, to get news from The Guardian (because it’s a skill rather than built-in), you have to ask Alexa to open The Guardian and then go through its instructions. Likewise, it can sometimes mistake words or phrases for others – “news” instead of “Muse”, or “lifeline” instead of “Lang Lang”.

Trying to get Alexa to restart a particular album can be quite tricky too. “Alexa, restart” will work if you’re already playing a song, but other times the same command will only repeat that particular song. “Alexa, replay this album” also tends to repeat only the song. There are a few commands in the “Things to Try” section of the Alexa app, to be fair, but it isn’t an exhaustive list.

Of course, once you’ve figured out the quirks, it becomes second nature, as you’ll already know how to phrase things correctly. It just takes a while – especially if, like me, you’re used to having a lot of information in front of you on a screen the whole time.

Remembering what you do and don’t have in your music library off the top of your head, for example, is quite a different thing to just clicking on a playlist on your PC. However, at least Prime members have the added advantage of being able to listen to anything available on Prime Music as backup if it isn’t something they’ve already bought.

Amazon Echo review: Verdict

So will Echo be staying put in my home? Maybe. It’s certainly easier to use than other voice assistants I’ve tried in the past, and the fact it’s already sitting there on a shelf means I don’t have to spend time getting my phone out to check the news or weather; I can simply ask a question and Echo will give me an answer. It’s also a pretty good speaker, and simply voicing my playlist requests is much simpler than trying to connect a laptop or phone over Bluetooth.

The real test will be how it functions as a smart home controller, since its potential to draw together all these fairly disparate services could be one of Echo’s greatest achievements if it does it right. As mentioned previously, I’ve yet to test Echo with any smart home kit, but I’ll update this review accordingly once I’ve been able to do so.^ The Echo Dot is a much smaller, cheaper version of Echo, which you can use together with the main unit

And once Amazon launches its smaller, £50 2nd-Gen Echo Dot devices on 20 October, you’ll be able to use Echo from anywhere in your home, further extending its appeal. These are smaller, cut-down versions of Echo without the built-in speaker, but you can still use them to send audio to other speakers by pairing them over Bluetooth or using an auxiliary cable. I’ll be adding my thoughts on Echo Dot once review samples are available.

Amazon’s Echo certainly does plenty right. You’ll get more out of it as a Prime customer – and a Spotify Premium account holder, for that matter – but if you like the idea of having a virtual butler at your beck and call to manage your shopping list, read your kids audio books, play music, and generally have something to show off to your friends, then Echo is well worth its £150 asking price – especially if all you want is a fairly cheap Bluetooth speaker to put in your living room.