this is it the device that started it all the Amazon Echo was the first true
smart speaker to come out onto the market and become widely adopted and
very successful now we've had one for over the past six months now and in this
video we're going to dive in and see how it's held up over the past six months
what features make the Amazon echo stand out and what features we've used the
most over the past six months let's dive in first let's look at the design the
Amazon echo that I bought is a second-generation refurbished Echo the
second-generation Echo comes with improved sound over the first generation
as well as a new seven count far-field microphone array at the top these
microphones and Amazon's beamforming technology allowed the Echo to clearly
hear you no matter where you are in a room or how loud the environment is what
a really cool thing about this design is that when you say the wake word the Echo
will light up with the brightest part of the ring near the microphone that heard
your voice the best in my experience the echo has been able to hear me with just
a faint whisper or over very loud music it's performance has been comparable if
not better to a Google Home speaker now speaking of Google many of you out there
who are familiar with our channel may be asking yourselves right now like hey
wait a minute aren't you that Google guy yes I've done many videos on the Google
assistant and Google home devices and I have chosen Google assistant devices as
the predominant devices in my residence however that doesn't mean I don't enjoy
my echo or Alexa but for this video I will be focusing on the echo and Alexa
but I will bring in Google into the conversation when it's relevant so let's
get back to the Echo and its external design one of the things I want to talk
about is the echos trademarked blue ring when I was first deciding which smart
speaker to get a few years back the blue ring on the Echo just looked a little to
space-age for me compared to the Google home that's at least what I thought at
the time after living with the echo for over six
months now I have to say I quite liked it it does look a bit space-age and
futuristic sure but Amazon's execution and design here really stand out I
really like the way the ring lights up from the back to the front of the device
and how Amazon uses different colored rings to symbolise different things my
favorite color is yellow which I'm now conditioned to be excited anytime I see
my echo glow yellow since I know that's my cue that something from Amazon has
just been delivered one thing I really like about the Echo is its audio quality
especially with music playback I found that its audio quality is a little bit
crisper than my Google home and it's bass is more finely tuned Amazon also
has a leg up over Google currently as the echo is now able to play both Apple
music and Spotify although it doesn't link to YouTube music or Google Play
like the Google home does Amazon has also gotten better in its design of Echo
devices to match the aesthetic of different rooms the mesh fabric they use
feels a little bit more premium than the first-generation Echo and just looks
better you can also get different colored echoes which I like so I just
opted for the black one since it matched the colors of the room that I was
planning to put in it well the design of the smart speaker is good it's not the
thing that makes people fall in love with their echo devices and that's
really in part because of Alexa the smart assistant on the Amazon Echo now
as I said before I used the Google assistant predominantly throughout my
home in all of my smart devices but over the past six months I have challenged
myself to use the Google assistant and Alexa 50/50 and this has given me some
really important observations one both of these assistants do very similar
things however there are quite a few and important advantages that Alexa has over
its competition here are a few observations right off the bat the echo
is faster at controlling my smart lights than Google this is likely due to
Amazon's choice to keep some of the computing on the echo device itself
while Google's devices are mostly cloud reliant related to lights Alexa has a
cool feature called brief mode with brief mode in response to your query
Alexa will just give you a couple of musical notes instead of its normal
response to your query this is useful for situations where I'll turn on the
lights and don't need an assistant to say okay turning on your lights
every single time here's what that looks like turn on the lights
shopping with Alexa is something I found myself doing a lot more than I thought I
would now you can't actually see what you're
shopping for with the echo like you can with an echo show because it has a
display with the echo there is no display but what Amazon and Alexa do is
when you try to buy something with an echo it will use your Amazon purchase
history to make recommendations for you and this is just a very smart feature if
you're someone like me who buys a lot on Amazon and a lot of everyday items like
batteries or toilet paper let's just say for example you're buying toilet paper I
can just shout out my echo to buy more toilet paper and then Alexa is going to
say based on your Amazon order history here's what we recommend and I'll
recommend the toilet paper I have bought previously and then give me the price
and I can buy it it just makes the experience very smooth and just very
easy to buy with your voice you of course will get a notification on your
phone when you buy something through Alexa so you can double-check and make
sure that it is ordering the right thing and if it's not you can quickly cancel
it but most of the time I found that Alexa's recommendations based on my
order history are just spot-on one nice thing I liked over the holidays
related to shopping were the delivery notifications that the echo gives you
during the holiday season Amazon would not tell me what the delivery was just
in case because it didn't want to spoil any holiday gifts arriving to my house
another Alexa feature I found very useful was the drop-in
feature with drop-in you can listen in to an Alexa device in your residence
either from another Alexa device or your smartphone it basically turns all of
your Alexa devices in your residence to an intercom system and it works really
well you can also use the Alexa app on your phone to drop into an Alexa device
as well and the audio quality of the drop in call was surprisingly decent one
area where I wasn't impressed with the audio quality with the echo and Alexa
was when I asked Alexa to play podcasts oddly enough it was typically playing
all the podcasts I was asking - - through the Tunein service but the
audio quality just sounded bad it was not crystal clear like I'm used to
playing either through my Google home devices or just through my Apple
podcasts app and the audio quality through the Echo with Tunein was
definitely worse than if I just stream the podcast from my iPhone over to the
echo over Bluetooth Alexa also has an announced feature similar to the Google
assistant broadcast feature where you can play a message across all of your
Alexa devices like dinner's ready or you're going to be running late or if
you're out of the shower another Alexa feature that I found
myself using a lot is the shopping list feature with Alexa you can just tell it
to add certain items to your shopping list and it'll do that but it takes it
one step further where you can have different types of shopping lists so
let's say that you want to have a separate target run shopping list from
your main shopping list with Alexa you can do that and here's an example method
daily cleaner to target run list method daily cleaner added to target run
another major feature of Alexa that I found myself using quite a bit is the
routines feature with routines Alexa will perform a series of different
actions and you can set all of these up within the Alexa app overall the
experience is very quick and the app design is pretty intuitive it's more
snappy and responsive than Google's now that doesn't mean that the Alexa
experience with routines is superior however I have found a few downsides
with using Alexa routines the first one being that I cannot figure out how to
make a single routine that will both trigger from a phrase and a time it
seems with Alexa that you can only create a routine that will do one or the
other but it will not trigger for both a phrase and a time also I don't like that
you can't add additional phrases that will trigger the routine like you can
with the Google Assistant for your morning routine a user may want to use a
variety of phrases to trigger their wakeup such as good morning I'm up let's
start the day etc Google's framework overall here seems a bit more flexible
than Alexa when it comes to routines now back to the Alexa app overall I think
the app is great and easy to use some specific things I love about it are that
Amazon has an alarm section making it easy to see all of the alarms you've set
on your devices the communications section with calling drop in and
messages is pretty well organized in the media section where they have tuned in
and audiobooks integrated is another favorite that just makes it really easy
to play media on your echo some areas of the app do need some improvement
especially the area around setting up smart devices when I set up all of my
Philips Hue devices in the Alexa app it was a real pain I had to add each light
one at a time and when you have 20 lights to add this takes some time
another area of the app that could use some improvement is choosing which news
sources you'd like Alexa to play for you in Alexa's news flash feature
news flash can be especially useful when creating an Alexa routine the news
sources are a bit buried in the settings also puzzling was why my echo was
defaulting to play the New York Times obituaries as one of my news sources out
of the box one other bizarre thing with new sources specifically is that you
can't just choose new ones you have to enable each news source one by one
as an Alexis skill before adding it to your newsflash which just makes no sense
I mean why add this extra step over the past six months I've really enjoyed
using my Amazon echo I use it for things like music and media playback setting
timers controlling my smart home devices and of course shopping on Amazon and as
someone who has both a Google home and an Amazon echo I've gotten to experience
both of these platforms advantages and disadvantages if you are someone like
that who's looking and want to compare the Amazon echo to the Google home we
have done a video of that I highly encourage you to watch it I'll link it
here in the video you can click on the card that pops up and go watch that also
drop a link to that video in the description below overall I think the
Amazon Echo is a solid choice for anyone wanting to bring a smart speaker into
their home Amazon's refinements to the second-generation echo over the previous
generation have made the device well worth it and have paid off greatly in
their design it just makes the device something that I could recommend to
almost anyone looking to bring a smart speaker into their home and of course
start off a smart home thanks for watching our 6 Month Later review of
the Amazon Echo smart speaker tell us what you thought of the video and the
comments below and if you liked the video click that thumbs up button and
subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more videos like this one well
thanks again for watching for 6 Months Later I'm Josh Teder
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