Amazon Echo Dot - Review and Demo of Alexa Voice Assistant/ Video

Using different voice assistants

When it comes to the voice assistants we usually have two options. The first one is installed on our phone or laptop (basically portable), and the second one is fixed.

I used to use Apple assistant Siri a lot on my iPhone, and my first experience was unforgettable. Siri could call people from my contact list, read numbers aloud and google anything I needed. But few weeks after I realised that it is not enough. The amount of functions was limited and did not cover most of my needs.

So I decided to take the next step and buy Echo Dot from Amazon which can control your smart home gadgets and integrate with a lot of applications. After all, it is 2017 and who doesn't want to turn the light bulb with the voice?

Amazon Echo Dot

Echo Dot is a smaller version of Amazon Echo. In UK it comes at 49.99 gbp, which I find very reasonable. My grand plan was to buy a Dot for each room in the house and pretend that I have finally conquered Jarvis. Little did I know how undeveloped the assistant was, but despite all the imperfections I encourage you to try this product.

After few days of trying a single Echo Dot ended up on a bedside table. If you have several rooms - you might get the maximum use of it by your bed because you caт use the alarm, news and weather all very fast. I also absolutely love how easy it is to connect Echo Dot to any speakers and synchronise it with different applications. Currently I don't use it as a part of a smart home system, but I do use it everyday. Please check out the video to see the functions that I use everyday.

Here are the lists of things that I enjoy in using Alexa and don't.

Things that Echo can do:

• Create an appointment in the calendar
• Tell you few headlines from the news
• Play music from Spotify
• Buy items from Amazon
• Fill your to-do-list (using an external skill)
• Tell the weather forecast
• Read Wikipedia articles
• Play a sound of rain (using an external skill)

Here is a full list of commands for Alexa. I find it extremely useful and fun. 

Things that Echo cannot do:

• Hear your voice (occasionaly)
• Be turned on and off from your smartphone
• Edit an appointment in the calendar or set its length
• Read a whole Wikipedia article
• Locate you (!). In my case it is a bug so it might be different for your location
• Get a Uber (location bug)
• Check traffic on a route (location bug)
• Be turned off by whispering in the middle of the night :)

I definitely would recomend this device to all gadget lovers out there, but I am not sure if I will buy the new version. Please let me know if there are Google Home users out there, I would love to hear your feedback.