Echo dot can prove to be quite useful in your home, and even if you ignore its smart features, it can offer connectivity between your audio devices that you would have to spend at least 3000 Rs ($40). for.
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Music used for sound test:
Track: Alan Walker - Fade [NCS Release]
Music Provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Watch: • Video
Transcript
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Coming to the features, you can really do a tons of things with Alexa. You can download the Alexa app and check out the things that it can do, and if you like them, you can decide whether you should get an Echo Dot, or any other echo speaker.
But the highlights include things like setting alarms and reminders, currency conversion, translation, news, weather, checking out IMDB ratings and other details on movies, and so on.
The most widely used feature would be playing music from Amazon Music, which is really great because Amazon Music is probably the most accessible streaming service in India, it has 85% of the music that I listen to in Both English and Hindi, and of course there are other Indian languages too. Another great thing is that you can not only control the volume of your music with your voice, but you can also change tracks, or even skip forward or backward in a track while it’s playing.
The echo dot also includes access to services like Saavn, Aaj Tak, Zomato, and OLA Cabs so it is very well prepared for Indian Market. It also has some just for fun features to please Indian customers like Navratri Rap. (Alexa, do navratri rap)
A big use of having a smart home speaker is to be able to control your smart home devices, there are smart plugs, lights, thermostats etc. that you can control with Alexa, if you are into that. I wasn't able to connect my Yeelight, because of some bugs with the Yeelight 'Skill', but you can basically control the brightness and set the color of any smart lighting, and can also group different lights for different rooms and control them all at once.
If you were wondering what a Skill is, it is just like Apps on your phone, but they run only on Alexa (or Alexa app on your phone). Having an App store for Alexa gives it tons of functionality, you can search in a wide catalogue of skills, and chances are, that you will be able to find most things that you want to accomplish with Alexa.
And if you don't find something that you want, you can also create routines, where you can basically program Alexa to do a set of skills when you say particular sentences. This is surprisingly easy to use, and even people not familiar with automation will be able to program Alexa routines easily, so Kudos to Amazon for that. And a lot of time, Alexa actually tells you how to set its features, which is quite helpful.
Alexa of course has very good integration with Amazon services, so you can make Alexa read audio books from Kindle. Alexa reads the books well for a smart assistant (Alexa, start reading harry potter), but of course, the quality is much inferior to actual audio books, the kind which Amazon offers with their Audible service, which isn't available in India.
You can also of course shop on Amazon using Alexa, it will tell you the search results of products that you are looking for, and will also read the specs and price, and you can order it directly from Alexa, and you can also track your orders with it.
You can also call or leave messages for other people who also have an Echo device.
The sound quality on Echo Dot is not that great, it is very loud for its size, but it is only okay for Alexa’s voice, or if you are in a hurry and just want to have a refresher for that song that has been stuck in your head. Here’s a sound test.
The performance is also good, as long as you don’t have a crappy internet connection, it will respond fairly quickly. I found it to be faster than the Alexa app on phone, and even the Google assistant on my phone. But Alexa is not very great at understanding things that have not been programmed well into it. But it will work fine as long as you don’t expect to understand you like actual humans do.
You can also customize the wake word to prevent it from waking up every time some reviewer says Alexa.