Smart speakers can make your home or office feel like magic when they’re set up properly. Speak some simple commands, and your place comes alive, making it feel like something from the future. This might sound a bit overblown, but if you’ve never felt this way about smart home products, or had a similar experience, chances are, you’re not doing it right.
Or you might have not even started yet. So, you want to give a smart speaker a try? Well, there are tons of brands out there, but we’d like to think that Amazon has one of the strongest lineups out right now. And the Echo Dot is a perfect starter speaker with a cute design that blends in with any environment.
Why should I buy the Amazon Echo Dot?
Well, Amazon was one of the earliest to dive into smart home products, and over time, has shown that it can deliver products that are reliable and supported in the long run. The Echo Dot is now in its fifth generation, offering users good value with lots of features at a fair price.
Of course, the discounted price right now makes it an even better deal, coming in at just $40. It can play your favorite music, audiobooks, and podcasts using popular services, like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and more. You can also keep things simple and just connect to devices using Bluetooth.
The speaker can also help with upcoming events, tell you about the weather, set timers, and alarms. Where things really get interesting is how Echo Dot can control other compatible smart devices. So, if you have connected lights, or other devices, you can have Echo Dot activate them.
And since there are many different types of devices that can be controlled, you can get really creative if you want to. Of course, if you don’t want Echo Dot listening all the time, there’s a physical button on the speaker that will deactivate the microphone. It’s a fairly versatile speaker, and with over 190,000 reviews and a 4.7-star rating, we don’t think you can go wrong.
- Audio
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1.73″ front-firing speaker, 4 microphones
- Power
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Wired, 15W barrel adapter
- Price
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$50
- Connectivity
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Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5
- Voice Assistant
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Alexa
The Amazon Echo (5th gen) may not seem like a big upgrade over its predecessor, but a ton of little quality-of-life improvements make it a much better budget smart speaker. For instance, the Echo Dot 5 now has an accelerometer and a temperature sensor. The accelerometer lets you tap on the speaker’s top for basic actions like pausing music and silencing alarms. The temperature sensor is the more interesting thing. You can make it a part of your various routines to take some automated actions based on your room’s temperature. For example, you can let the Echo Dot turn on the heater when it starts to get chilly indoors. Using the Echo Dot 5 to extend your Wi-Fi signals is also possible if you have an Eero mesh system in your home — that’s a great example of a tightly-knit ecosystem! And as always, the 2022 Echo Dot can easily pair with your existing Echo or other Alexa speakers and even work as an external speaker for your Fire TV stick. Besides these new smart capabilities, Amazon has also upgraded the speaker driver on the Echo Dot 5. It now comes with a new, larger audio driver producing a much bassier sound and cleaner vocals; even the audio output at higher volumes is distortion free. The Echo Dot 5 is definitely a major step up in audio quality over any previous Echo Dots. Many people prefer to keep the Echo Dot on their bedside table or work desk. For places like these, you can pick the Echo Dot with Clock by spending just $10 more, and it will do the job of two devices while taking the space of one.
