Smart speakers are the popular trend in the home automation and entertainment space. Google and Amazon are two popular brands, offering smart speakers. Last year, Amazon announced a range of Alexa-enabled speakers – the Echo Dot, Echo and the Echo Plus. These were simple looking yet powerful speakers with a variety of features.
The Echo Spot is Amazon’s newly launched smart speaker and the main highlight of the Spot is its touchscreen display. It is Amazon’s first speaker to sport a display, priced at Rs. 12,999*. The speaker features a traditional alarm clock design. It is a beautiful looking speaker packed to the rim with features. We have our hands on the Amazon Echo Spot and we’re going to see how well it performs. Let’s find what makes the Echo Spot different from the existing Echo speakers and also test its performance.
Design and Build
The Amazon Echo Spot is a compact speaker, which fits anywhere in your home. It has a spherical body with a 2.5-inch circular display, fitted at a slightly upward-facing angle. This lets you read and watch content even if you were to be standing or sitting. There is a camera placed just above the screen, for video calling.
The Spot has a flat, rubberised bottom to ensure that the speaker doesn’t slide or move around while playing any bass-heavy music at high volumes since the speaker grill faces the bottom. The speaker has very minimal controls. On the top are two volume control buttons and one button to toggle the microphones and camera. Just below, is a power port to power the speaker and a 3.5mm audio output for connecting headphones or external speakers. Besides this, the Spot has a 4 microphone array at the top.
The Echo Spot is compact and lightweight. It weighs just 419 grams and is easy to move around. The speaker is made up of matte-finished hard plastic. The Spot we tested was the black model. There is also a white variant available. The Amazon Echo Spot can perfectly blend with your living room, bedroom or even in your kitchen.
Features
The main highlight of the Amazon Spot is its small touchscreen display. This tiny screen is bright and clear. Even the viewing angles are really good. The Spot supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11n, which means you can connect this speaker to other Bluetooth devices and Wi-Fi enabled devices such as phones, tablets, laptops and TVs. There is of course, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant that is at the heart of this product and responds to your voice commands.
Amazon claims that the speaker uses far-field voice recognition technology. This means the Spot can hear you from a distance. Our results of trying this are described in the performance section below.
There is a front-facing camera you can use to make video calls, to friends who also use the Echo Spot. Though the small screen is great for calls, it may not be great for reading purposes. You could also use this speaker in your kitchen to watch cooking videos.
Performance
The Amazon Echo Spot is by far, the most interesting speaker from the range of Echo speakers. Unlike other Echo speakers, you don’t necessarily have to use your smartphone to setup the Amazon Spot. The screen of the Amazon Spot makes the setup a lot easier. When prompted for the Wi-Fi password, the Spot’s touchscreen keyboard is very useful for entering credentials. A person with broad fingertips might find it difficult to type since it is a very small keyboard.
To communicate with the Echo Spot, one needs to use a wake word such as “Alexa”, “Echo”, “Amazon” or “Computer”. When setting up the speaker, you have to set a wake word you are likely to use most often. We also installed the Alexa app in our phones to set up the speaker, but didn’t need to use it during the setup process. The app is available for both, Android and iPhone (and iPad) users and is useful when you want to make fine tweaks to speaker settings or if you want to sync photos from your phone to the speaker.
Once set up, the Spot was capable of answering all our questions. It gave us insights on weather forecast, highlights of the day, played songs, helped set alarms and reminders, etc. The speaker performs really well on a strong internet connection, else it takes time to understand and respond to commands. Testing the far-field technology, we didn’t had any problem speaking to the Amazon Spot. In a quiet room, the performance is a lot better.
The interface of the Spot is simple to use. Scrolling from top to bottom on the screen gives you access to all the speaker’s settings. The font size is very big and is not adjustable if you prefer using small fonts. It might have been designed intentionally so text is readable from a distance. The default screen displays a clock face. You can choose from a collection of clock faces and background themes. You can also use photos from your phone’s gallery as a clock face. To do this, you have to first sync photos using the Alexa app on your phone.
Besides this, you can use the Echo Spot to book a cab, purchase products online and even control other Alexa-enabled devices at home. We tried connecting the Echo Spot to the Fire TV connected to one of our TVs. The connection was really quick, but we were not able to use voice commands on the speaker to control the Fire TV content. We had to use the Fire TV remote instead.
The Amazon Echo Spot lets you make video calls to others using the Amazon Echo Spot too. Video call requests are also sent to the recipient’s smartphone using the Alexa app.
The sound quality of the Echo Spot is good, though not perfect. Even though the speaker has a down firing speaker, it is loud enough to fill a small room. We played a number of songs on it and noticed that the Echo Spot wasn’t exactly great for bass-heavy music. It sounded slightly off compared to the Echo and Echo Plus. For a true music fan, audio quality can be a sort of compromise with the Echo Spot.
Verdict
The Amazon Echo Spot is a new addition to the line of Amazon Echo smart speakers. The speaker is really impressive in design. Having a touch screen in a portable speaker is new. It is small, but of great help if you going to use it on your office desk, or bedside. It’s good that the speaker lets you make video calls but you might not use it often, since video calling is restricted only to those using Amazon Echo devices. If sound quality is your first preference, the Echo Spot may fall short. The Echo or Echo Plus might be better equipped for those needs.
