The original Amazon Echo was a weird device. Did anyone really want a speaker with an always-on assistant waiting for your next command? As it turns out, people did—so much so that now there are more speakers, lamps, baby monitors, refrigerators, and (soon) cars that have Amazon's Alexa built in.

But even though Amazon opened up Alexa to other companies to integrate into their products, Amazon hasn't stopped improving the original Echo. The second-generation Echo just came out, and while the most obvious differences lie in the device's design and its reduced price tag, Alexa has gone through a number of changes and improvements as well.

However, if you're familiar with the Echo and Alexa in general, you might be disappointed to find that the new Echo doesn't provide a drastically different experience from the original. But that's OK—the new Echo shows that updated devices don't have to reinvent the wheel to be better than their predecessors.

Design

This is one of the few cases where a new product being stumpier than the original is a good thing. The second-generation Echo is shorter and fatter than its predecessor, essentially reducing its vertical footprint and making it look more similar to a Google Home than before. It still has a cylindrical shape featuring an Amazon logo at the bottom and Alexa's blue light ring around the top's circumference, while the top sports volume, mic off, and Alexa action buttons. After using Harman Kardon's Invoke speaker with Cortana, I missed being able to twist that device's volume adjuster ring to manually raise or lower music volume. I'd love to see a hardware feature like that in the next version of the Echo, but, for now, traditional buttons will have to do.

The new Echo comes in various fabric and wood veneer options, upping the device's style game. The Google Home was the first major device in this category to come out with a partially fabric exterior, which gives the device a friendlier, softer aesthetic while making it look less like a piece of smart home technology. Amazon also offers decorative fabric and wood shells for the new Echo starting at $19 each, so you're not married to the material on the Echo that you buy.

Amazon certainly tried to make the new Echo less tech-like than the original, and it succeeded, although this will likely contribute to fabric-lined smart speakers becoming ubiquitous over the next few years. But lining a device with fabric is not particularly innovative, considering audio manufacturers have been designing regular speakers in this fashion for years.

In the original Echo, Alexa already did a good job of hearing your every command, but now it never misses a beat. The new microphone array makes it nearly impossible for Alexa to miss something you say. The default wake word is "Alexa," but you can change that in the Alexa app to be "Amazon," "Echo," or "Computer." Even when I explained how Alexa worked to others in my apartment, the virtual assistant heard me from across the room. I had to whisper whenever I talked about Alexa in conversation or pull a Harry Potter and refer to it as "She Who Must Not Be Named."

If you aren't in the habit of explaining every new piece of technology in your home to guests, this improved speech recognition is a blessing. Alexa heard all of my commands even when I was across my apartment, speaking in my inside voice. I never had to yell to get it to hear me, making it a truly convenient hands-free device. The more times you have to ask a virtual assistant to do something, the less convenient it is to use—you might as well open your smartphone, tablet, or computer and find what you need yourself. That's never the case with Alexa on the new Echo, and I only wish it could complete multi-layered commands. Instead of saying "Alexa" after every single question, it would be ideal to say, "Alexa, what's the weather in New York today?" and then "How about tomorrow?" when you want to know both today's and the weekend's forecasts.

Sound quality

Amazon improved the internals of the new Echo as well. It has a new speaker with a 0.6-inch upward-firing tweeter, a 2.5-inch downward-firing subwoofer, Dolby audio processing, and a new group of seven far-field microphones. The new Echo sounds better than the original, getting loud enough to fill most of my one-bedroom apartment with clear sound.

However, I preferred the sound quality of the Invoke speaker, which isn't surprising since Harman Kardon knows how to make a good speaker. That device delivered deeper sound and didn't have to hit max volume to fill my entire apartment with music. I always had to pump up the Echo's volume to the max to get it to fill my apartment, and I often had to adjust the volume while listening to podcasts depending on the room I was in. If I stayed in my living room where the Echo lives, I could hear the hosts of the podcasts speaking with no problem. But I regularly put on podcasts while I'm cleaning, cooking, and doing other things around my apartment that don't have me confined to the living room. In those cases, I could barely hear podcasts when I was on the other side of my apartment and the volume wasn't up to the max already.

Music quality is just OK, and the Echo doesn't hold a candle to the Invoke in that respect. While the bass is stronger on the second-generation device than the original, the new Echo still doesn't have the amount of bass I was expecting. Songs with prominent bass lines like The Weeknd's "The Hills" and Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive" fell flat, with bass that didn't have enough power to do them justice. I'd recommend connecting the Echo to another Bluetooth speaker or speaker system you may have to not only make the sound travel farther but get better sound quality in general. If your only music-playing device is your smartphone, however, the Echo will be an upgrade.