Hardware

The Fire TV Cube itself is a glossy black box that, aside from the blue ring that lights up when Alexa is listening to you, looks about as nondescript as a bit of home theater kit can be. (It's also not strictly speaking a cube since its sides are different lengths — what gives, Amazon?) I'm not much of a fan of the glossy finish, but it's here for a reason: There's an omnidirectional IR blaster inside that gives the Cube the power to control some of your more traditional, non-smart home theater equipment. You'll find an HDMI-out around back alongside a port for an IR extender and a microUSB port you can use to connect a full-sized ethernet adapter. There's also 16GB of storage inside the box, which is double what you'd get from any other Fire TV.

While most Amazon Echo devices use an array of seven far-field microphones, the Fire TV Cube has eight. The extra mic is said to be helpful for listening for Alexa's wake-words because the Cube is meant to sit much closer to your television and sound system and probably has to deal with more ambient sound than a standard Echo. Amazon says its voice recognition algorithm has been tuned to be more "hostile" to the sounds of movies and television shows, and so far, the Cube has done well at hearing wake-words I've uttered from across the room.

TV, but hands-free

There's a traditional Fire TV remote in the box, but Amazon seems fairly insistent that you can get by just fine without it. So far, that mostly seems to be the case: Once you've breezed through the setup process (complete with jaunty music and a friendly video), you can ask Alexa to play specific shows, search for results within certain genres, switch between multiple inputs and turn on extra hardware like sound bars or receivers. Those latter commands are a great argument for why the Cube needs to exist — it allows for more nuanced control over the mechanics of your TV set.