Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled smart speaker is finally available in the UK, but was the wait worth it?



The Echo (find here) is one of the first devices with Amazon’s voice assistant – a rival to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana – which allows you to control music playback just by speaking to it and a whole lot more.

What is it?

Ask Alexa for the weather and she’ll tell you what’s what, but the Alexa on your smartphone app will also fire up with more detail. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Echo is three devices in one. It’s a voice-controlled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker capable of playing music from Amazon music, a Spotify premium account or a smartphone, tablet or computer connected via Bluetooth.

It’s also a smart voice assistant called Alexa that’s capable of answering queries, setting timers, doing calculations, telling you the weather or what’s in your calendar and other bits you might expect from Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant. It also has third-party app integrations that allow users to interact with the National Rail app for train times and other similar services.

Finally, Echo is smart-home controller that can turn devices on and off, set scenes and other internet of things functions just by saying: “Alexa, turn on the living room light.”

What does it look like?

The top ring lights up: blue when listening to you; red when muted, which is clearly visible from across the room. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Standing 23.5cm tall with a diameter of 8.4cm, the Echo is a small tower speaker available in black or white. When not active it simply looks like a black perforated tube, but when spoken to a ring of lights up top sparkle to indicate activity, state and whether it’s listening to your barked orders.

In its base are two down-firing speakers - one tweeter and one 2.5in woofer - producing 360-degree audio. At the top are two buttons, one for performing actions and the other for muting the voice recognition. A rotating ring at the top acts as a volume control, but in truth you never need to use it or the action button.

It sounds pretty good for a single 360-degree speaker. It’s not going to please audiophiles or beat a good pair of speakers, but it is fully capable of filling a room with pretty good sound. It’s not quite as good as a Sonos Play 1, which also costs £150, but then it is doing a lot more for the same price.

The real magic is the hidden in the top. An array of seven microphones work in conjunction to do what’s called beam forming – isolating a sound coming from a particular direction by cancelling out all other noise. The mic array means Alexa can hear you even when playing music at full blast, or in my case, from the other end of the kitchen while the washing machine, oven and dishwasher are all going.

I was constantly amazed that it could hear me from the front door, all the way down the other end of my long and narrow terraced house.

What does it do?

The blue ring of lights shows that the Echo is actively listening to you and streaming your speech to the cloud to interpret what you’re trying to say. The white light shows you where the speaker thinks your voice is coming from. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

All you need to do to activate Echo is say its wake word - Alexa, Echo or Amazon, you get a choice - and it will begin listening to your dulcet tones.

Say “Alexa, play some Tycho” and it will start playing a playlist of tracks from Tycho from Amazon Prime music, presuming you have a Prime account or Amazon Music Unlimited if you’re a subscriber. In the UK you can also listen to music from a Spotify premium account, which can be set to default or be used instead of Prime by just saying “from Spotify” at the end. TuneIn for radio or the Radioplayer are also available if you’re just after some general music.

Once music is playing, saying “Alexa, turn up the volume” does what you might expect. The remarkable thing is that the array of mics picks you up even when it is blasting music at full volume. Or in my case, playing music loud enough to drown out the cooker hood extractor fan.

You can skip tracks, of course, switch to radio through TuneIn, or play music via a Bluetooth source. It can do other useful basic things, such as set timers, alarms and tell you the time, which is more useful than you might think if you’re cooking.

If adjusting the volume via voice is a bit of a faff, the top ring twists for instant volume control with the light ring indicating the current level. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Alexa has access to a wealth of data too. You can ask it questions, get the weather, the latest news or sport scores, find out when the next game is on or check a calendar that you’ve connected through the Alexa app on your phone. Here is where Echo is both amazing and not quite there.

It can answer more questions correctly than Apple’s Siri in my testing, but can’t quite match the sheer volume of data that Google’s Assistant has access to. Alexa will normally understand the question, but doesn’t have the answer. It’s not like it can simply show you a web search.

Amazon also supports third-party apps called “skills”, which are installed using the Alexa app on your smartphone. Once added, asking Alexa to open or ask the skill a question provides you with all sorts of features.

The Guardian skill, for instance, can read you the latest headlines from the Guardian, play podcasts and give you a flash-style update on what’s going on. You can navigate sections and more.

The National Rail skill can give you an update on your commute via rail, or specific train times. Out of the box Alexa can give you traffic updates for road commutes and the weather, of course. The Tube Status skill does what it says on the tin, but if it’s all horrible then the Uber skill can order you a taxi.

There are cocktail skills that can read out the ingredients for a Tom Collins. Anything much more complicated than that though and you’ll need a pen and paper - at which point you might as well use your phone. The Jamie Oliver skill reads out recipes, but suffers from a similar problem, so it’s a lot easier to enable the Just Eat skill and ask Alexa to “ask Just Eat to re-order my last Chinese”.

There are more trivia, fact, joke and other random entertainment skills than you can shake a stick at, while the Sound Machine skill can give you applause on demand for when you need a pat on the back.

Hit the mute button and the microphones are electrically disconnected. As long as the light ring and mute button are lit up in red, Echo and Alexa cannot hear you. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

The longer I had Echo in my kitchen the more I got used to it just being there and being able to do things quicker and more easily than I could, but it took until I was alone in the house, midway through a DIY project, hands full of tools, covered in rubbish, bent in an awkward position to reach something and needing a calculation to proceed that I realised that voice assistants in the home were the future.

I couldn’t reach my phone, I was tired and even on a good day I wouldn’t be able to tell you what 57.5 divided by five was. So I simply shouted - I was pretty stressed at this point - “Alexa, what’s 57.5 divided by five” and from across the room out she bellowed “11.5”. I marked and I cut and the job was done.

Could a phone have done that? Of course. Could it has heard me talking through furniture and at the other end of the room? Probably not. Would I have done that in public, absolutely not, but the home is the perfect place for a voice assistant.

Smart Home

Your devices, groups and smart home skills are all configured through the Alexa app. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

Arguably the most interesting set of skills for Alexa are the ones for integrating various smart-home devices. There’s nothing quite as cool as walking into a room and saying “Alexa, lights on in the kitchen” and it happening as if by magic.

Of course, it depends on which devices you already have or are intending to buy. Skills exist for Nest, Hive, Honeywell, Tado, LightwaveRF and LIFX; the Echo works out of the box Philips Hue and soon on Sonos too, although there’s a Hue skill available for more advanced features such as scene control.

Alexa also has integration with Samsung’s Smartthings Hub, which means that anything supported by Smartthings, which is basically everything, can be hooked up to the Echo through the Smartthings Hub.

Setting it up is both simple and complicated. Going into the Alexa app and adding skills is easy, so is setting discovery, or you can simply say “Alexa, discover devices” and she’ll do as required. They’re all listed in the Alexa app, which if you have even just a few smart bulbs can easily produce a massive list.

For instance, each scene available for each bulb is listed as a separate entry. I easily had more than 150 entries in my smart home list with duplications - Hue bulbs showed up once from the Hue skill and again from the Smartthings Hub. You can configure what’s visible and what isn’t to Alexa within the various skills, or make Alexa forget them directly. You have to do it one-by-one, which is rather time consuming.

The Echo is available in black or white. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian

You also have to consider what you call all your devices. You have to be able to say them easily and Alexa has to be able to understand what you’re on about. Numbering lights one, two and three in each room doesn’t work well, for instance. If you tell Alexa to turn off the bedroom light, but you have more than one light in the room called bedroom light, she will ask which one.

The easiest thing to do is to call each light or device something separate and then group them together within the Alexa app. I grouped all my devices into a massive group called “house” . This meant I could walk out the door and shout “Alexa, house off” and everything would turn off.

I also created groups for individual rooms, upstairs, downstairs and the hallway, so that they were easy to command for each place in my house. The groups overlapped so that I could command more than one rooms’ lights in one go. It took a bit of thought to work out what was going to be easy to remember and say, but was well worth it.

Observations

Alexa differentiates between the singular and plural of words - light versus lights elicits different responses

Talking to it like a human gets better results than like a robot in sentence structure

The Alexa app on your phone is relatively slow - use it where you have solid Wi-Fi

House guests were amazed by Echo - it is definitely a statement piece in a house

You can buy products from Amazon via voice, which works just fine if you know what you’re after, but it’s a lot easier to just pull out a smartphone in most instances

Price

The Amazon Echo is available in either black or white for £149.99 (buy here).

The only other similar competitor is Google Home, which is not yet available in the UK, but costs $129 (£104) in the US.

Verdict

The Amazon Echo is a device that once you get into your home you’ll find more and more uses for it. The question is really whether it does something that’s interesting or useful enough for you to buy it.

It’s a pretty good speaker, but not the best. It has fantastic voice recognition and can hear you from anywhere over anything. It will pretty much always understand what you’re saying but can’t always help you out with it. It has third-party apps for most things and more appear each day.

Is voice the best way to access everything? No. Is it the most convenient for a lot of things? Absolutely. The potential privacy implications of having an internet-connected listening device in your home aside, having something that understands you and just does what you need nine times out of 10 is brilliant.

The Echo is the best voice assistant-come-speaker you can buy in the UK at the moment. But it won’t be the only one in the near future. Google’s Home has the advantage of access to more data than anything else on the planet, but data is only one part of the equation. Being able to hear and understand you every time is the most important thing for a voice-only object and Amazon has absolutely nailed that with Echo.

Pros: can almost always hear you, mute button electrically disconnects the mics, rotating light ring obvious, lots of third-party apps, sounds pretty good, sounds more human than any other voice assistant Cons: can’t always answer the question, always-listening object in your house, doesn’t support multiple user calendars or personal information, only one Spotify or Amazon music account can be linked at any one time

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