You can add these through the touchscreen interface or with voice commands. Feature-rich touch-screen interface. If you want to disconnect it from a Bluetooth speaker you can instruct Alexa with your voice to "disconnect" (more on this later).Its small form, in addition to its radically reduced price tag of $39.99 / £34.99 / AU$79, makes the Dot the perfect way to get Alexa into your home without the fuss or investment, and therefore it's one of our most recommended products to friends and family members who aren't sure about making the leap into more high-end, pricey connected gadgets. More recently, Amazon has rolled out a new feature that enables the developers of skills to tell Amazon the kind of questions their tool can answer. With the speakers mounted on the back of the new Echo Show, there's no more awful looking front speaker taking up what should be prime touchscreen real estate.You'll find new icons entitled Lights & More, Routines and Alarms. There's naturally a limit to how far you can push this (it's not magic), but it's not something you have to think about balancing during a normal, non-deafening, music session.Although some of these new, smarter updates to Alexa are yet to land, the promise of these upgrades and improvements means this tiny Dot really is worth the investment... and we suspect its successor will be too.You don’t need to do anything extra to get Alexa, the voice assistant comes built-in to Amazon’s Echo range of smart speakers.The advantage of doing away with a more capable built-in speaker is of course a much smaller piece of hardware: you can stick the Amazon Echo Dot just about anywhere you like.We're not quite living in the age of Tony Stark's Jarvis just yet, but if developers continue to rally behind Alexa by developing ever more intelligent skills, then the future may be just around the corner. The Amazon Echo Dot may be tiny in comparison to the rest of the line-up, but it takes what made the original Echo great and slims down the built-in speaker. This leaves you in a bit of a dilemma.
The puck-shaped device takes all the best bits of the Echo and condenses it down into something you can put anywhere. We've also recently seen a slew of new voices for Alexa, as well as a new Brief Mode that makes Alexa less likely to respond to your voice (to stop the voice assistant constantly interjecting in conversations).While the smaller Echo Dot does compromise on sound quality to match its tiny size and price tag, it's just as smart as its stablemates and, arguably more impressive than many of its non-Alexa rivals.The Echo smart speaker range was a means for Amazon to take its AI-powered voice assistant Alexa and turn it from a piece of software made primarily for searching through video catalogs, into a much more handy general assistant that would see to all the modern-day demands of a connected smart home.There was a problem. Echo Flex - Plug-in mini smart speaker with Alexa 4.3 out of 5 stars 10,605. As for better hearing, Alexa heard me the first time with the new Echo Show at distances where I had to repeat the wake word three or four times on the first generation unit.Still, parts of the visual Alexa experience feel underwhelming and some seemingly obvious features remain absent.