Amazon Echo Spot

Brand: Amazon
Model: VN94DQ
EAN: 0841667159287
Category: Home & Office
List Price: $129.99
Price: $34.08  (127 customer reviews)
You Save: $95.91 (74%)
Dimension: 3.62 x 3.82 x 3.07 inches
Shipping Wt: 0.92 pounds. FREE Shipping (Details)
Availability: In Stock
Average Rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
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Product Description

Everyone is in love Alexa in Amazon's Echo, the latest Echo Spot offers all the features you love about Alexa plus a screen.... [Read more]

Features

  • Compact 2.5" smart display with Alexa ready to help
  • Alexa is always happy to help - Manage your day. Get instant information. Check weather and traffic on your way out.
  • Voice control your music - Ask Alexa to play music and see lyrics with Amazon Music. Also, stream music from Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, and other music services, or books from Audible.
  • Control your smart home - Voice control compatible devices or manage them on the easy-to-use display. Ask Alexa to show you security cameras, control lights, and adjust thermostats.
  • Connect with video calling and messaging - Make video calls to family and friends with Skype, the Alexa app, an Echo Spot, or Echo Show.
  • Alexa has skills - With tens of thousands of skills and counting, Alexa is always getting smarter and adding new skills like tracking fitness, playing games, and more.
  • Designed to protect your privacy - Electronically disconnect the microphones and camera with one press of a button.

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Top Reviews

Amazon should listen to its customers.
by MP from NY (1 out of 5 stars)
July 22, 2018

I own 3 of these... amazon is ignoring its customers and using these devices as a marketing tool. You can customize the screen contents, but you cannot turn off there advertising, Things to Try... People will suggest that you can, but you can only do so if you turn off all content changes which is not an acceptable option.

Moreover, they should increase the size slightly, and improve the audio speaker. That would give you a 5 star device.

Right now i'm debating whether to return all 3 devices. My wife says we should.
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"Try and ask Alexa" card is so irritating i cant even look at the screen, so now the screen faces th
by Greg Sutton (1 out of 5 stars)
July 26, 2018

Great product and I would give 5 stars - but you can't scroll face cards without having the stupid "try and ask Alexa" suggestions pop up. Yes you can have it scroll once, and just stay on the clock, but I like having other cards as well. God its the worst and SO irritating. I got it super cheap, so i just face the screen toward the wall and treat it like a Dot instead of a Spot. What a dumb move on Amazons" part.
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One major flaw
by Mark H. (1 out of 5 stars)
June 20, 2018

This is an excellent smart device with one major flaw that makes it unbearable. There's no way to deactivate "Things To Try", which means you're forced to watch on-screen tutorials of basic Alexa tips each time the Spot wakes up. It's not possible to deactivate this "feature."
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UPDATE. Zero stars. Slider interfacle for light controls is horrible. Things to try" Please go away.
by BB (1 out of 5 stars)
June 27, 2018

This thing just plain sucks. A new update brought ANOTHER annoying feature other than "things to try". I just uploaded an image of a new interface when you ask Alexa to dim the lights, bedroom off, kitehen on etc...it's an image of a lamp with a slide toggle that you can touch to increase or decrease the brightness. WHY?! When I'm asking Alexa to dim the bedroom to 50% I don't need to touch the screen. When I say "bedroom off" the lights go off but the Alexa is still bright screen with this hideous interface on the screen for 10 seconds until it goes away then it auto adjusts. THIS IS RIDICILOUS. I don't want this device anymore. It's so painful and unbearable to use.

Dealbreaker is the THINGS TO TRY. Please remove this. I don't want to see this. I own several echo items. I know what to try. At least give an option to toggle this on or off. Everytime I ask for something like "turn the lights off" it then starts the slides with things to try. I don't want this. I know I can set to show things to try only once after a request but this seems so silly that I cannot turn it off completely.

Please update this feature.
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I give up. Amazon has ruined a decent device.
by Sam D. (1 out of 5 stars)
September 25, 2018

Amazon has officially ruined this device. I have recommended this device, in conjunction with the Amazon Cloud Cam for months. The best reason to own this device is to use it as a baby monitor. With recent changes to the display, it is useless. It now has an on-screen display 100% of the time, without the ability to remove it. You used to have to tap to bring up these buttons so you could use 100% of the display, now you can't hide them. Amazon: take a note;. When you have 3 inches of screen real estate. It's all precious. Don't put up onscreen display that you can't hide. Stay away from this device until they fix this problem.
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Needs updated
by Braden Welch (1 out of 5 stars)
July 3, 2018

The physical product is great. Love it! BUT THE FIRMWARE NEEDS TO BE UPDATED!! "Things to try" needs to be GONE. The clock faces need to be more customizable. Like putting the weather on the clock face, more digital options, and dates. Different fonts. Ect...and a white noise option like the Google home has would be very nice. Rain, thunder, wind, and heavy rain.
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Alexa developers - listen to the nearsighted of America!!!!
by Art Tart (5 out of 5 stars)
December 29, 2017

So far, so much love, with a tiny suggestion - hopefully the Amazon developers read these reviews.

Easy peesy set up - I was able to get it up and running and customized in less than 20 minutes - score!!!

Paired my bluetooth Thonet and Vander speakers (that also live with my bedroom TV) flawlessly. Figured out how to set recurring and different alarms for weekdays and weekends (after you set the 'single alarm' go to the alexa app under alarms and reminders - you have far more control through the app to easily change that single alarm into a recurring alarm with lots of options). Got a photo uploaded to make a custom clock face (used my photo cloud storage at Prime). Played some Prime music. Watched a little CNN. What isn't to love???

THE FONT SIZE!!!!!

It can't be that hard to give us options on font size on the 'personalized' clock. Hey, Amazon developers, not all of us have perfect eyesight, especially at night when the eyeglasses end up on the night stand next to the Spot. Listen to the nearsighted of America, heck, the World, give us a bigger font!!!!!

As soon as Amazon addresses this 'you gotta be kidding' fix, I will be changing that 4 star review to a 5!!!

Edit:

They listened!!!

There is now a much bigger font, very similar to what I photoshopped in my 'wish' photo, and it can turn red at night. A++ and I changed my rating to five stars. I really like this little spot, we have been buying more Alexa compatible items and our 'smart home' is really coming together.

And for all of my 'commentors' who suggested just asking Alexa what time it is, I would rather not wake up my guy in the middle of the night.
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All I Wanted Was A Simple Black & White Clock. (I Figuered It Out)
by Bobby Lane (5 out of 5 stars)
December 26, 2017

I have 3 Echo Dots in the house & mom & I really like them. When I heard about this a couple of months ago I jumped right on the pre-order train. It caught my attention because the Echo Show was interesting to me but it was just way to big. I wanted something that I could use as a clock by the bed, currently I was using my Moto 360 watch (it turns into a simple clock dial when docked). So this would replace two things on the stand (my watch as a clock & the Echo Dot). I absolutely LOVE it. / What I really wasn't fond of were the clock dials, all I wanted was a simple clock (all black background & white numbers), sadly that option isn't available as a choice... but there is a work around!

As you can see in the pics it's VERY dim at night when the lights are off & it's bright & clearly visible when the lights are on but still stays as a simple black & white clock.

For those that want to know how to achieve this:
1.) The main thing is to turn on the "Night Mode" "Nighttime Clock" (pic3) and set it to run 24hrs a day.
2.) Turn on the "Adaptive Brightness" & crank up the brightness, you can see how high I set mine in the pic (pic4), but you can fine tune this setting to your liking (this is the setting that actually controls how bright it is in the day & how dim it is at night).
3.) Choose the "Street Lights" or "Bokeh" digital clock.
4.) That's it, once you make those setting just wait about a minute for it to go back into standby mode and your "simple clock" will fade in.

Oh, for those that have an issue with the screen cycling through all the the displays non-stop (Clock-Weather-Things To Try, etc.) & just want it to stay on the clock face of your choosing, the way to achieve that is to go into Settings>Home & Clock>Home Card Preferences, click on "Rotate Once".

Hope this helps someone. ;-)
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which is incredibly annoying. There is a setting where you can opt ...
by Kevin T. (1 out of 5 stars)
July 28, 2018

This product currently has two related software flaws that make it completely unusable:
1) There is a "card" on the homescreen called "Things To Try" -- it's an ad for other Alexa services you can try. You can turn off all the other homescreen cards, but not this one.
2) By default, the homescreen cards "cycle" automatically, which is incredibly annoying. There is a setting where you can opt to have the cards only "cycle once" instead of "cycle continuously", but critically *this setting does not work*. My unit has been set to "cycle once", and the cards still continue to cycle all the time. Have rebooted the device, re-set, etc etc.

Until these two obvious software issues are fixed, in my opinion the product is useless.
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The screen increases the utility 2-3x over the Dot
by Steve M. (4 out of 5 stars)
December 21, 2017

So the Echo Spot is a glorified alarm clock. To me, though, it represents something more as I get ready to return to work after being laid off 6 months ago. To get back into the routine of waking up early on weekdays, I *need* an alarm clock now, and the Spot is my early "new job" present. I was delighted when it was delivered a whole day before the official release date. Echo Spot is a metaphor for Alexa sneaking into the earliest, most vulnerable part of your daily routine, and in my case it's a very exciting journey as I return to a regular 9-to-5 (with *pay*). Enough about my plight--how will this thing work for YOU?

OVERALL CONCLUSION
======================

Four stars out of five because Echo Spot's screen is a useful addition to Alexa, the overall aesthetic design is great, the sound is very good for a tiny speaker, BUT the price is high and the video ecosystem is immature (and not ideal on a round screen). You should buy it if you really need a fancy device in the kitchen or bedroom and you have this amount budgeted for an "extravagant" gadget for yourself or loved one. Otherwise, wait a little while until the price eventually decreases.

WHO SHOULD BUY AN ECHO SPOT?
==================================

The Echo Spot is one of the more expensive ways to enter the Alex ecosystem. It has a screen, which none of the other small speaker versions have. Only the angular (ugly?) tablet-on-stand Echo Show has a screen, but that's where the differences end.
✓ If you care about style and want to put a device in the bedroom, on a desk at work, or in the kitchen, the Spot would look great.
✓ If you want to see the live video feed from a Nest/Dropcam/Ring, etc. camera, watch a video (albeit a limited selection right now), see reminders, lists, song lyrics and recipes, that screen is really helpful.
✓ If you want an upgrade to the Dot (whose speaker isn't really meant for music) and have about the same amount of money to spend as the Echo (Gen 2), the Spot should be on your shortlist. The Echo G2 wins for sound quality by a small margin, but the Spot wins big for versatility with its screen and hardwired line-out for an external speaker (which the larger Echo Show inexplicably lacks, supporting only Bluetooth and not corded external speakers).

HOW DOES THE SCREEN LOOK?
=============================

Good, not great. The resolution is excellent, somewhat close to retina, but the brightness is just OK, the glare is waaaay worse than I wanted (similar to the new/cheap Fire tablet screens, which lack the gapless lamination you'd find on the older/expensive Fire tablets and of course on all modern iPads). These previous factors coupled with the visible (but not terrible) color-shifting at extreme viewing angles make me realize how spoiled I am with flagship phone and tablet screens in the last 2-3 years. This is not a top-tier smartphone display, but I have to give a lot of credit for the cool-factor of a perfectly round screen.

ARE VIDEOS WATCHABLE?
=========================

I looked up a recipe for the ever-sumptuous pannacotta. To my delight, the Spot immediately took me to allrecipes.com with a video on how to make an easy version of this Italian dessert. The video was zoomed in to fill the circular screen, and it looked surprisingly "normal". It's not likely that Amazon somehow curated videos for ones that look good on a circle screen, so my assumption is that most video producers just center tightly on their subjects and we actually don't use the sides of our rectangular screens very much.

That being said, I couldn't stand to watch long-form content on this tiny screen. Moreover, where is YouTube? Please end this fight, Amazon and Google. Maybe it will be available in 2018. Until then, recipes from non-Google sites are the killer app for the Spot, and they are a tremendously useful feature.

HOW IS THE SOUND?
====================

I own the Echo Dot (gen 2) and the Echo (gen 1), and the sound of the Echo Spot is somewhere between them. If the Echo Dot is 30 in quality and the Echo is 100, the Spot is probably a 70 or perhaps even 80. It's going to forego a lot of bass richness, but I listened to many hours of music this week and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the sound actually was. It's certainly better than any other speaker I've had in a bedroom or at work, which is where the majority of these will end up. If you want even better sound, then buy a nice Bluetooth speaker as a satellite, but the Echo Spot already sounds as good as the $50 little Bluetooth cubes a co-worker had at my former job. It's got a standard stereo out port and Bluetooth streaming, so if you need better speakers now or down the road, you can expand.

WHAT ARE SOME THINGS YOU LIKE?
=================================
✓ Design, weight, premium feel
✓ Very responsive touch screen
✓ Lyrics for songs (the killer app for old Christmas carols, wow!)
✓ Recipes
✓ Video calling (worked well with my Alexa app on my Android phone)
✓ Voice drop-in / intercom
✓ Custom photo upload for background
✓ Simple, uncomplicated UI, and most things, even Wi-Fi setup, don't need the Alexa app--this is a good gift for people who aren't bonded to a smartphone
✓ Easily watch Amazon video content (but on a tiny screen)
✓ Multi-room features are INCREDIBLE. During setup, I had my Echo Dot in the same room, and Alexa just *knew* (ESP is a great name) which device I was talking to; playing music in all rooms is nifty as well...
✓ Mics and voice recognition seem just as good as all the other Echo devices, even though Spot seems to have only 4, not 7 like my original Echo and new Echo Dot both have

THINGS LESS LIKABLE?
======================
❌ Power cord is not USB--why can't this just be a USB-C device?!?
❌ Not a lot of clock faces, just 6 analog and digital right now; I do LOVE the "bokeh" clock face, though, which is a geeky photographer's term that refers to those out of focus rings made by lens aperture blades
❌ Can't watch many video sources, yet
❌ Expensive--this thing is as overpriced as the original Echo, so expect it to drop to about half the current level in 1-2 years
❌ Screen is silly small for watching longer videos or videos that can't be cropped to circular proportions
❌ No way to really "stop" video--it started again on its own today, which was beyond annoying because I had left the room at least 5 minutes beforehand and heard it resume from across the hall
❌ UPDATE: You can "tap" anywhere on the touchscreen while the alarm is going off to snooze for 9 minutes. Very cool! Thanks to commenter Smokey DeBear for correcting me. (Original statement, now no longer valid: Utility as an alarm clock relies on using your voice--no dedicated buttons or intuitive way to snooze, etc.)
❌ Camera could be a risk for those concerned about privacy and can't be *truly* disabled aside from blackout tape (which apparently stops the motion sensor and auto-brightness as well)

ABOUT THE PHOTOS
===================

I wanted to include some common fruit for size comparison, so the logical sequence is to show you a grapefruit and tangerine so that you can visually see the Spot is about the size of a large orange. My wife then decided that Spot was "lonely" and needed "friends", so the two citrus fruits got faces, courtesy of a black Sharpie. Hopefully she'll keep the marker away from the Spot itself!

To show an example of a custom clock face, I then took a photo of the grapefruit with the smiley face and made it the "face" of the Echo Spot. It was already round, so the cropping worked really well. You can upload any photo from your phone and zoom/crop to fit.

UPDATE AFTER 5 DAYS
====================

Everyone who has come over for holiday gatherings has been amazed by the sound quality. It's a tiny form factor for such rich sound.

I realized that the motion sensor will enable lyrics display as you walk up to it, waking it from the clock mode if music is playing. Neat!

My phone is suddenly becoming less useful to call people because the speakerphone quality of the Echo Spot is just incredible. Everyone I've called says the audio on their side is amazing. Alexa wakes up and processes voice commands so much quicker than "OK Google" on my Nexus 6P, so it's more convenient to call when I'm near an Echo device.

The kids love playing 20 questions and The Magic Door with Alexa. The Spot's screen doesn't help much with those, but I can definitely see other games/skills being built to entertain kids (and big kids) for hours. This could be a great homework helper in the future as the ecosystem evolves . . . "Alexa, how do you spell syzygy?" and the word appears on the screen as Alexa reinforces with spoken letters, S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.

UPDATE AFTER 4 WEEKS
=====================

Things that cracked me up the most: "Alexa, sing a barbershop quartet" and "Alexa, sing auld lang syne." The first is pretty bad, but Auld Lang Syne is FABULOUS and obviously has some human backup singers.

Things I'm totally addicted to: I use the Echo Spot as a remote portal to check-in with the kids while I'm working remotely. I "drop in" on their Echo Dot and have been reading aloud to them ("Lord of the Rings," if you're curious) for an hour or so, a few times a week. The speakerphone quality is phenomenal and the connection is very stable. I wouldn't be able to do this on my cellphone.

Lists galore: I now have half a dozen lists going because it's so easy to make lists and add stuff via voice. I worry that my short-term memory will be totally gone in a few years as I now depend on virtual assistants for everything . . .

ALSO, responding to another reviewer, the clock's time size is big on the INCLUDED clock faces! See the last photo I just uploaded. Amazon must think that if you have a personal photo uploaded, you want the time to be small (which makes sense--you can see your photo better), so if you want the numbers large, just don't upload a personal watchface photo. Maybe they'll give an option to change that in the future, but it's not a big deal, in my opinion. Finally, if you walk up to the Spot and the camera senses your motion, the display will change to the weather or reminders, etc. Therefore: it's only big when it senses no motion (you're far away) and you've got a stock clock face. Pretty smart!

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