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Amazon Echo Spot: Alexa packed into small speaker that's smart enough to come into your bedroom

The smart speaker and screen has specific options to stop it listening to you

David Phelan
Tuesday 16 January 2018 10:31 GMT
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Amazon today announced the UK release of its latest smart speaker, the Echo Spot. It’s a small speaker with the same voice-controlled virtual assistant, Alexa, found in other Echo products and beyond.

This is a smaller gadget – just as the Echo has a smaller sibling called the Echo Dot, this is the littler version of the Echo Show and, like the Show, it has a video screen.

The Echo Spot is spherical, save for a flat screen and a flat base to stand on. It has a 2.5in circular display and is about the size of a baseball. When you speak to it, the blue rotating circle familiar from other Echo gadgets rolls round the screen. As with other gadgets from this stable, you can ask it what the weather’s like, what your news feed is, ask it to recite your day’s appointments or to tell you a joke.

When you see the Echo Spot, one of the neatest use cases is immediately clear: it’s the perfect size for an alarm clock. It’s been designed with that, and plenty of other scenarios, in mind. So you can dim the screen when you go to bed, either controlling the brightness manually or setting a schedule – it doesn’t dim automatically according to the ambient light around it. And you can turn the screen off completely if you wish, thanks to a Do Not Disturb mode which darkens the screen and mutes the speaker, apart from the alarm you’ve set, obviously. You can choose which clock face you want to wake up to, too, and select a radio station or favourite track or artist from Amazon Music or Spotify.

It has a camera as well as a microphone, so you can use it for video calls, as you can with the larger Echo Show. You can call other Spot or Show users. Or other Echo gizmos without screens when, obviously, it sets up an audio-only call. The display isn’t big, but it’s sharp, bright and attractive, certainly enough for clear, visible video calls.

All very well, but you’ll have spotted an area where you might have a concern: privacy. After all, we know that Amazon Echo devices have been known to think you’re talking to them and activate the microphone when it’s not wanted. And this one could be sitting right next to your bed.

Well, just as the audio-only Echo devices have a microphone off button, which actually kills the electrical connection to the microphone, so there’s a button to quell the microphone and camera here, too.

The Echo Spot is available for pre-order right now, priced £119.99. Buy two, and there’s a £40 saving (£199.98) which is useful if you want to use it as a video intercom between rooms, say.

Last week in Las Vegas, it became apparent that smart virtual assistants are the coming thing and that Alexa, especially, is ubiquitous. The more devices she appears on, the easier it is to control your home with a few words – so long as the first of them is Alexa. As time passes, she grows more capable, adding extra information – her sports knowledge now includes cricket and Formula One data.

In brief tests, I found the Echo Spot to be responsive and accurate, though I’ll wait until I get it home to be sure. At which point, I’ll be reviewing it. In the meantime it looks like it could be a welcome addition to the Amazon range of Alexa-powered gadgets thanks to its pin-sharp display, highly convenient size and decent speaker quality.

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