Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There's already a ton reviews for the Amazon Echo, but I just wanted say how happy we are with this product. I initially thought that I should get the regular larger speaker Amazon Echo for our living room/kitchen for the first floor of our 2- level condo and because it's a larger room than our bedrooms upstairs; however, when the Echo Dot went on sale for $40, I thought it was a really good value over the more expensive big brother and too good to pass up. What I found was that the Echo Dot was perfectly sufficient for the first floor. It's hard to know if the sound will be loud enough or if Alexa could hear from all parts of the room just by seeing it at the retail store, but Alexa (Echo Dot) had no problems hearing and responding to our commands. We typically set the volume setting to volume level 7 and music is loud enough for us to hear everywhere. It helps to have it centrally located in the room, and I am no farther than 20 feet away from the device speaking at relatively normal voice volume. My wife, an initial skeptic, is really surprised by how smart the Echo Dot is, and my kid loves it as well. The only thing that is CON for me is that the Amazon Echo "skills" that can be learned still feels like in the infant stages and many of the "skills" not as polished. Certainly there are several companies that have helped designed some really good skills like Capital One, Fitbit, and Domino's, but there's still not a lot to choose from. I hope that more and more companies will jump on this quickly. Considering everything, for $40/$50 bucks this is a great value and easy way to get yourself introduced to home automation and voice recognition technology, and overall, I would highly recommend this product. The product comes in a small package, and everything that comes in the box can be seen in pictures attached.