Amazon Echo - Siri thing from Amazon because their phone bombed

Echo is inherently a cloud service. The old hardware may never be obsolete.

Regarding the Spot, they say it has a 1.4" speaker versus 0.6" on the Dot. If that translates to twice the volume and timbre, it would be perfectly fine as a clock radio type thing. I mean, the sound on the Dot is surprisingly good for such a tiny little bugger. It just isn’t quite good enough.

I really like my Echo, because I don’t have bluetooth speakers in the kitchen where it resides. It makes a good all-in-one device for me. I’d be in the market for the Echo Plus, but I’m not really sure it adds anything beyond what I already have. Certainly not $150 worth of things.

You only want the plus if you have non-wifi smarthome devices. And I would wait for reviews before moving forward with that.

Also announced was a new iteration of the FireTV. 4k60, HDR, tiny, and only 70 bucks. Throw in a Dot for another $10.

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07595W166/

Yeah, that new fireTV performs in-between the stick and the firetv2, but closer to the stick. I don’t find it particularly attractive when I bought a firetv2 well over a year ago for $85. $10 for a dot is pretty cool though.

Edit: They discontinued the firetv2, so you don’t really have a choice.

…then you might be a techie redneck?

It occurs to me that the echo spot is kinda sorta a Chumby.

Except apparently Chumby still exists? Weird.

I don’t have an Echo, but when I want to listen to a track or album I usually go to YouTube, which IMO remains profitable only due to all the copyright violations. Services like Spotify OTOH do not benefit from this advantage, and must pay royalties for every single track.

Sometimes I use Pandora or SoundCloud, but mostly it’s YouTube. (I actually don’t listen to a lot of music, and play games or read instead.)

Anyone ever get a 7:3:0:0:1 error?

My Echo has worked fine for months, but last night the power went out. Now the Echo refuses to connect. No settings have changed. Reset the router, modem, and the Echo. Internet search says it doesn’t like dual band, so give each band a different name, but it has always worked find with dual band, in the 2+ years I have had it it has been on a dual band modem.

Have the little round Echo coming next month, but think I better cancel it now.

Edit: yep, doesn’t like dual band using the same name all of a sudden. Created a single band guest network and it worked fine.

Hey @Nesrie (or anyone who has both a Fire and an Echo), does your Fire’s screen activate when you send your Echo commands? Mine does, and it’s super annoying (especially late at night) and I can’t find the appropriate setting for the life of me.

I just tried the two echos, one is a dot, with the Fire TVs, neither one turned on. I am not sure how it could though. My fire TV can only listen when I have the button pressed on the remote. I haven’t really updated to named devices, room groups, stuff like that though. Have you?

Same. I’ve literally only launched the Alexa app twice on the Fire, the first time for initial setup and more recently when I started looking into this issue. And it’s sort of random. Sometimes happens, sometimes not, no pattern that I can see. Each time it happens, the Fire wants to show me what command I just sent to the Echo. And the power/wake button seems to be fine.

You have a Fire TV or are you talking about a Fire tablet, @barstein? I have the former but not the latter.

My Echo will bring stuff up on my Fire TV if I ask it (a fairly recent update, a few months old). But it doesn’t turn my TV on in the process, unless I ask it to.

Fire 7" tablet. Hmm. Will dig deeper! Thanks for the replies. :)

I have no idea if this is related or not., but I just received an update one device, my two devices never update at the same time, that says I can use my Alexa Voice Remote or Pair my Amazon Fire TV with an Amazon Echo device to control it via voice. It told me I could visit “Settings” anytime to explore this later.

Maybe that’s what you’ve done, some sort of pairing option.

Oh and pairing is automatically On and it auto pairs wich instructions on what to do if it does not auto pair. aka, I just got paired.

That’s probably the “Voicecast” feature which allows the tablet to display additional information about your Echo search. You can disable that in the app settings under Voicecast.

Ah, didn’t poke into that area, thanks! Voicecast was (I believe) enabled by default and the description specifically says the command would be “Alexa, send that to my Fire tablet”. But there’s also Automatic Voicecast that “automatically sends a Voicecast on this Fire tablet for certain kinds of content” – sounds like a closer fit.

As for pairing, there is no Echo + Fire tablet 7" pairing option that I’m aware of, but I did pair my Fire TV with the tablet a while back, so that may somehow be a factor.

Will wait and see. Fingers crossed!

Ask Alexa, Open the Magic Door.

Just talked about the new Echo Plus in the Philips Hue bulbs thread.

In a short, IMO based on what I’ve experienced, it does not replace the Hue Bridge (if you have or want Hue bulbs, get the Hue Bridge) and it’s really just a more expensive Echo.

That said, it does have a 0.8" tweeter versus the 0.6" tweeter on the standard Echo. I haven’t noticed any differences yet. I have read reviews where people said that it sacrifices bass for treble, but I don’t know if that’s actually true.

I picked up a Spot. For me, all Echos should have screens now. Just a nice little feature that I miss when using my big Echo or HomePod. I do worry about screen burn in with the clock though. I guess Amazon must have designed for that though?