Gadgetory

it's been well over a year since Amazon unveiled its cloud connected voice-activated smart speaker now Amazon echo has come quite a long way adding all sorts of features and integrations and extra tricks up its sleeve to help make your smart home smarter at its core it pitches itself as a music streamer you can ask Alexa to stream any type of music or any specific song or band you want to hear and it's in the Amazon Prime music library it'll play it now echo worked with even more services including Pandora and Spotify so you have access to a lot more music but echo is more than that this is not just a music streamer with cloud connected smarts this is a connected home experience this is a product that gives you the smart home you didn't know you wanted what Amazon figured out is that we interact with our homes more than anything an echo can serve as a better user interface for your home think about all the things you might do in your daily routine listening to music listening to a podcast setting a kitchen timer as you cook turning your lights on and off echo can make all those things easier and more convenient and more futuristic in a way that's also accessible that's a pretty impressive accomplishment for a single product now for all those smart home integrations everything from Belkin Wemo switches to philips hue bulbs to smart things controlled setups there's still more we wish echo could do I'd love to see echo integrate with Smart TV sets we could ask the LexA to turn a TV onto CNN or whatever channel you want to watch and on the sound quality front while HECO provides a good experience in general for most environments the base is a little bit weak at high volumes it would be great if echo could let you add additional speakers you know interface with other subwoofers and systems in your home to pipe the audio through and make it more of a control point all of that said echos potential is very clear at this point Amazon has done an admirable job of rolling out different third-party integrations and all sorts of cool tricks through if tour through other products that work with it all of that keeps making an already smart product a lot smarter and more useful in your home and that's only going to continue as time goes forward you