Amazon Echo Dot (2020)
The Amazon Echo Dot has always been about providing fledgling smart home owners a way to get their foot in the door; about providing a place for Alexa to live inside your home and enough sound performance to fill a room up. It’s about being able to buy a cheap speaker for under $50 / £50 / AU$80.
In some of those ways, the Amazon Echo Dot (2020) lives up to the legacy set down by previous Echo Dot devices – it’s small, decently loud and, thanks to Alexa, it’s pretty smart, too.
But the unfortunate part about the new Echo Dot is that it seems to have all the same foibles as its predecessors as well – it doesn’t have a Zigbee hub inside and, the line-out jack, while great for folks who have a big speaker system, doesn’t cater to the crowd who want to use the Echo Dot as a speaker for their audio player. It’s also not a great-sounding speaker.
We’ll still need to spend some more time with it to fully evaluate the sound quality, but for now it will suffice to say that the new Echo, while aesthetically different, brings more of the same as last year's Echo Dot 3rd gen.
Price analysis and release date
The new Amazon Echo Dot became available to buy on the same day as the new Amazon Echo and Amazon Echo Dot with Clock: Thursday, October 22, 2020.
Like the more powerful Amazon Echo, the Amazon Echo Dot is available in three colors – Charcoal (dark gray), Glacier White (white), and Twilight Blue (grayish-blue) – all of which are available now.
The standard Amazon Echo Dot price is $49.99 / £49.99 / AU$79, while the Echo Dot with Clock costs $59.99 / £59.99 / AU$99. Time is a premium.
Buying an Echo Dot for your child? Check out the Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition in the US. It costs slightly more than the standard Echo Dot at $59.99 (likely £59.99 / AU$99 in the UK and Australia if it becomes available in those markets), but this super-cute smart speaker continues the ball-like design and makes it kid-friendly with panda and tiger-style grilles.
There aren’t many other cheap smart speakers, but the closest competitor is the Google Nest Mini that’s supposed to cost $49.99 / £49 / AU$79, but is usually on sale for $35 / £35. So far, we like the Amazon Echo Dot a bit more than the Google Nest Mini, but we’ll need to spend some more time with it before we can say that with any sort of definitiveness.
Design
Amazon has definitely taken a different tack when designing the new Amazon Echo Dot: instead of a hockey puck shape like last year, the new Echo Dot is a palm-sized sphere.
Like the larger Amazon Echo, the Amazon Echo Dot’s spherical chassis is divided into two parts: a layer of hard mesh and a plastic back piece with rubber feet on the bottom so that it doesn’t scratch your table. You’ll also notice a plastic translucent ring along the bottom, which serves as the LED indicator light, telling you when Alexa is listening (blue), when the microphone is muted (red) or when the speaker has lost its internet connection (yellow).
On the top of the space age-looking speaker are four control buttons – volume up, volume down, microphone off/on and a button that summons Alexa. You won’t necessarily need to use them if you don’t want to – as almost all of them can be replaced by voice commands – but they’re nice additions.
If you turn the speaker around you’ll find a power connector and a 3.5mm aux jack that can be used as a line out port to send the audio signal to an external speaker. That’s an especially handy feature considering the Echo Dot’s less-than-sterling sound quality that we’ll discuss in a minute, but it’s also somewhat disappointing that the 3.5mm aux jack doesn’t double as a line in port like it does on the full size Amazon Echo.
Tear away the top layer of the Amazon Echo Dot and you’ll find a single 1.6-inch full-range front-firing speaker. This tiny-but-powerful speaker is responsible for producing the entire frequency range of sound for the speaker and the results, well... aren’t exactly inspiring.
That said, there’s also the included microphone array packed inside there as well and we don’t have any complaints about the Echo Dot’s ability to hear us over the dull roar of our music and process our commands perfectly.
Smart Assistant (Alexa)
As you’d expect from an Echo speaker, Alexa is present and accounted for on the Amazon Echo Dot, offering you hands-free access to the super smart voice assistant.
Getting the speaker setup is simple – especially if you have one or more Alexa devices already setup in your house. If that’s you, all you need to do is head into the Amazon Alexa app and tap the plus icon in the Devices section – the app will do a quick scan for nearby devices and before you know it you’ll be up and running with your new smart speaker.
If you don’t have the Alexa or an Echo Device already installed, you’ll have to go through the process of downloading the app and signing into your Amazon account, but then it’s more or less the same process as above.
Once it’s set up, you can ask Alexa to set timers, create calendar events, play music, tell you the weather, call other Echo speakers and mobile phones, and read the news, as well as a host of other actions thanks to Alexa Skills.
Disappointingly, however, while the Amazon Echo Dot 2020 can control other smart home devices that you’ve previously paired with another Amazon Echo device, it can’t pair any devices on its own because it lacks a built-in Zigbee hub. You can ask Alexa to do everything from turning your smart lights on to locking your front door, but you’ll still need a larger Amazon Echo to set up those devices.
The good news is that Amazon has added a new feature alongside the Echo Dot in the form of Alexa Voice Profiles for Kids which allows Alexa to automatically change its responses to be kid-friendly when it recognizes a child's voice is speaking to it.
While using an Echo speaker in this mode, Amazon says children can "ask Alexa questions, set animal sound alarms, get help with homework, and call approved friends and family, with extensive controls that give parents peace of mind". There’s also a new Alexa feature that's designed to help with home learning: Reading Sidekick, helps with your kids reading, and offers encouragement when they're struggling.
None of these features make up for the lack of a Zigbee hub, but for families they’re a nice touch that should allay parent’s fears of keeping a smart speaker around their kids.
Performance
In terms of sound quality, the Amazon Echo Dot really hones in on the mid-range, presenting clear vocals in songs and emphasizing speech in podcasts. The soundstage isn’t particularly wide and instead is fairly shallow with little separation between instruments.
Now, its spherical design might lead you to believe that it will offer 360-degree sound, but in actuality you’re getting pretty focused, directional audio that’s at its best when you’re standing a few feet in front of it. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth noting.
Songs we’ve tested include hits like Hey Jude by The Beatles and Justin Bieber’s new hit, Lonely, as well as some classic funk and rock as well. The trend seems to be the same throughout: great vocals in that midrange sweet spot but at the expense of the trebles and bass response that sound muted at almost any volume level.
Thankfully, you can tweak each of these areas individually by asking Alexa to raise the bass, midrange or treble, but it doesn’t radically impact the sound of the speaker.
In terms of overall volume level, the Amazon Echo Dot does appear to get quite loud if you max it out, however it doesn’t seem to be able to hold that volume level for an extended period of time and eventually drops to a more sustainable level.
So what are you to make of the Echo Dot’s performance? Well, as a desk speaker that sits in front of you and plays music for a half-hour at a time, it’s perfectly fine – but as a home speaker that you’ll use to play songs during parties? Well, the Dot doesn’t seem to cut it.
Early verdict
We’ll still need to spend a few more days with it to really get to know it inside and out, but so far the Amazon Echo Dot (2020) appears to be more of the same packaged in a new aesthetic.
The sound quality doesn’t feel like it’s a big improvement, and if you plan on using it to fill a small-to-medium-sized room, you’ll likely be disappointed by its performance in larger environments. Thankfully you can port audio to another speaker using the 3.5mm jack (don’t forget to pick up a cable, though!) and we appreciate how well the built-in microphone works. The Echo Dot is an easy, affordable way to get Alexa into every room and a solid choice for parents concerned about their child’s privacy but, for music enthusiasts, it still doesn’t quite hit all the right notes.
- Echo Dot 2019 vs Echo Dot 2020: which mini Alexa smart speaker is for you?
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