I’ve had an Echo for over a year now. Overall, I quite like it. I use it every day to control a few lights, check the weather as I’m getting ready to leave for work, and play music (through Prime Music or Spotify) or audiobooks through Audible. I also use it as a no-hands-required kitchen timer (“Alexa, set a timer for 20 minutes”), measurement converter, and random-question-answerer.
The sound quality of the speaker is quite good, but the amazing thing is how well it can hear you say “Alexa” from across the room, without shouting, while music is playing.
My biggest complaint is the “skills” system that Amazon uses to let third parties add custom voice commands. While Amazon actively encourages this, and there are quite a lot of these “skills” available (and they’re all free so far), the voice interface for accessing them is incredibly clunky. You can’t just say “Alexa, get me an UberX” or “Alexa, switch to channel 10” – you have to say “Alexa, ask Uber to get me a car” and “Alexa, ask Harmony to switch to channel 10”. This means that you have to remember the name of each of these skills, which is very much against the point of natural voice communication. The whole selling point of the Echo is that you just talk to it as you would to a person, and it can understand you. Third party skills break that, and there’s currently no hint of Amazon changing this voice interface.
That being said, Google has now announced Google Home, which is a direct competitor that builds on the already pretty impressive Google Now. I’m hoping that this and other developments in this space will push Amazon to be more competitive, seeing as they no longer have the market entirely to themselves.
All in all, I’m definitely happy with my purchase of the Echo. From the time I got it to this point, there have been no other products really like it, which means that regardless of downsides, it has been the best thing out there for this type of natural-speech, long-range, voice-controlled home automation. It’s evolved quite a lot, and is definitely getting better over time. However, as I mentioned, within the year, Google and others will offer alternatives, and if you aren’t sure that you really want a home voice control device right now, waiting might make sense.