Is Amazon Echo Worth Your Money?

Amazon’s Echo is the next-gen Siri. It is a connected device that combines what Siri can do and a bluetooth speaker in a cylinder that is 9.25 inches tall. The price for an Amazon Echo, which is on sale now and ships July 14, is $179.99.

Some members of Amazon Prime though were able to get their hands on the Amazon Echo for only $99 and have had six months or so to play with it and convince us why we should drop $200 on the new toy. Amazon Echo serves as a personal assistant for your home, meaning your can talk to your Amazon Echo and have it answer questions, read a book, play music, or tell you some jokes.

So why an Amazon Echo and not just a Jambox or something? The sound is the same on what you would get with other bluetooth products. With Amazon Echo, you can link streaming music services to it, including Pandora and iHeartRadio, which other systems can not.

Amazon is also planning on teaming up with third-party hardware companies so your Amazon Echo can work with just about anything, including your television, sound system, alarm clocks, and maybe even cars. Reviews coming in about Amazon Echo say that it can hear you about 90 percent of the time, and usually listening problems come when the speaker talks too fast. Unfortunately if many people are talking, Amazon Echo has a hard time figuring out what to do.

A cool feature of the Amazon Echo is being able to link it to your Google Calendar. Amazon Echo can tell you what you have planned for that day, and you don’t even have to look at your phone. Other awesome features include being able to program your lights to your Amazon Echo, so when you go to bed, all you have to do is tell your Amazon Echo to turn the lights off and it will. You can also purchase a remote separately for $29.99 to adjust the volume for your Amazon Echo. Why not add to the laziness that the Amazon Echo supplies you with?

The Amazon Echo is the way of the future, having a machine answer every question you ask and play music at the drop of a hat. Reviews for the Amazon Echo are great, and for a fairly decent price, it may be worth it to get to help keep you organized in one unit.

[Image via Amazon]