Amazon Australia has just announced a Father’s Day sale until 5th September midnight on their Amazon Echo range, with their top-of-the-line Echo Plus speaker on sale for $149 ($80 off), the lowest price since Prime Day two months ago.
The Echo range is powered by Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, and the entire range from the miniscule Echo Dot through the Echo and video enabled Echo Spot and the high end Echo Plus are all discounted.
- Echo Dot – Normally $79 – Now $59
- Echo – Normally $149 – Now $119
- Echo Spot – Normally $199 – Now $179
- Echo Plus – Normally $229 – Now $149
The Echo Plus has the same seven microphone array at the top as the Echo Dot but loses the Dot’s physical volume buttons in favour of smoothly twisting the top of the speaker left or right to change the volume.
The main difference between the Echo Plus and smaller Amazon speakers besides audio quality is the Plus has an inbuilt Zigbee smart home hub which allows you to voice control Zigbee compatible devices.
We just received an Echo Plus review unit and are waiting for Zigbee controllable lights to start testing. First impression is as you’d expect, the audio quality is far better than the tiny Echo Dot.
Make sure you read Ausdroid reviews of the Echo Dot, Echo and Echo Spot before buying any of the other Echo devices which are also on sale at the moment (much smaller percentage discount than the Echo Plus).
I bought the Google Home and then had to replace it with the Echo. The Echo wins hands down on home automation in terms of devices it can connect to. It also can work directly with the Microsoft environment – particularly my Outlook calendar.
Good point Murray. Dan is a big fan of using Echo to control his smart home gadgets
Using search functions won’t be as good as Google Home, as the Amazon Echo doesn’t use the Google search engine. And you can’t use the Echo with Chromecast. You could buy Amazon’s Fire Stick TV dongle, but that won’t work with YouTube. So would you really want internet TV without YouTube, or search without Google?
Both Google and Amazon’s voice speakers have their merits. Yes Google speakers have Chromecast and better search results
However the Echo Dot’s 7 microphones are much better at hearing voice commands than the two microphones in the Google home mini
Amazon speakers are also widely agreed to have better integration with voice controllable devices in your home and their speakers have a lot more 3rd party Skills compared to Google