My 2-year old Amazon Echo Spot has been getting a little glitchy recently. The screen keeps flickering, and sometimes the alarm won't turn off. And the touchscreen is also not always registering, so it means that some days, I end up waking up my wife because I have to use voice to switch off the alarm.
Voice Assistants will be the future. Ordering things, turning lights on & off, getting information from the internet- all faster than having to type. This Amazon Echo Dot is adds to the devices in our house; slowly we'll building a smart connected home. Really slowly at this point, because there's a lot to research and a lot of money required.
My criteria for a smart device in the bedroom is that it must have some sort of display for the time. Having to use voice to check the time or switch off the alarm is really impractical if there is another person in the bedroom sleeping. So the choices were either something like this Echo Dot with a LED display, or a full-blown screen which is significantly more expensive, with features that I probably don't need.
So how easy is this to set up? Well, it wasn't too difficult, until I tried to change the wifi network it was connected to. If you have never setup an Amazon device before, or have an existing network you're happy with, you shouldn't have much problem with this sub-$100 device. It's worth considering if you don't need an actual video screen, or a camera for calls etc.
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