Last week, I spent two days holed up in a drab Sheraton hotel just outside of downtown San Diego. My only company came from Alexa, in the form of Amazon's new Echo Spot. This is the company's newest Echo device, yet another way to bring Alexa inside your house. It's also the second Echo with a screen and a camera, after the Echo Show. The Spot is a similar thing, only a lot smaller and a lot better-looking.
What Amazon's doing with Alexa is fascinating: It's building devices of different shapes, sizes, and prices, with slightly different strengths and weaknesses. In these early days of smart speakers and virtual assistants, Amazon's trying to figure out what works. With the Spot, Amazon tried to build an Echo you might keep by your bed, or on your desk. At $130 it's also one of the more expensive Alexa-capable devices.
After spending lots of time lying on my freshly made hotel bed and talking to the Spot, I'm impressed with the device. In most ways it's no better or worse than any other Alexa device, because Alexa is Alexa no matter where it lives. All the things you'd expect it to do, it does. But it raises some complicated questions: Am I comfortable having this thing next to my bed with its camera and microphones always armed? Do I trust it not to monitor me when I'm sleeping, or even to not accidentally turn on and wake me up in the process? I don't know. I don't think so. But you should decide for yourself.
The Spot is the first Echo I can honestly call a good-looking device. That is not a high bar; the other Echos don't appear to have been designed at all. This one's about the size and shape of a softball, with about 40 percent of it lopped off at an angle. On the sloped front sits a bright and crisp 2.5-inch round touchscreen, surrounded by a big black bezel. Volume and mute buttons pop out of the top. It’s not particularly beautiful, but it feels thoughtful and approachable.
One great thing about an Echo with a screen: It's much easier to set up. I got the Spot up and running in five minutes, tapping my Amazon credentials and the Sheraton Wi-Fi password onto the small keyboard on the screen. (Two setup tips, by the way: call it "Computer," not Alexa, and turn on the sound that lets you know the device heard you.)
Once it's up and running, the Spot works like any other Alexa device. It can access the same skills, answer the same questions, and offer the same information. Most of the time, Alexa speaks its responses aloud as usual, but it can also display relevant information on the screen. The Spot heard me as well as any other device, including through the wall inside the bathroom. (I wanted some music!) It even produces decent audio quality, far better than the Echo Dot and almost as good as the standard Echo. If you want more, it also has a 3.5mm jack, and can Bluetooth out to other speakers.
The Spot is a terrific alarm clock, by the way. You can wake up to an alarm tone or to music, then say "Alexa, good morning," to get the weather forecast and your daily news briefing. It's become a crucial part of the first hour of my day.
Since the Spot has a screen, it can do all the things the Show can, like display recipes or play movie trailers. The Flash Briefings can be video-enabled too, which I like. (It can't show YouTube, of course, because Amazon and Google have beef.) Everything works just as it should. But while the Show exists for video, it's not really the point of the Spot. You have to get up close to see anything, and since the screen is round, you're either watching with awkward letterboxes or filling the screen but not seeing the whole video. It was fine for re-watching the Last Jedi trailer while I looked up showtimes, but not for anything longer than that.
In general, I've found a screen adds to the Alexa experience. Even when I use it for setting timers and alarms, or asking questions about the weather, it's nice to see the answer as well as hear it. I like that I can change settings on the Spot itself rather than on my phone, too. And the Spot does a nice job of dimming its screen at night, and will turn all the way off at your request. There's really no downside, especially in a device that looks as nice as the Spot.
The Spot's camera, on the other hand, makes me nervous. I get why it's there: to enable the Drop In feature that lets you video-chat with other Echo users, or act as an ersatz security camera. But for some reason, even though I'm perfectly comfortable with an always-on microphone eight inches away from my sleeping face, having a camera there makes me anxious. It's nice that you can say, "Alexa, turn off the camera," and it will mechanically disconnect, but there's still a lens there. I could cover it in tape, I guess, but I'd rather just have a Spot without a camera.
Where you land on the Spot versus other Echo devices will largely come down to how much you want a speaker and a camera. Luckily, there's no right answer: The $50 Echo Dot does all the same music-playing, home-controlling, Jeopardy-playing stuff as the Echo Spot or any other Alexa-capable gadget. The Spot just looks better on your nightstand.
