Amazon Echo Dot - 2nd Gen Refurb - $30 Prime

What cool things can I do with this besides ask it questions?
 
h0mez said:
What cool things can I do with this besides ask it questions?
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It can read you a book or play your Amazon Prime Music for example. I have it play my mother's music all the time. You can specify a station of similar music or a specific artist only. There is an app on the Google Play store for it that goes into great detail of other features. That was all I wanted it to do really. Oh and tell me NPR news. ;)
 
I had a Gen 1 until it died a few weeks ago and I found it pretty useful:

1. I had mine connected to the line in on my PC (Decent 7.1 component system) so everything was mixed with my PC audio.
2. It's a pretty good bluetooth bridge for my phone - very convenient for listening to pod casts and other things which are on the phone and I don't want to look for on the PC - it can also be a bluetooth source and connect to another device like a speaker (internal speaker is about like you get in a cell phone)
3. I have a lot of audible books and you can ask it to read your books and it will keep your place synced up with other audible clients (like your phone, etc)
4. My music library is on Amazon so it's handy to just tell it a song or album you want to hear (but 95% of the time, I would use the PC app for this)
5. You can get the Amazon streaming service on Echo devices for $3.99/mo and it has a ton of content. It's $7.99 on other devices
6. It's got a lot of novelty features like jeopardy and word games - mostly just one time amusement when family comes in from out of town
7. It's an open platform and is getting more apps all the time - it's pretty interesting to keep up
8. I didn't do any home automation but I've considered it.

I think it's a good device if you're really plugged into the Amazon ecosystem - but if you're more into Apple or Google, it's probably not as useful to you.

My brother has the Echo which has decent sound but it can't be connected to a larger system. The Dot is much cheaper and could work on it's own for stuff like Audible, but it has the line out missing on the Echo. That's probably the most annoying thing about their product line - an Echo with a line out (optical?!) would be perfect, but nope - they split their feature set.
 
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You can now use them for a room to room intercom in the house, and you can also use them to make calls. It's convenient when we need to leave the kids home for a few minutes, we can call them or just listen in to what's going on and or they can call us easily.
 
Bosom said:
You can now use them for a room to room intercom in the house, and you can also use them to make calls. It's convenient when we need to leave the kids home for a few minutes, we can call them or just listen in to what's going on and or they can call us easily.
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Interesting. I might keep mine now.
 
Bosom said:
You can now use them for a room to room intercom in the house, and you can also use them to make calls. It's convenient when we need to leave the kids home for a few minutes, we can call them or just listen in to what's going on and or they can call us easily.
Click to expand...
Yeah. I use this feature all the time now. When my wife is downstairs in the kitchen and shes calling for me but I can't hear what shes saying. I say to "drop in kitchen" and now it's an intercom system. I have an echo and echo dots all around the house. Love it.
 
You can use to to hear the start up sound and "hello" message every so often, without being able to disable that shit.
 
aside from size, what's the difference between the dot and the larger echo?
 
h0mez said:
What cool things can I do with this besides ask it questions?
Click to expand...


Plex now has support for Alexa so you can use it to voice command your HTPC interface if you use Plex. I haven't used it myself so I can't speak to how well it works but it seems pretty cool from the demo I saw.
 
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