Amazon Echo review

I received an Amazon Echo for Christmas which was an unexpected surprise.

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon although I have not signed up for Amazon Prime. However, I have an Android phone, a Nexus 7 tablet and am a sporadic user of Google Plus.

The Echo was very quick and easy to setup using the Android application. You simply supply the credentials for your wifi and you're away.

When I first got the Nexus 7, I had experimented with voice control and found it an interesting but short lived exercise. File under 'Gimmick'.

The Echo has a slightly wider range of functionality, particularly when enhanced by additional 'Skills' essentially plugins to control third party applications).

After asking Alexa what the weather forecast was, what the time was and to tell us a joke, an obvious test was to play music. This worked great; 'Alexa - play The National' and you instantly get a random stream of all the music you own by the indie guitar band from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Or rather, you don't. You get a stream of all your music stored on Amazon Music by The National. If you have previously purchased music on Amazon, then that is available but for legacy music from the 80's stored on CD, then those tunes aren't available.

That's not quite true. Until recently, there was an Amazon Music uploader but that was limited to a paltry 250 songs and this functionality was removed in December 2017 forcing you to a paid subscription (Amazon Unlimited or Prime).

My music collection is meticulously catalogued and stored on a NAS in my house under my control. All music is available as lossless FLAC and can be converted to other, smaller, lossy formats for use on a phone as required. Much to my daughter's puzzlement, I never buy music online. Even in 2018, like a lumbering technical dinosaur, I still purchase CD's, get them delivered a couple of days later, rip them to FLAC format, check the meta-data and upload to the Plex Media Server.

A little research discovered that controlling Plex from the Amazon Echo is possible. This was promising news but finding that you have to configure the firewall and make your Plex installation fully accessible to the public internet was less attractive.

However, my better half did like the voice control and ease of use. Undeniably, it is much easier to say 'Alexa - play 'Never gonna give you up' than accessing music via Plex from the Roberts Stream 93i digital radio which is rather convoluted and time consuming.

With hindsight, a Google Home Mini may have been a better purchase for me as I also have two Chromecast devices which would have enabled me to control the TV although this would have needed me to upload my music collection to Google Music (again).