We have recently been sent the Amazon Echo and we love it! If you don’t know Amazon Echo is a home automation device that sits in your room and is controlled via your voice only. There is no screen and it includes only a 360 degree omni directional speaker with  far-field voice recognition technology built in.  Far field Voice Recognition technology is basically a really cool piece of tech that allows Alexa (the internal voice in the echo) to hear you from a far and in noisy environments or when you are playing music. The Echo is controlled entirely with your voice and is activated by simply saying “Alexa”

Alexa can do a range of things including:

• Plays all your music from Amazon Music, Spotify and TuneIn Radio.
• Echo has Bluetooth built in so you can stream music from iTunes/Apple Music or off of a bluetooth enabled device.
• Can answer questions, reads you audiobooks, reports news, traffic and weather & more using Alexa Voice Service
• Controls lights, switches, thermostats and more with compatible devices such as Philips Hue, Hive and Nest products.
• Alexa updates through the cloud automatically and is continually learning, adding new features and skills. 
• Skills such as ordering take away from Just Eat or requesting a ride from Uber—simply discover and enable the skills you want to use in the Alexa App.
• The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary and personal preferences.
• If you are an Amazon Prime member you can also ask Alexa to purchase and order things for you, that includes things you have already bought before and many Prime products that are available on Amazon. (this can be password protected to avoid any buying mistakes)