Echo Dot (3rd Gen, 2018 release) - Smart speaker with Alexa - Charcoal

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• 

  Jason G

  5 out of 5 stars

  A great automated device for a great price!

  Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2021

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  We already had an Amazon Echo for our living room, and we wanted to put one in the bedroom for controlling lights and listening to spa music when falling asleep. The Echo Dot is so nice because it’s small and sleek, and sounds really good. Sometimes we crank it up when listening to music while cleaning or something, and the audio quality is really good. Obviously I didn’t expect much from such a small device, but I was pleasantly surprised by this one. Alexa is a nice feature, we can say something like, “Alexa, play spa music for 1 hour”, she’ll play the music and after an hour, turn off, which is handy for falling asleep at night. Word of warning though, if you don’t have an Amazon Music subscription, there will be commercials, and they are louder than the music, so it might wake you up at night! I also love the feature of being able to whisper commands and she whispers back. Very nice for not waking up my wife!

  There are a few things I wish it could do. One, using voice commands, you can’t go quieter than 10%. Sometimes my wife goes to bed before I do, she sets the music for an hour, then sends me a text message asking if I can lower the volume. Since I have the app on my phone, I can go in and manually lower it to 5%, which works well. Not a big deal, but would be nice to say, “Alexa, lower volume to 5%”.

  Number two, since we have two echos, sometimes we’ll give a voice command to Alexa, from the living room, but the bedroom Echo picks us up and seems to take priority over the living room Echo which is right in front of us. So sometimes we have to close the bedroom door when giving commands in the living room. It would be nice if it was a “mesh” system, where the microphones could tell which Echo I’m closer to and give that one priority. Again, it’s not a big deal, and oddly doesn’t happen all the time.

  Overall, the ease of setup, especially since we already had one setup, was very nice and simple. The device itself is cool and low profile, and the speaker works very well, at least for us! This is a happy beginning to a smart home!

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• 

  Brenda Gomez

  5 out of 5 stars

  Great device!

  Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2019

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  Okay so I'm debating between 4-5 stars but will go with 5 because the price is fantastic even as a speaker alone!!! Alexa is a lot of fun and more so then siri or bixbi and the speaker is great. I think it's a little better then my Anker Blutooth speaker I paid more money for so yes I'd say it's definitely worth it. It fills our living room with music. I can ask alexa to play Christmas music and she will.. I previously was using spotiify through my phone and bluetooth which was more time consumung and made my phone slower and often there was connection issues with the spotify app. I was so tired of it and practically stopped listening to music.. Alexa interacts with me, answers questions and is all around so great to have. I have not used "home" features yet but you can also connect her to your compatible TV and Roku and she will change the volume, etc. Very neat!!! You can also play trivia with alexa but she is very limited and if you want more decks of trivia you have to pay for it which is a con for me. Another good feature is she will also add items to your amazon cart and or you can choose to "buy it now" or repurchase items and will also look up items for you if asked.. So why am I debating between 4-5 stars? Well sometimes Alexa doesn't know everything I need to know.. She can play news if asked or the weather and other simple commands and she does it better then bixby which is far behind however she often does not understand certain questions or only gives part of the answer. I can ask how to rebuild an engine for example (for fun ;) and she will give a simpliefied example but hey what can you expect. When she doesn't understand, you can rephrase and she usually understands. She also makes jokes if asked and can truly interact with you which is VERY neat. Bixby can do some interacting too but is definitely more limited making Alexa much much better although I think Alexa has room to improve her skills and knowledge.. That being said for the price of Alexa she is definitely worth it. The speaker plays music loud and clear and she will turn up and down the volume if asked. The only slight muffled sound that I read mentioned in reviews is Alexa's voice seems slightly muffled but I guess it depends where the device is set up.. Anyway the initial set up.litterally took minutes.. You need to download the Alexa app and go from there to connect your device via wifi but she was up and running in minutes!! Super easy set up even for someone not tech savy. I will definitely be getting another one for the Living room as I've been carrying the device room to room as it plugs in the wall and is inconvenient to carry room to room. I do enjoy Alexa more then I expected to at this point and would recommend!

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• 

  Michael J. Cole

  5 out of 5 stars

  Decent Little Device

  Reviewed in the United States on November 13, 2020

  Verified Purchase

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  For such a small little device I am very pleased. I use mine primarily to control my smart devices (lights, etc.) but I am discovering many new uses. Now that I'm getting used to it, I'm finding it's pretty intuitive to set up and use. I had to call for help once but the gentleman solved my issue quickly and now I know. Be prepared to use Goggle or the like for help. It makes things much easier. I am setting up routines like "Goodnight" to turn everything I have programed to turn off all over the house when I go to bed. I have numerous routines set (very easy) like "Office On" which turns on the lamps I set to come on at 50%. I have several Dots throughout the house and I have more on order for the remaining rooms. I have been converting my old X-10 automation to Leviton smart modules, switches, etc. Alexa (I chose the word "computer" instead of "Alexa" to wake up the system - like Star Trek...lol) has been very useful and reliable. It has already made my life a lot easier on many levels. The sound quality from the tiny speaker is amazing for it's size and is certainly adequate for speech. You can connect to Bluetooth speakers or use the aux jack, like I did. My office Dot is connected to the audio system in that room, and the one in my living room is connected to my surround and whole house system. Loving that! The biggest challenge I've had is learning how to word things so Alexa understands what I want. I am still in the learning curve. I have also learned to keep the names of my devices as simple as possible to make it easier for Alexa to understand. For example, I changed my credenza lamp's name from "credenza" to "printer". It's easier to say printer clearly. Talk clearly and you're good. So all in all, I am happy enough to now want to convert the rest of my house that is still connected to ancient X-10 technology to Leviton and Alexa. A great combination.

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  6 people found this helpful

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• 

  S. Mayo

  4 out of 5 stars

  So good, and yet...

  Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2020

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  The Echo Dot itself is a nice little unit. It's compact, and if you don't need a screen or camera it works well for simple device control, weather reports and some uncomplicated questions. You can turn the microphone off if you don't want it listening to what you're up to, and it's wonderful for times and alarms. "Alexa, 30 minute timer" is all you need to say to get beeped in 30 minutes. I like that better than fussing with the timer on my stove. Timers, reminders and alarms (all different things) are probably what I use the most.

  Where I think it falls down is the AI aspects. I'm sure Amazon is proud of how well it does, and as a software engineer who has done a bit with natural language parsing, I recognize the challenges. But I was writing natural language analyzers in the 90's as a hobby, that did better than this. Simple example: you can ask for current weather almost anywhere in the world with a simple "Alexa, what's the temperature in San Jose Costa Rica." And bang, you get the temperature there. Oh, you want the humidity too? You try "Alexa, what's the temperature and humidity in San Jose Costa Rica" and it is instantly confused. Yet you can ask for the humidity separately and it can figure that out. Basically, asking for "x and y" instantly confuses it. That's just bad analysis; kids in grammar school used to be able to diagram sentences and Alexa should be able to as well. That's one example of many.

  Using Alexa for web searching is hit or miss, and more miss than hit. She has a few favorite websites she likes to look things up on and for some simple queries that works. But more often than not she comes up with an answer that's wildly unrelated to the question; these can be laughable moments, but it can also be annoying. She's no Watson. Don't buy it if your main hope is getting it to do web searches for you.

  If you have a few of these in the house, you can use them as intercoms, either point to point or to all devices in the house. "Alexa, intercom, living room" is all it takes. The microphones allow you to have conversations even if you're across the room from the Echo. You can also set them up to place calls using an iphone account, though you can't use it to pick up calls to your iphone.

  Randomly, she loses contact with the internet (and that makes her instantly useless) even when nothing else has connection problems. Power cycling fixes it. Just waiting doesn't seem to. It's rare but annoying.

  You will absolutely want to turn off the option for buying things via an Echo. It sometimes tries to make product suggestions and that's absolutely untenable. And while they did try to make it hard to order stuff by mistake, and you can set a security code so your children can't order candy by the metric ton, it's surely a matter of time before your kids eavesdrop and get the code. I know Amazon wants you to use Alexa as a "shopping assistant" but it's a foot in the door that you don't want open in the first place.

  One awful misfeature - Alexa sometimes tries to be cheery and positive. Occasionally she'll throw in stuff like "Have a nice day!" or some other meaningless drivel. I don't see an option to turn it off. I'm sorry, but Alexa is not and will never be a person, and having some algorithm wish me a good day is at best an insincere try at manipulation and at worst some sort of weird attempt to make you trust robots. It's flat out creepy. When I ask her to reporting something, I want a brief answer and then silence. If I want an actual conversation I'll talk to my wife, thanks.

  Sound quality is actually fairly good given the size, which is to say, not special. It's no audiophile device and using it play even background music is something I just don't do. It's fine for news stations on the web. If you want to ruin an early Pentatonix song, have Alexa play it. Ari's voice is simply out of range. And just forget most Classical.

  Summary: useful, yes. I might even say Very. Life-changing, not quite. And it could be so much better. Eventually maybe it will be; the language processing is done remotely and I'm sure there are improvements monthly. But as "your plastic pal who's fun to be with", or even a device with the language understanding of a four year old, it has a long way to go.

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• 

  Amazon Customer

  5 out of 5 stars

  So far so good

  Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2019

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  We've only had our Alexa devices setup for about two weeks now, so we're definitely still working out the kinks. With that said, this is a review of everything I've noticed of our entire Alexa ecosystem, which includes 2x Echo Dots, 2x Echo Spots, 2x refurbished Echos, and 1x Echo Sub:

  Pros: Individually, they all work exactly as they should ALMOST all the time (more on that in the cons section). They all look good, and aren't big, ugly hunks of metal and plastic taking up space in your house. They were all incredibly easy to get through initial setup (except the Echo Sub, more below). Music sounds good in all of them, to include the Echo Dots (but it sounds GREAT on the Echos, and fantastic on the Echo/Sub pair).

  Cons: The voice recognition is almost too good for its own good. We have a fairly open floor plan, with an Echo Spot in the living room and an Echo in the kitchen. Sometimes they both hear a demand, and the wrong device (meaning the one farther away) will respond. I find myself occasionally whispering to an Echo device so its friends don't butt in to the convo.

  The Echo Sub needed to be reset 3x when I first got it/went to set it up. I had to log in/out of the app a couple times as well before it was recognized and would actually pair to an Echo.

  Sometimes Alexa tells me she can't complete a request, then my wife (who uses Alexa far less often than I do) will ask the same request and it works...and vice versa. We haven't figured out what we're doing/saying or not doing/not saying for these discrepancies to happen, but hopefully that'll work itself out with time.

  The most irritating issue I have so far is getting music to play on the "Everywhere" group. Sometimes I say "Alexa play music everywhere" and it just doesn't do it. Sometimes it'll play on only some of the devices, and sometimes it'll only play on the device I was speaking to. Our house is two stories, and we have two kids and a dog, so we spend a ridiculous amount of our time cleaning/walking up and down the stairs. A big part of the reason I bought these was for the music to fill the house while cleaning, and it oftentimes requires me to spend some time arguing with Alexa to get that to happen. It's even gotten to the point where I've had to go into the app and manually select "Everywhere," because the voice command just won't work.

  Individual components:

  2x Echo Dots (w/ separately purchased wall mounts): No complaints. They setup just fine, and work perfectly. They're actually bigger than I thought they would be, and look a little clunky mounted to the wall, but overall they don't mess up our aesthetic enough for me to dock them a star or anything. 5/5 would recommend.

  2x Echo Spots: No complaints again. These were the first two devices we bought, and they worked so well I decided to buy the other devices. My favorite part of these is their ability to pull up security cam footage. My desk is in the basement, so it's nice to say "Alexa show me the driveway" and see who just pulled in, or to say "Alexa show me the front door" when the doorbell rings. I paired these will some web cam covers (also bought on Amazon, of course) so Jeffy and his crew can't record me all day long.

  2x refurbished Echos (in charcoal): I bought these to play music, and they sound amazing. We'll see how they hold up, given that they're refurbished equipment, but I have my fingers crossed. They also look great, and are not an eye sore like other speakers.

  1x Echo Sub: The only device that gave me an issue with the setup process. For that, I'd honestly give the Sub 4/5 stars because it really was a pain in the butt getting it properly hooked up. It gave me issues not just connecting to Wifi, but also when pairing with an Echo. Lots of logging in/out of the app, resetting the Sub. Irritating, to say the least. However, with that one star docked, I'd give it a SOLID 4/5 stars. This thing sounds GREAT. I'm a huge music lover, but hip hop/rap is really where my loyalty lies. And I NEED bass when I jam, and this thing delivers bass in spades. Even with the setup issue, I'm planning on buying another for in the basement. If Amazon ever makes a waterproof version, I'll buy one for outside for bbqs/parties too.

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• 

  Rose

  5 out of 5 stars

  Highly recommended!

  Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2024

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  I recently purchased the Echo Dot (3rd Gen), and it has exceeded my expectations in both performance and functionality! This smart speaker has seamlessly integrated into my daily routine and has quickly become an essential part of my home.

  Pros:

  Compact design: The 3rd Gen Echo Dot has a sleek and modern look, making it a perfect fit for any room. The charcoal color is stylish and blends well with my home decor.

  Great sound quality: The audio quality is impressive for such a small speaker. It delivers clear sound with decent bass, making it great for listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks.

  Voice control with Alexa: Alexa is incredibly responsive and performs a wide range of tasks, from playing music and setting reminders to controlling smart home devices and providing weather updates. The hands-free control is a game changer!

  Smart home integration: It works seamlessly with various smart home devices, allowing me to control lights, thermostats, and more with just my voice. It makes managing my home so much easier.

  Cons:

  Limited bass for music enthusiasts: While the sound quality is good, audiophiles might find the bass lacking compared to larger speakers. However, it’s still excellent for casual listening.

  Overall, the Echo Dot (3rd Gen) is a fantastic smart speaker that offers great value for its price. Its compact size, impressive sound quality, and versatility make it a must-have for anyone looking to enhance their home with smart technology. I highly recommend it to anyone considering adding a smart speaker to their setup!

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• 

  Mister Blue Sky

  5 out of 5 stars

  Meet Alexa, Your New Personal Assistant

  Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2023

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  The Echo Dot 3rd Gen, released in 2018, is a smart speaker with Alexa that will change the way you interact with your smart home. The device is small and compact, but don't let its size fool you – it's packed with features that will make your life easier and more convenient.

  Setting up the Echo Dot 3rd Gen is incredibly easy. Simply plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi network, and you're ready to go. The device responds to voice commands and can do everything from playing music to controlling your smart home devices.

  Alexa, the intelligent assistant built into the Echo Dot, is incredibly versatile. You can ask her to tell you the weather forecast, set a timer, or even order food from your favorite restaurant. She can also control your smart home devices, such as lights, thermostats, and locks, making it easy to manage your home from one central location.

  The sound quality of the Echo Dot 3rd Gen is surprisingly good for such a small device. It features a 1.6-inch speaker that produces clear and crisp audio. You can also connect the device to external speakers via Bluetooth or an audio cable for even better sound quality.

  One of the best things about the Echo Dot 3rd Gen is its compatibility with other smart home devices. It works seamlessly with popular smart home brands like Philips Hue, Nest, and Ring, making it easy to control all of your devices from one central location.

  Overall, the Echo Dot 3rd Gen is an excellent smart speaker that is perfect for anyone looking to make their home smarter and more convenient. Its compact size, versatility, and compatibility with other smart home devices make it a great addition to any home. If you're looking for a personal assistant that can help you manage your life and your home, the Echo Dot 3rd Gen is the perfect device for you.

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• 

  Onahunch

  5 out of 5 stars

  My Garage Jukebox Got Smarter!

  Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2025

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  The Echo Dot (3rd Gen, 2018 release) in Charcoal has transformed my garage into a music haven, and I’m absolutely loving it! I use it to stream tunes from my phone while I tinker with projects, and this little smart speaker punches way above its weight. It’s become my go-to companion for making every garage session more enjoyable—five stars all the way!

  Pros:

  • Awesome Sound for the Size: Don’t let the compact design fool you—the sound is clear, rich, and fills my garage with ease. From rock to podcasts, it handles everything I throw at it via Bluetooth from my phone.

  • Seamless Phone Pairing: Connecting my phone was a breeze, and Alexa plays my Spotify playlists or Pandora stations with a simple voice command. No fumbling with cords or complicated setups—just instant music.

  • Tough Enough for the Garage: The fabric finish looks sleek in charcoal, and it’s held up to the dusty, gritty vibes of my workspace. It’s small enough to tuck on a shelf but sturdy enough to feel like it belongs.

  • Alexa’s Handy Perks: Beyond music, I’ve started using it to check the weather or set timers for paint drying—super convenient when my hands are covered in grease. It’s like having an assistant out there!

  • Great Value: For the price, this thing delivers big. It’s reliable, responsive, and hasn’t skipped a beat in months of use.

  Cons:

  • Voice Pickup Can Be Spotty: In a noisy garage (think power tools), Alexa sometimes misses my commands unless I’m close or shout. Not a huge deal, but I’ve had to repeat myself a few times.

  • No Battery Option: It’s tethered to an outlet, so I had to rig an extension cord to place it where I wanted. A built-in battery would’ve made it more portable for my setup.

  • Bass Could Be Stronger: The sound is great overall, but if I crank up bass-heavy tracks, it lacks that deep thump I’d love. It’s fine for casual listening, though.

  The Echo Dot 3rd Gen has made my garage time so much better—music flows effortlessly from my phone, and Alexa keeps things fun and functional. It’s a small device with a big impact, perfect for jamming out while I work. Five stars for a smart speaker that’s earned its spot in my man cave—I’d buy it again in a heartbeat!

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