The 4th Generation Amazon Echo now looks totally different from the previous generation. It has an all-new spherical design which is a welcome upgrade to previous hockey pock design. This new Dot comes with a bunch of new features and is available in 3 colours – charcoal, glacier white, and twilight blue.

Voice Commands

It uses on-device speech recognition to processes what you say locally and responds to your needs faster than before. And thanks to the AZ1 Neural Edge silicon module, it uses a local machine learning speech recognition algorithm before sending your commands to the cloud. 

How does it sound?

Sound quality is one of the biggest improvements with this new Echo smart speaker. It sports a 3-inch woofer, dual firing tweeters and uses Dolby processing. This means you’re able to get an even better sound experience when it’s time to playing music. You can also pair two Echo speakers together for a more surround sound experience or pair it with a fire tv streamer and use it to play your TVs audio.

A  Zigbee receiver has been built-in so you can do away with excess smart home hubs in your home. The Zigbee hub allows your Echo to talk to low power smart home devices like a light bulb and door sensors without needing any intermediary hub. Your Echo can also be used to set up those smart devices quick and easy.

The new hardware also boasts a feature called Sidewalk. This takes a portion of your Wi-Fi signal and turns it into low power Bluetooth and radio frequencies that it can send further than Wi-Fi so that your outdoors smart home gadgets can still connect to the cloud without needing to be close to your router.

The Amazon Echo 4 is the best version yet, it’s definitely a step up from the previous generation Echo smart speaker. You also now get a lot more of the features that you could only get on the more expensive Echo Plus.