I have one of these (which I ordered from another site that was offering them at a lower cost at the time) and one echo dot. I keep this one in my bedroom and mainly use it to play music since it has a better speaker than the Dot. It is not high-end Bose quality, but much better in quality than old-school low-end computer speakers, and some Bluetooth speakers.
This is (in my opinion) very handy, and has more and more functionality being added all the time. The Echo can do anything from playing music from Pandora, iHeart, Amazon music, etc, to updating a grocery list, turning lights on and off, ordering a pizza, accessing Wikipedia, getting weather and traffic updates, etc.
I see them as being as useful as you want them to be. Some of the skills that can be enabled are pretty useless or just for fun, but others like the alert my buddy app (which can alert a list of people if you need help, which can be great for seniors) can be very useful. I have found that it responds to and understands commands most of the time very well. It mainly only has problems when there is background noise like from a TV. Although it occasionally understands a question but does not know the answer. You can give it feedback through the app which you have to download to a phone or tablet to get it set up, by telling it whether the unit did what you wanted next to what it heard.
The setup is very easy, just plug it in, connect it to wifi via the app, and then read off a list of 25 commands so it can configure to your voice. It is definitely not something that everyone will find useful or see as a must-have, but if you have seen the commercials or looked into it and are intrigued by at least some of the things it can do then I definitely think it (especially at the reduced holiday price) is worth the expense. Even if you are looking for a reasonably priced Bluetooth speaker this will give you that functionality and a lot more.
This is (in my opinion) very handy, and has more and more functionality being added all the time. The Echo can do anything from playing music from Pandora, iHeart, Amazon music, etc, to updating a grocery list, turning lights on and off, ordering a pizza, accessing Wikipedia, getting weather and traffic updates, etc.
I see them as being as useful as you want them to be. Some of the skills that can be enabled are pretty useless or just for fun, but others like the alert my buddy app (which can alert a list of people if you need help, which can be great for seniors) can be very useful. I have found that it responds to and understands commands most of the time very well. It mainly only has problems when there is background noise like from a TV. Although it occasionally understands a question but does not know the answer. You can give it feedback through the app which you have to download to a phone or tablet to get it set up, by telling it whether the unit did what you wanted next to what it heard.
The setup is very easy, just plug it in, connect it to wifi via the app, and then read off a list of 25 commands so it can configure to your voice. It is definitely not something that everyone will find useful or see as a must-have, but if you have seen the commercials or looked into it and are intrigued by at least some of the things it can do then I definitely think it (especially at the reduced holiday price) is worth the expense. Even if you are looking for a reasonably priced Bluetooth speaker this will give you that functionality and a lot more.
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