Amazon’s new Echo Auto is a small Echo speaker for your vehicle’s dashboard. With its excellent microphones, it’s easy to install and stows away when you park. And it offers an easy way to play music from your phone through your vehicle’s speakers if they lack Bluetooth.
However, it isn’t as smart as your phone’s own assistant, and unless you’ve got an ecosystem of Amazon smart devices, it doesn’t make sense for most people to buy one.
Amazon Echo Auto Review
It’s simply a $54.99 car microphone that allows you to use Alexa voice commands when driving.
It connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth and then connects your smartphone to your vehicle’s audio system using a USB cable. Your vehicle doesn’t require any special smarts for it to function; it simply needs a traditional power outlet and an auxiliary port for your smartphone.
Pros
- Great microphones
- Easy to set up, easy to store
- Adds Bluetooth to some vehicles without Bluetooth
Cons
- Alexa isn’t that useful when driving
- It’s annoying when you find all the default settings for Amazon services and change them.
- You can’t do as much as your smartphone’s native assistant
Features
Size
The microphone at the bottom of the second-generation Echo Auto speaker is even smaller than the previous version (2.1 x.9 inches, compared to 3.4 x 2.0 inches), which was itself a lot less than the first-generation Echo speaker and puck.
Mount
It comes with an adhesive-backed magnetic mount that attaches to your car’s dashboard.
Power
You need to plug the Echo Auto into your car’s USB charger or 12V DC outlet. Once it’s plugged in, you can pair it with your smartphone using Bluetooth.
Connection
You’ll then either use Bluetooth or the headphone jack on the Echo’s breakout box to connect to the car radio. It takes less than five minutes if you already have an Amazon Prime membership and the Alexa app on the device you’re using.
Importantly, the whole thing can be unplugged, taken off the mount, and stored in the center console, and plugging it back in is just as quick.
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Microphones
Its strength lies in its very good microphones. It has five instead of eight microphones and uses an improved algorithm to interpret voice commands. Even with fewer microphones, it’ll still be very good.
Limitations
Asking it to find nearby gas stations and coffee shops and to look up store hours usually worked well.
However, if you need something that requires interaction with the smartphone, like making calls and navigating, you’re limited by what the Alexa mobile application can do on your smartphone, and you hit these limits quickly.
Apple Maps
Alexa is also able to open up Apple Maps with specific destinations by voice commands, but we still need to press buttons in the app to start and stop the navigation. However, Siri can do these things without requiring any additional input from me at all.
Default Streaming Service
The Echo Auto wants us to use Amazon services, but you might not use them often enough for them to be convenient. We still had to ask Alexa several times to change our music service from Amazon Music to Spotify.
Alexa Calendar
You can easily add an event to your own personal schedule by clicking the Add Event button. Or, if you’re feeling extra ambitious, you can create a whole new event by tapping the Create New Event button. Either way, you’ll see a list of upcoming events on your home screen. Tap one to open it in full view.
It’s easy enough to switch from a Google Calendar to an iCloud calendar, but it’ll take some extra effort to get everything set up right away.
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Amazon Fresh
If you use AmazonFresh to buy most of your groceries, which integrates fairly well into Alexa’s grocery list feature.
For me, adding things to my shopping list as they occur while driving is a valid use case, so Alexa would be useful in those situations.
However, that’s still an extremely rare occurrence, and there isn’t enough other useful stuff that Amazon Echo could do for that you would really need a whole extra device in your vehicle.
Where can Echo Auto be Used?
The Echo Auto is not a good product. It makes no practical use. Its best use might be for someone who already owns an old vehicle without Bluetooth but has an auxiliary input jack.
If you want to use your phone as a speakerphone without having to plug anything into your vehicle’s audio system, then you could get one of these inexpensively. However, at $55, it’s not worth it. At $30, though, it seems like a good deal.
Conclusion
The real killer feature of the Echo Auto isn’t the device itself; it’s the fact that you already have an Amazon Alexa speaker in your house. If you simply plug the Echo Auto into your existing Alexa speaker, you’ll be able to use its voice commands without having to buy anything else.
At present, Alexa isn’t all that smart when not connected to Wi‑Fi.