Amazon Echo

I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with the Amazon Echo ecosystem lately. The withdrawal of APIs for third party to do list apps was a particular kick in the teeth, and the Echo Auto is one mid-journey misbehaviour away from being ejected from the car on the Oxford Ring Road.

However, I have stumbled across something which is actually useful.

For many years, one of the Echos on my account was located 140 miles away on a relative’s kitchen counter (for reasons that definitely didn’t involve sharing subscriptions in a non-approved manner). And so I never had the chance to hit the “everywhere” button in apps like Spotify when deciding what device to play music on.

That arrangement has now come to an end, and for the first time the other week, I hit the everywhere button on a podcast.

And it worked! My house is by no means big, and as it turns out, an echo in two rooms upstairs and two downstairs provides pretty good coverage. Crucially, you can wander around the house going about your business while listening to podcasts, radio, etc. without a break in the content or having to carry a phone on speaker round in your pocket.

For sure, I’d put ceiling speakers in if I were refurbishing the place from scratch, but in the absence of that, this is a pretty usable alternative.