Amazon continues to develop and expand its Alexa voice assistant, giving it new abilities and putting it in new devices.
Speakers like the Echo and Echo Dot are voice-only, but Alexa can display visual information on request when in a device connected to a screen, like the Amazon Fire TV.
The first Alexa-specific Echo hardware with a screen, the $229.99 Show combines the voice assistant features of the Amazon Echo with a 7-inch touch screen and a 5-megapixel camera.
It's undoubtedly a technical upgrade, but we like the smaller Amazon Echo Spot a bit more; while it lacks the power and screen size of the Echo Show, the Echo Spot's round, compact frame and lower price make it much friendlier to any shelf or nightstand.
Design
The Echo Show has an oddly angular design that looks a bit dated compared with the Echo Spot, current Echo speakers, and the Google Home.
It's a black or white slab (though the white version still has a black front face) with an uneven pentagonal profile, looking like a triangle with two shaved points when viewed from the side.
It measures 7.0 by 7.4 by 4.0 inches (HWD), with a square front panel that faces slightly upward at an angle.
The front panel consists of a 7-inch, 1,024-by-600 touch screen above a flat plastic rectangular speaker grill.
The top panel holds Volume Up/Down and Microphone Mute buttons, and the back panel has a single connector for the proprietary power adapter.
The angular lines of the Echo Show might work with modern TV design, but they're blocky and stark for a bookshelf or desk speaker.
The form factor is evocative of the ill-conceived fad of "internet appliances" intended for countertops and tables (remember the Chumby?).
It's counterintuitive that adding features like a screen and a camera make something look less advanced, but when everyone has a smartphone in their pocket and most voice assistant speakers are rounder and friendlier-looking, the chunky Echo Show comes off as awkward and almost quaint.
The Echo Spot is much sleeker, and its small, friendly ball shape is easy to fit on a crowded shelf.
Setup and Connectivity
Thanks to its touch screen, setting up the Echo Home is simple and doesn't require any additional devices.
When you plug it in, the screen displays available Wi-Fi networks and asks you to pick one.
After connecting to the network, it walks you through logging in to your Amazon account, then checks for any firmware updates.
Once everything is up to date, the default home screen appears and the Echo Show is ready to take your commands.
The Show doesn't have any wired connections at all besides the power connector.
It features dual-band Wi-Fi for fast internet access, but the Bluetooth capabilities are the really interesting part of the device.
It functions as both a Bluetooth speaker as well a sound source.
You can pair the Echo Show with your smartphone or tablet and play music through its speaker.
You can also pair it with a separate Bluetooth speaker or headphones to stream audio out from the Echo Show itself.
Be careful when pairing the Echo Show with your smartphone or tablet if you plan on listening to music directly from the device with voice commands.
The Bluetooth pairing takes precedence over any music streaming from Amazon, which led to tracks stopping when I fired my iPad up.
It's a small annoyance, but it's irritating if you're in the middle of a song and the Echo Show suddenly connects with your smartphone or tablet and breaks the stream.
Of course, you can play music from any service through your mobile device, so it's ultimately a trade-off between two different types of conveniences.
The Main Event: The Screen
The Echo Show's home screen is a passive display rather than a main menu.
It shows the current time over a rotating series of backgrounds, with additional information and cues fading in and out.
By default, the home screen alternates between the current local weather, trending news stories, notifications from skills, upcoming appointments on your calendar, and the availability of anyone on your Alexa contact list for Drop In calls (more on those later).
You can manually navigate between active home screen cards by swiping left or right on the screen.
If you aren't sure what to ask Alexa, the screen also suggests different commands and questions to try out, like, "Alexa, wake me up in the morning" to set an alarm, or, "Wikipedia soccer" to bring up the Wikipedia entry for soccer, or, "Alexa, play the barista video" to play a suggested video about coffee art.
The screen is nearly identical to the one found on the Amazon Fire 7 tablet, and as such is fairly grainy at 171 pixels per inch (ppi) compared with even the 1,280-by-800 Fire HD 8 (189ppi).
Text is legible, but it isn't as bright, sharp, or vivid as a midrange smartphone or television, or a higher-end tablet; it's fine, but the display is clearly designed to provide information, not to be a primary means for media consumption.
The touch controls are responsive when navigating the Show's settings menu, but lag a bit switching between tracks when playing music.
Swiping down on the touch screen displays a menu bar with Home, Settings, and Do Not Disturb buttons, along with a brightness slider.
The Home button sends you right back to the home screen (you can also say, "Alexa, go home").
The Settings button lets you access the Echo Show's settings menu, which, lets you change a lot of things without using a mobile device and the Alexa app, like pairing with Bluetooth devices or changing the Alexa wake word from "Alexa" to "Amazon," "Computer," or "Echo."
Don't expect much more in terms of touch controls, or an app store for that matter.
The Show is primarily an Alexa voice assistant, and its screen is more for showing what you ask for than navigating directly to it yourself.
There are no icons, no apps, and no menus to navigate besides the device settings.
If you're going to touch the screen, it'll be to pause and skip music tracks, swipe across different products Alexa suggests based on your search, and flick over very light information cards.
It takes a bit of getting used to, because at first you assume there will be a lot more touch interactivity than there actually is.
But this isn't an Android device that happens to have Alexa; this is an Alexa device that happens to have a touch screen.
All About Alexa
As an Alexa-controlled device with a microphone array, touch screen, speaker, and camera, the Echo Show covers the full range of features Amazon's voice assistant offers.
All of the basic functions are here, letting you ask Alexa basic factual questions, request traffic and weather reports, check upcoming appointments in your calendar, and add items to your to-do list.
You can shop on Amazon with the Echo Show, giving you all of the voice control benefits of the Amazon Dash Wand.
Alexa can add items directly to your Amazon shopping cart, and even place instant orders.
The touch screen adds a lot of convenience to the shopping experience, showing a list of products you can swipe through if it can't identify the specific item you want.
This lets you choose exactly what you want to buy without going to your computer or mobile device, or listening to Alexa rattle off a list of possible products without any visual information.
However, you can't directly check your shopping cart from the Echo Show; you need your mobile device or a computer to view or edit anything in your cart after you add items, or to place an order of the entire cart.
Alexa can control your smart home devices as well.
Like the Echo, you can tell the Show to turn your smart lights on, lock your doors, adjust your temperature, or manage any other Alexa-compatible (or IFTTT-controlled) device.
Thanks to a recent update and API release, the Echo Show can even bring up video feeds of compatible security cameras, like the Amazon Cloud Cam.
If you have a Ring Video Doorbell Pro, for instance, you can say, "Alexa, show me the front door," to see and hear who is there.
For more ideas of what Alexa can do, see Amazon's highest-rated Alexa skills in every category—just keep in mind that some of those skills don't utilize the Show's display.
Drop In
Messaging features haven't always been Alexa's strong suit, but the Show's new Drop In system helps fix that.
The Show can make voice or video calls and send speech-to-text messages to your contacts.
Drop In is Amazon's own Alexa-powered chat and messaging service, and that means everyone you want to talk to needs to either have an Echo Show or install the Alexa app on their mobile device.
Text messages, voice calls, and video calls are all sent through Alexa, and are part of Amazon's closed communication system.
This means you can't send text messages or place calls to someone's phone unless they have the Alexa app installed, and you can't make video calls on third-party services like Skype or Google Hangouts.
This small, closed scope can be handy for keeping households in touch (assuming everyone is on the same page with the Alexa app on their smartphone), but anything beyond that requires a more robust and universal communication service.
While the closed system is limiting, the call quality is quite good.
The Echo Show's camera and microphone array send a crisp image and clear sound to whomever you're calling, and the screen and speaker convey the caller well.
The speech-to-text messaging isn't quite as strong; messages I dictated to the Echo Show were full of confusing errors.
The camera can also take 5-megapixel photos, with a Photo Booth function that uploads snapshots directly to Prime Photos.
The test photos we took looked crisp and sharp under the bright fluorescent lights of PC Labs.
Since the Show is meant to be set somewhere stationary, and you can't adjust the angle of the camera, you may not utilize this feature too often unless you like taking photos in the same spot.
Alexa, Play Something
Amazon's various media libraries, both audio and video, are available on the Echo Show.
You can ask Alexa to play any music from Prime Music or Amazon Music, or any show or movie from Prime Video.
The video playback is a nice touch, but since the Show doesn't have any video output, you have to watch it through the 7-inch screen; an Amazon Fire TV Stick is a much better way to access this, plus video from other services like Hulu and Netflix.
As mentioned above, the screen itself is a bit grainy and clearly isn't designed as a primary method of watching video.
Music services are a bit more flexible, since Alexa supports Amazon's music libraries plus iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, and TuneIn.
Audio Performance
The Echo Show features two 2-inch speaker drivers for stereo audio powered by Dolby processing.
Despite this, it only has average sound quality for the price.
Our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," distorts heavily at high volumes.
The kick drum hits crackle and every bass synth note is followed by what sounds like a quiet, belabored breath as the drivers struggle to handle the low frequencies.
The Damned's "Nasty" gives a stronger sense of the speaker's range beyond ultra-low frequencies.
The dense punk track at times gets overwhelmed by the low-mids of the bassline and drums, muscling in on any midrange presence the guitars and vocals have to offer.
The higher frequencies of the noodling and singing still stand out, but it sounds like the disparate parts of the mix are all fighting for prominence a bit more than they should (even for punk music).
The speaker works much better for jazz and lounge tracks.
Richard Cheese's cover of U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" sounds clean and full.
The low backing piano notes give the track a warm, round sound, while the higher piano notes and snare drum hits punch through the mix alongside Cheese's vocals to create a sculpted, balanced feel.
Gorillaz' "On Melancholy Hill" also sounds good on the Echo Show, with the chirpy high notes and rolling bassline complementing each other in the mix without getting in the way of the vocals.
The Echo Show is certainly more powerful than the anemic Echo Dot (though you can plug the Dot into any speaker with a 3.5mm aux input, which you can't do with the Echo Show), and can get louder than the portable Tap as well.
It comes close the original Echo in audio performance, though it isn't quite as loud and the forward-facing directional drivers mean it really needs to face you directly to get the best sound.
The original Echo sounds good regardless of where it is, relative to you, in the room, and its audio profile is a bit more balanced and not quite as stark as the Show's.
The Google Home isn't quite as powerful, but its audio profile is a bit more balanced and not quite as starkly sculpted.
If you use Amazon Music or Prime Music, the Echo Show's screen enables a fun karaoke feature.
Tapping the Lyrics button on the screen on any song that offers it brings up its lyrics, scrolling in time with the music so you can keep up with (or song along to) the song.
A Screen in Time
The Amazon Echo Show tries to do many different things with varying degrees of success.
But for audio it's unimpressive given its price point, and you can get better sound quality by pairing an Echo Dot with an inexpensive speaker.
The voice and video messaging features also feel very closed off as an Alexa-specific system, so it won't replace text messages or more broadly used voice and video call services like Google Hangouts and Skype.
The touch screen doesn't add much to the overall experience compared with a regular Echo, since Alexa can already do a ton of different, useful things without any video output.
If you're looking for your first voice assistant device, the Echo Spot offers hands-free Alexa and a screen in a smaller, friendlier, and more affordable package.
The Echo Dot is a fraction of the price of either device and lets you get acquainted with all of the voice-only features Alexa offers, with the ability to use your own speaker if the tiny built-in driver isn't powerful enough for you.
You can pair any device with an Amazon Fire TV or Fire TV Stick for a better hands-free video experience, or just get the excellent Amazon Fire TV Cube and use your TV as a giant screen for Alexa, and use that single device as a universal remote control to boot.
The only missing feature on the Fire TV Cube is Drop In calls, but they're underutilized and easily forgotten feature compared with most other ways to call...
