● It has two buttons on top, one for action and one for mute.
● It has an LED panel on its edge, which has the same indicatory hues as Amazon Echo. Blue when it’s listening, orange when you are setting it up and red when it’s muted.
● It has eight-minute holes pierced in two lines, four on either side of the button. They are microphones to detect speech even in environments crammed with distortion. (With cars honking in traffic and millions of people talking in and around you, it’s pretty much a given.)
● On the left side is the speaker, that will speak out commands to guide you through the setup.
● It comes with a micro USB cable.
- Turn the key in your car and set the stereo to ‘Bluetooth’
- Turn on Bluetooth in your handset
- Tap on the Alexa app
- Click on Devices, and then click the ‘+’ sign. You’ll find it enclosed in a circle.
- Tap on ‘Add Device’ then click on ‘Amazon Echo’ and finally on ‘Amazon Echo Auto’.
- Follow the instructions popping up on your screen to set up your device.
It’s loaded with Alexa skills, like any other Amazon device. It can play your favorite music from the playlist of your choice or the radio, place calls, inform you about the traffic and weather, and so forth! For fifty dollars, you get to bridge the features gap between yours and the current latest car in the market. One drawback, however, is the navigation glitch. Amazon Echo Auto can navigate you to your destination, but it does so by sending a push notification to your navigation app on your connected handset, which would require you to stay on your screen. A few other reports claimed that upon asking Alexa about the nearest store, she navigated the user to the nearest store known to her, and not the actual closest one. Even though it misses out a bit on the accuracy, it’s still a ‘steal the deal’ offer for just $50.
Although Amazon Echo Auto is missing out on some of the features, such as reading your incoming texts and propagates a glitchy navigation system, it’s still a safe bet for its low price. It has a wide array of microphones to detect speech even in the noisiest of environments- so when you have your kids yelling at the backseat or your friends hooting with millions of other cars honking and indistinct chattering, Alexa can still hear you above it all.
It has excellent speech recognition power, and can still place calls, tell you the weather, inform you of the traffic and play your favorite songs without moving your hands. If you’re not willing to lose money hand over fist on a brand new automobile with the latest voice-technology features, you can always opt for this. The standard solution at a substandard price, it’s simply hard to say no.
