I love my dots! I put one in the kitchen/living room area and now I don’t have to shout down the hallway at my echo. 
The other one is now in my car, it replaces the fireTV I had in there before. It’s nice, not to need to press the button on the remote, but just say “Alexa, read a kindle book”
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I’m digging my dot so far. The speaker on it was actually better than I thought. I figured it’d be worthless but for small things like an alarm, news update, or home automation responses where sound depth isn’t really required its fine. I decided to connect it to a Sonos play 5 though, and so far its dong well in that capacity.
Big thing for me was that both inputs could interrupt the other without manual settings intervention and that seems to be the case. If Sonos is playing something I can interrupt with line in, and if dot is playing something I can interrupt with Sonos controller. It doesn’t appear to be capable of auto resuming though, or at least I haven’t yet figured out how to. That is to say if I’m using Sonos controller and then ask the dot to do something, the OK response causes line in to interrupt the SonosNet feed. I figured worse case scenario I can create some kinda SmartThings or Harmony activity to “resume sonos”. The only real negative I’ve experienced is sometimes the audio output can get missed. For instance I’ve missed a few “OKs” or got “56” in response to what time is it where the first part of the time was caught up. Not sure if that’s just Sonos slow to realize there is input or what. Ultimately not a big deal as if I immediately ask again it works.
Of course another thing is volume control, no easy native control of the speakers volume which isn’t unexpected. Just able to control Dot’s output volume 1-10. Obviously can use another SmartThings/Harmony hack here if I want to.
Voice recognition seems just as good without any real quantitative testing criteria. It can hear me around numerous obstacles.
So yeah very positive review from me all in all, for the price it’d be worth it just to have more voice control over automation throughout the house. The fact that I can hook it up to a real speaker is just gravy for my use cases.
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I had the same observation. It’s not Extremely loud, but it is louder than I expected.
This is really interesting, I didn’t think it would work this way for any speakers. I’m going to try using line in / bluetooth with my samsung shape m7 this weekend to see how it works. Hopefully one way or another I can reproduce that experience.
I replaced my full echo at work with Tap today, The smaller form factor fits better on the desk and since it’s always in arms reach it isn’t hard to press the button for voice control (you only have to press the button, you don’t have to hold it down) I’m going to buy another charging station for it so that on the weekends it can easily come home with me for use around the house/yard.
Love this idea. How are you doing your car internet access?
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Yeah this is probably more of a Sonos feature. It has a number of “auto line in” settings that I suspect allow it to be dynamic in determining if its getting input or not. I was quite impressed. Hopefully the m7 has similar feature set.
I think that I should be able to get dot to connect via bluetooth to m7 so that the echo can override music, but we’ll see.
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I’m loving my DOT so far, i have never owned an echo so this is all brand new to me. I haven’t even connected it to my bluetooth speaker yet, the built in and pretty decent for every day tasks. I have all my smartthings devices configured and working with it and installed Alexa Helper smartapp already. It’s a very handy and cool device.
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I got my dot hooked up last night. Haven’t had much time to play with it other than setting up a virtual switch to initiate my Goodnight routine. Are we able to have audio play through the internal Dot speaker from SmartThings? Or have they blocked outside audio on this speaker and only allow Alexa’s voice? With the speaker being a little better than I thought, I might try to do some voice feedback for ST events.
You could just use a WiFi hotspot in your car to make it work, the Echo Dot uses a regular USB cable for power, and the Bluetooth audio-out pairs to my Ford Sync audio just fine.
My car wifi is actually more complicated, I have a WD N900 “Central” version that is the main wifi attach point - it has a built in hard drive so I can stream multiple MP4 movies to tablets in the car. On the wan side of the N900 I have a MikroTik Metal wireless bridge that connects to my WiFi virgin mobile hotspot in the car (or when parked, to my house WiFi for uploads and downloads to the drive, or McDonald’s, or wherever I want to leach a WiFi signal from) to share with the rest of the car.
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Man, I thought I was a geek! 
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The Dot serves it’s purpose as basically other areas in my house where I can now utilize voice technology to issue home automation commands. Unfortunately in the rooms I have, I can’t leverage the line-in speakers as I have a Sonos Play1 and a Bose Soundbar, and neither accept Line-in 
+1 on the surprisingly ok internal speakers. I was going to connect my new sharkk bt speaker to it but the volume/quality was decent enough to make me not do the connection immediately, but I will eventually connect the bt speaker so I can rock on… softly.
Drawback of putting one of the Dots in the living room. We’re sitting here watching Batman V Superman and every time somebody asks Lex Luther a question Dot is replying. Actually kind of amusing.
For those of us that have the Amazon Echo, can you use it to play a song on the dot? Meaning if the echo was on the top floor and the dot was on the bottom hooked up to whole house audio could you say something like "Alex have dot play Nickleback 
" and it will play from the dot?
Very Funny ! I installed my dot in my media room and I am now looking forward to this experience 
I have one issue with dot I didn’t anticipate. I thought music couldn’t be played through it and you had to plug in 3.5 connection or use bluetooth. So I assumed command responses would always come through the built in speaker. But that’t not the case. Once you plug in the 3.5 jack, ALL sounds now play through the 3.5 jack.
My problem is I have the 3.5 jack connected to my high end receiver and B&W speakers for music. When I am not playing music my receiver is off or doing something else like watching movie etc. So I can’t get response from alexa unless I am playing music. I wish I could just tell alexa to use the jack or not.
One solution I am considering is adding a Bluetooth receiver to my audio receiver. I think I can tell alexa to connect or not to bluetooth right ?
Automatic Input Source changing is nice sometimes. That’s due to HDMI-CEC. Also goes by other names. Sometimes you can disable in TV settings. Or sometimes move device to a different HDMI port on TV. I put my DOT near my TV but now I’m yelling across the room. I think the Echo microphones work better because its height clears a lot. I can’t even see my DOT from bed, guess I need to move for line of sight. How is your new setup?
I would send Echo team a request for that.
I noticed that the mic isnt as good this morning as well. I installed 1 of 2 in my ensuite and while taking a shower with the vent fan on and the music turnt up to 11, poking my head out of the shower and trying to talk to alexa, which was only 4 feet away, she couldnt hear me through my wifes hair and makeup products on the counter.
Someone needs to make a ceiling mount for these…
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Or wall mount, I was thinking the same thing