Show it to me, Alexa

Amazon has carefully waited and chosen its timing to step up the smart speaker game in India after testing the waters with each of the other Echo speakers in its line-up. The Echo Show now joins the popular little Dot, the Input, the middle-of-the-road Echo and the Echo Plus, which has rather good sound and controls smart home devices. A sub-woofer is separately available to boost the music up on these.

The Echo Show isn’t the only Echo with a screen to be available in India. There’s the Spot, which is like an alarm clock on steroids. But although you can, the Spot is hardly the ideal device on which to watch YouTube videos or Prime movies. That needs a bigger screen — which is precisely what the Show brings. It does so for ₹22,999, so if you’re interested you need to know what it does that other Alexa speakers don’t.

With a little touch

In the real world, we don’t just use voice and many people are not comfortable with the idea of just talking to gadgets. It seems natural to also see additional communication at the same time as making voice commands. The Show responds to voice commands the same as other Alexa speakers but presents related visual information on the screen. For example, if you ask Alexa to turn on a light, you will also see a slider to choose its brightness level or colour. Ask for the news and you can see related visuals and videos, though this depends on the source of news you choose and whether it has visual content. Ask for the weather and you can see the forecast up ahead — though unfortunately no beautiful visuals of real-time weather conditions, which would have been nice. You can see album covers for music, Facebook photos, and of course, your shopping list, since Amazon is after all, an online marketplace. Then there are visuals for the cricket score, all sorts of trending videos and news, etc.

The front of the Show is all HD screen — 10.1 inches of it. The viewing angles are good though the screen is a little reflective, so you shouldn’t put it where the light falls straight on it. The screen is also a little dimmer than one would expect, so you inevitably would put the brightness up quite high. Maybe this is a conscious decision to not make the Show too distracting and blazing all the time. At night, you can schedule or command it to go dark.

Interestingly, because of our phones and tablets, we’re accustomed to touchscreens doing much more than the Show’s on-screen functions so it can be a bit confusing and frustrating as you learn which task to voice-command and which to touch the screen for. Many feel the screen-related functions should be amped up, but it’s to be remembered that the smart speaker is a voice-first device and the idea has never been to give it the same functionality as a tablet.

Big sound

The back of the Show, covered in a fabric that might get dirty if you choose the white version, houses the side-firing speakers. The two-inch Neodymium drivers and the passive bass radiator, along with Dolby processing deliver some loud full sound. You can tune the levels of highs, mids and bass on-screen. The bass is deep and can make surfaces vibrate, so careful placement is called for. It certainly needs no additional sub-woofer. It sounds rather good for both personal listening and to spread across a room and manages to sound very pleasant at a lower volume. Using it at very high to full volume isn’t a recommended experience. What is recommended is to use it to watch movies for which the sound is really well localised and immersive.

The Echo Show is, of course, a smart home hub that needs nothing more than compatible devices like smart lights. Xiaomi’s security camera also works with it and can let you see what’s happening in the room where it’s placed. Smart plugs that are Alexa-integrated can be found and these enable many appliances to be used. It’s the addition of smart home devices that make the Show enjoyable to use for ‘routines’. For instance, ‘Alexa, goodnight’ can be set to trigger off a series of actions such as turning off all the lights — maybe leaving specified ones on — and playing soft music to induce sleep. A good morning can be set to give a weather report, the news, an alarm, devotional music or podcasts. Amazon has smartly opened up Alexa skills development to anyone who cares to make them. If they pass muster, they appear on the Skills Store. There are thousands of India-specific skills, from cricket to Bollywood and horoscopes to the Art of Living. This is something the Show shares with its other Echo cousins.

Though you can listen to music from multiple sources and watch movies and TV shows, don’t expect YouTube to be available as an Alexa-integrated app. It’s accessed from within the browser onboard (Silk or Firefox). You also won’t get Netflix or Apple Music or Spotify — at least not yet. But the Indian sources for music are there.

One of the best features likely to be popular in India is the hands-free video calling. Though you can video chat with someone on your phone with a mere touch, there’s something nice about having an impulsive voice-triggered call. At the same time, one can opt to turn off the 5 MP front camera as it can take you by surprise.

The Show is an interesting addition to the Echo line-up. Not everyone will want to spend that much, a fact borne out by the inexpensive Dot being the most popular, but a niche group of customers will love the fact that they can have a powerful-sounding speaker that also has a screen and has Alexa at its heart.

Price: ₹22,999

Pros: Pleasant enough screen, solid immersive sound, big bass, good for Prime movies and video calls, lots of India skills, controls smart devices

Cons: Sound can vibrate somewhat, native support for YouTube still missing, no Netflix and other movie sources

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