 Here's what my life is like right now. I'm cooking, or lying in bed, or playing video games, and I suddenly remember, oh, I need more batteries, or I need to pick up my laundry in exactly 24 minutes. Maybe I just want to hear some Dave Matthews band, like right now. In every one of those cases, I do the same thing. I say, Alexa, and then command Alexa to do something. Set a timer, add batteries to my shopping list, play ants marching, and crank it up. And this thing, this black cylinder about the size of a can of tennis balls that's sitting on my shelf, responds. The Echo is two things. It's a Bluetooth speaker, and it's a personal assistant. Let's get that first one out of the way now. It's a terrible Bluetooth speaker. It has this really awkward connection system, and just bad, tinny, shallow sound. Since it has to be plugged in all the time, you really can't take it anywhere. It's just never going to replace a real wireless speaker. Even being able to search for music is nice, but not when it's just Prime Music, iHeart Radio, and TuneIn. But, of course, calling the Echo a Bluetooth speaker is like calling Kit from Knight Rider a car. The whole point is everything else the Echo can do. Everything Alexa can do. You can change her name, by the way, if you have someone named Alexa or Alexis in your house. But you can only change it to Amazon, so if your son and daughter are named Amazon and Alexis, you're basically just screwed. Alexa can add things to a really basic to-do list in the companion app, or to a shopping list. But no, she can't just randomly order things for you that show up in two business days, though that would be awesome. Alexa can also take basic commands and answer basic questions. I think half the time I used it to check the weather or find out how many tablespoons are in a cup. One cup equals 16 tablespoons. But from telling jokes to looking things up to telling you the time, Alexa is an incredible fountain of useful information. How many ears does Captain Kirk have? Three. His left ear, his right ear, and his final front ear. And most of the time, it works. And when it does, it feels like magic. Alexa can also tell you when the Civil War ended, or who won the Knicks game last night. Although I guess I should say she usually will tell you these things, because sometimes she just won't. Sometimes Alexa doesn't hear me right, even in super quiet rooms, and sometimes she hears me right but refuses to answer the question, instead making me open up the companion app and go through my search history to find it. The app is fine, and it works on Android and iOS, in addition to Amazon's devices, but it's also 100% not the point of this device to make it ever so slightly easier for you to search the internet with an app. For the most part it does work in a quiet room. But as soon as you say, Alexa, play some music, and some weird Prime music playlist comes on, it's just over. She can't hear you anymore. She won't tell you she doesn't hear you either. The blue at the top comes on as if she's doing something, and then it just goes off. For all the reasons that the Echo feels so simple when it works, it's maddeningly unhelpful when it doesn't. Yeah, sure, you can press the button on the top to make sure the Echo is listening, but by the time I've walked all the way over there to do it, it'd be easier to just pick up my phone. There's also a remote, but taking that out of my pocket is as much work as taking my phone out of my pocket. I mostly think Amazon was smart to make you plug in the Echo to use it, because it means you don't need to worry about it being charged and turned on all the time. But the idea that you can just leave the Echo where it is and use it anywhere is just not true. You'd have to buy basically one for every two or three rooms, which is just crazy. I've found it most useful in the kitchen, where I'm always doing other things with my hands anyway, so I left my Echo there. The thing about the Echo, and with any voice control device right now, is that it works a lot, and when it works, it's awesome. But by the time I've spent two minutes yelling, Alexa, volume three, while she blasts whatever Huey Lewis and the News song she found on Amazon Prime, I just give up. If the Echo were a great Bluetooth speaker, I'd say buy this thing right now. It's going to get better fast, as it gets more apps, more content, and more smarts. And it's almost worth it just to have a voice controlled way to add things to my shopping list while I play video games. But for $199, 99 for a Prime member, it's not a very good Bluetooth speaker. And it's the craziest, most unreliable personal assistant ever. She's the best, until she's the worst, until she just completely ignores you while she plays Katy Perry at her desk. I want the Echo to be great, and I want one in my house. I think it'll get there, but it probably won't be this version.