The Amazon Echo Input is cheaper than the Echo Dot (and is not shaped like a weird plant pot!)
Amazon Echo Input
£34.99, amazon.co.uk
Fashionable though it is, I don’t actually like listening to music through a device shaped like a weird plant pot. Perhaps I’m showing my age here.
In the past couple of years, Google’s Home and Amazon’s Echo speakers have taken over – with the tech companies understandably eager that we hurl out all previous hi-fi equipment to make room for them, enjoying an astounding new world where our music systems also allow us to order groceries.
You just plug it in via either a headphone cable or Bluetooth, and suddenly you can forget dreary old discs and instead enjoy the modern pleasure of Alexa replying ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand that’
So Amazon’s Echo Input is a welcome arrival: it’s Echo, minus the speaker, so it works via your existing hi-fi. You just plug it in via either a headphone cable or Bluetooth, and suddenly you can forget dreary old discs and instead enjoy the modern pleasure of Alexa replying ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand that’.
Input is £15 less than the Echo Dot, the puck-shaped runt of the Echo litter (which has a speaker, albeit a pretty horrible one).
The four far-field microphones can pick up your voice even if you’re blasting music at high volume, and there’s a Mute button for those private moments when you’d prefer Jeff Bezos not to be listening in.
There are a few hiccups with Bluetooth: many hi-fis power off when not in use, which means you’ll have to reconnect manually. That’s a headache. But it works well via 3.5mm cable (although a choice of connectors would have been nice) and the tiny gizmo sits discreetly on top of a ‘proper’ hi-fi – ie, one with two speakers – and no resemblance to a plant pot.