Ok Let Me Review It: 3 Months of Living with Amazon Dot aka Alexa

Well it has been 3 months since I invited Alexa to come and live with me. It is really amazing at how much this device can do. There are still some limitations but for the most part I feel really good about the purchase.

There are times where she doesn't hear me, or misunderstands me. But for the most part, she gets things right 98% of the time. The one feature that I have come do depend on the most, is having her control my lights.

There have been times when going to bed that I have forgotten to shut off a light or something like that and had to get back up and go do it. Now I have Smart Plugs connected to all of my lamps. So all I have to do is roll over get comfy in bed and say "Alexa, turn off the lights" and tall the lights in the house shut off.

The other feature that I really love is the music feature. All I have to do is say "Alexa, play music" and she automatically starts playing music from a preselected station (typically country). And if you have more than one Echo Dot, you can have music streaming and playing through each one of them by saying "Alexa play music in the everywhere group". Now you have to set it up to do that, but with the app it is pretty easy.

The app is another extension of Alexa. You must have it downloaded in order to make it work, and to add devices for it to control and things like that. But another nifty feature is that through the app you can control your home devices that are connected via Smart Plug or a Hub.

You can also play games with her. My favorite so far is Jeopardy, and Tic Tac Toe. Also it seems like they are always coming out with some new feature, or game, or way for you to interact with her. There are quite literally hundreds of ways to interact with her. There are these things called Skills which help her, help you, to get even more done. My family and I, downloaded a program called Life360 which is a family GPS and Alexa has a skill set that will tell you where your family is, and will alert you when one of them is driving. Now if you purchase the full app then there are other things that it can tell you, like if someone is speeding, or if there was a reported issue with the car, like an accident.

Now about Smart Plugs/Bulbs/Hubs/etc there is quite a number of "off brand" devices that "work" with Alexa, but in my opinion you really should only use Amazon Approved products, unless you are a bit of a tech person, then you can fiddle around with some of them and get them to work. I have several off brand plugs, and I had one completely give out on me. And 2 that I cant seem to get to pair with my WiFi but I also dont have a huge tolerance or patients when it comes to some of that stuff.

With all of that being said, I would totally recommend getting an Amazon Alexa device. The initial upfront is going to be the biggest hurdle ranging anywhere from about $60-$300 depending on the set up you get. I found that around the holidays they drop down to about $30 but otherwise they are usually about $49.99.