• Pros – New Design Looks Great, Amazon Has Dropped The Price By £60, Alexa Is As Joyful To Use As Ever, Huge Number Of Third-Party Skills 
• Cons – Sound Quality Is Still A Little Lacking At High Volume

Amazon unveiled its second-generation Echo a little over a year after it first brought the smart speaker to the UK.

Express.co.uk was really impressed with the original Echo, branding it “the first device to successfully make the case that voice-activated appliances are the future”.

One year later, Amazon has unveiled an updated Echo alongside a swathe of other Alexa-powered gadgets, including the Fire HD 10, Echo Plus, and more.

The new Echo boasts a sleek new industrial design, improved speakers, and an attractive new £89.99 price tag – currently £69.99 due to the Black Friday sales.

Express.co.uk has been busy testing the new Echo, here is our definitive verdict.

Review –

In a nutshell, the new Echo is simply phenomenal.

Amazon has thrown out the stark utilitarian design of the first-generation Echo in favour of a friendlier, fabric-covered look.

The new Echo is available in a number of different colours, including Charcoal Fabric, Sandstone Fabric, and Heather Grey Fabric.

There’s also an Oak Finish, Walnut Finish and Silver Finish.

These should ensure the new Amazon Echo blends in with the furnishings inside your home and doesn’t call too much attention to itself, something the stark white and black finishes of its predecessor didn’t always manage.

Elsewhere, the second-generation Echo is also smaller than last year.

The new Echo stands at 14.8cm (5.8-inches) tall, compared to the 23.5cm (9.25-inches) of the original.

It’s a sizeable difference and means the Echo can be placed in more places around your home.

These small tweaks all make for a much more attractive design, something that’s incredibly important for a smart home product.

Those who were holding out on buying an Echo because of its monolithic, functional design should no longer have any qualms.

But while there’s no doubt the 2017 Echo looks miles better than its predecessor, for our money, Amazon’s smart speaker still can’t quite match the Google Home when it comes to pure aesthetics.

Inside the new design, Amazon has packed an all-new speaker architecture.

This includes an 2.5” downward-firing woofer and an upward-firing 0.6” tweeter powered by Dolby.

The new Echo boasts a little more bass than its predecessor, but other than that, there’s almost no discernible difference between the first and second generation speakers.

That’s not a criticism. In fact, given the £60 price difference between last year’s Echo and the new model – it’s actually a pretty hefty compliment.

Granted, the new Echo isn’t likely to win any awards for its sound, but it’s perfectly good enough when listening to the radio, podcasts or a few tracks via Prime Music or Spotify – two of the audio services compatible with Amazon’s smart speaker.

In fact, the limitations of the device only really become apparent when the Echo is cranked-up to full volume.

For the majority of the time, the Echo sounds absolutely fine.

Amazon has ditched the snazzy dial design, where the top of the speaker could be twisted to increase or decrease the volume in favour of physical + and – buttons on the top of the speaker, like the Echo Dot.

It's not as enjoyable as the first-generation design, but it's not much of an issue, since you'll probably find yourself adjusting the volume with a voice command most of the time anyway.

According to Amazon, the new Echo uses second-generation far-field microphone technology, which boasts better wake word processing, improved beam-forming technology, and enhanced noise cancellation.

Honestly, we rarely experienced any trouble with the first-generation technology hearing and processing our requests, so the new microphone array hasn’t appeared to be much of an improvement.

Echo consistently heard our demands – regardless of the volume of the music playing at the time.

It’s impressive stuff and inspires a level of trust that we have not afforded to many other rival voice-enabled assistants (here’s looking at you, Siri).

One year after the Amazon Echo launched in the UK, Alexa has come a long way.

A slew of companies have added Alexa compatibility in the last 365 days, including the likes of EasyJet, Domino’s Pizza, British Red Cross, and more.

These third-party apps, which Amazon has branded Skills, are still a little clunky to use.

Unlike the built-in functionality, which is activated with a number of naturalistic phrases, Amazon requires third-party developers to stick to a very rigid structure.

Echo owners need to name-check the specific Skill that will be able to execute their demand. For example, “Alexa, ask The Bartender what’s in a Tom Collins?” or “Alexa, ask National Rail to check my commute.”

This can be a bit of faff, especially since the names of the individual skills can be easy to forget.

When the rest of the Amazon Echo is so intuitive, the executive of third-party Skills stands-out like a sore thumb.

Alexa is still an absolute joy to use.

Unlike Google Assistant, which be a little mechanical and cold at times, Alexa has real personality.

Finding the comedic responses and hidden commands programmed into the virtual assistant is a lot of fun.

Alexa is also really useful.

Asking the disembodied assistant to play a chosen radio station, shuffle songs by a certain artist on Prime Music, or play a favourite album via Spotify, is incredibly convenient.

Granted, manually reaching for the dial on your analogue radio or using a Bluetooth speaker to listen to a playlist is far from a hardship, but there is something brilliant about asking Alexa to execute these demands.

Adding items to a To Do list before you forget to them write it down is phenomenally useful, as is the ability to quickly set timers and alarms when you’re busy cooking.

Alexa can also read-out the latest headlines from a number of news outlets, keep you up-to-date with weather, and answer any quick queries you have – like “How old is Stephen King?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?”

If you are kitted-out with smart and home automation devices, the Echo adds an entirely-new level of functionality to your household. 

Philips Hue lightbulbs, Hive thermostats and Netatmo security cameras are all compatible with the second-generation Echo.

But those with good old fashioned manual light switches might find a little less value for money in their all-new Echo.

Final Verdict 

The new Echo keeps the charms of the original Amazon smart speaker, whilst also benefiting from a stylish redesign.

The second-generation hardware looks great in the flesh, and the myriad of colour options are a welcome addition.

Granted, the sound quality is still nothing to write home about.

However, the fact the Echo has dropped from £149.99 to £89.99 takes most of the wind out of that qualm, since its comparable in quality to most speakers in that price bracket.

Alexa has seen a number of improvements in the last year, both in terms of its own in-built functionality, and the number of brands embracing the platform.

The Amazon Echo was our favourite consumer technology gadget last year, and now it’s even better.

The almost-impulse buy price, design improvements and advances to Alexa means Amazon is steadily whittling away any excuses you might have not to own one of these brilliant smart speakers.