Amazon Echo review: combined speaker, voice assistant and smart-home controller

Amazon's Echo voice-controlled smart speaker is finally available in the UK, but was the wait worth it? The Echo is one of the first devices with Amazon's voice assistant - a rival to Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant and Microsoft's Cortana - which allows you to control music playback just by speaking to it and a whole lot more. Echo is three devices in one. It's a voice-controlled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speaker capable of playing music from Amazon music, a Spotify premium account or a smartphone, tablet or computer connected via Bluetooth. It's also a smart voice assistant called Alexa that's capable of answering queries, setting timers, doing calculations, telling you the weather or what's in your calendar and other bits you might expect from Siri, Cortana or Google Assistant.