Amazon Echo Dot review: as good as the Echo for one-third of the price

The Amazon Echo Dot is essentially all the bits of an Amazon Echo that make it interesting, but without the speaker beneath it – and so it costs just one-third of the price. The Dot is one of three Alexa-enabled products from Amazon that puts the company's voice assistant front and centre. Only two, the Echo Dot and the Echo are available in the UK: the third, the portable Bluetooth speaker called Echo Tap, is only available in the US. The Dot is a small black or white puck with a ring of lights at the top, four buttons and a seven-microphone array – the same system that makes the Echo speaker so good at hearing you from pretty much anywhere. It listens out for a "wake word", which by default is the name of the voice assistant contained within the Dot: "Alexa".