The Amazon Echo is good if you can make it work. Wrenn Sanchez

Making the Amazon Echo work in the Philippines is quite a challenge for non-geeks or tech heads, so when we got hold of one at the Daily Tribune digital section we ran it through its paces.

The Echo is a family of smart speakers manufactured and first released by Amazon over four years ago which has become a favorite among US-based Filipinos. The full-featured iterations like the one in review can control several smart devices like a TV.

With Echo you can turn on that TV and command the personal digital assistant Alexa to search for the show you want to watch. With a Spotify subscription, you can ask Alexa to play any song or album in that particular music library.

Generally, among the features of the Amazon smart speakers are voice interaction, planning activities, setting alarms, streaming podcasts and audio books and music playback.

For music, the Echo, which is quite heavy, sounded full bodied, a bit on the warm side and was not lacking in bass. Many a graveyard shifts in the Tribune had passed by with Alexa as music player with its satisfying tonality.

For the price vis-à-vis its many functions, can we recommend the Echo for use in the Philippines if the primary consideration is its audio muscle?

Maybe, just maybe, considering the availability of so many other smart speakers that are way cheaper and not as difficult to set up as the Amazon Echo. In fact, we have yet to make the Amazon Dot work in our office.

Probably realizing that many potential buyers of the Echo are turned off by having to download third-party apps to make it work, Amazon has released an update on making it work easily.

But even that “easily” is relative to the difficulty in setting it up so for those us here in the Philippines who are primarily interested in music streaming, the old-fashioned Bluetooth speakers may still be the best option available.