Has anybody else gotten an Amazon Echo yet. I bought one for my wife for her birthday and we are loving it. The best way I can describe it is a cross between Siri and a Squeezbox. It is a 3 1/4 inch round, 9 1/4 high cylinder with self contained speakers. It gives you voice controlled command of your itunes library, your Amazon library, Pandora, iHeart Radio and if you are an Amazon Prime member,free access to a library of 1000s of albums. In addition to music it can also connect you to news, traffic, weather and sports reports and to all kinds of non-audio things, like keep a shopping list for you and connect to home automation devices. And more functionalities are being developed and added all the time.
It seamlessly connects to the net over wifi and is small enough to fit most anywhere in the house without getting in the way.
No it is not an audiophile device, there are not outputs at all to connect it to a separate audio system, so it is not going to become your goto music source, but it is easy to use and the sound quality is not bad at all for casual listening. my wife cannot cook without it playing anymore and just loves the fact that she can change the music or the volume without having to stop and clean off her hands before touching any knobs.
And best off for her is she can get the music going without having to get involved with turning up my stereo, which also involved a trip into the other room whenever she wanted to change anything.
And so far we have pretty much used it for nothing but music. There are all kinds of other things left for us to explore.
Quite a fun toy. And all for $179!