Amazon Echo Dot (4th Gen) Review
I’m that 5G guy. I’ve actually been here for every "G." I’ve reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also write a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsess about phones and networks.
I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
The Bottom Line
The fourth-generation Echo Dot speaker doesn’t offer particularly impressive sound quality, but for $50, it’s still the best basic gateway to Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.
Amazon Echo Dot (4th Gen) Specs
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Channels | Mono |
| Bluetooth | Yes |
| Wi-Fi | Yes |
| Multi-Room | Yes |
| Physical Connections | 3.5mm |
| Portable | No |
| Water-Resistant | No |
| Speakerphone | Yes |
| Built-In Voice Assistant | Amazon Alexa |
Editors’ Note: There is a new version of the Echo Dot available. Check out the Amazon Echo Dot (5th Gen).
It’s surprising that it took the $49.99 Echo Dot smart speaker this long to start looking like, well, a dot. The fourth-generation Echo Dot is now a sphere, to mirror the look of the new fourth-gen Echo, albeit in a smaller size for half the price. Not much else has changed here, but the new Echo Dot remains one of the best ways to add Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to every room of your home. That said, we think the LED clock face on the Echo Dot With Clock is worth the extra $10 if you plan on putting the speaker on your desk, nightstand, or anywhere else you use clocks and timers.
Mostly a New Design
The fourth-gen Echo Dot is a 3.9-inch sphere, half plastic and half fabric covered, coming in blue, dark gray, or white. On the top there are four physical buttons for volume up, volume down, activating Alexa, and turning the mic off. The blue light ring that shows when Alexa is listening has migrated from the top of the speaker to the bottom, making the surface underneath glow softly. The back features the power adapter and a 3.5mm audio output for connecting the Echo Dot to a larger speaker.
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Along with the standard model, there’s an Echo Dot for Kids, pictured below, where the cover looks like a cute tiger or a panda. You’ll pay $10 more for it, but you also get a two-year warranty and a yearlong subscription to Amazon Kids+, the former FreeTime Unlimited kids’ content service. That’s at least a $36 value, although the Kids+ pricing (Opens in a new window) is a little complicated. There’s also the aforementioned Echo Dot With Clock, the exact same Echo Dot but with a digital LED clock display, for $59.99.
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Don’t expect better sound here; this is largely a cosmetic change. The Echo Dot still has a 1.6-inch driver and a 3.5mm line out to power more capable speakers. If you want better sound, you’ll have to step up to the fourth-gen Echo with its 3-inch woofer and dual 0.8-inch tweeters.
Amazon Alexa
Like every Echo speaker before it, the new Echo Dot lets you access Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant simply by saying, "Alexa," followed by a command. Alexa can answer general questions; provide information like weather forecasts and unit conversion; control smart home devices; make phone calls and in-home voice calls to other Alexa devices; and play music from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and SiriusXM (if you want to listen to music on other services, the Echo Dot also has Bluetooth).
Alexa is useful, but its syntax tends to be very strict compared with Google Assistant, which you get on the $50 Nest Mini and the $100 Nest Audio. We’ve found that Google Assistant is better at recognizing natural language, particularly when controlling smart home devices. Amazon continues to develop Alexa and is working on improving its natural language recognition, but for now Google Assistant has the edge in simply being easier to talk to.
Audio Performance
You won’t get room-filling power or low-frequency rumble with the Echo Dot. The speaker handled our bass test track, The Knife’s "Silent Shout," without much bass response to speak of. At maximum volume levels, the kick drum and bass synth sound poppy at best, and lean toward distortion at worst.
Yes’ "Roundabout" comes through a bit better on the Echo Dot, but it still lacks much in the way of bass response. The opening acoustic guitar plucks get some string texture, but also sound a bit hollow and slightly tinny. When the track properly kicks in, the mix sounds reasonably balanced, but any bass takes a backseat to the vocals, which stand firmly in the front. This is a highs-focused sound signature, with little in the lower frequencies to even it out.
Like the previous version, the new Echo Dot doesn’t sound terrible, it just doesn’t have the power or range to really offer a listening experience that can fill a room with well-balanced audio. But that isn’t the point: The Echo Dot is designed for bringing Alexa’s voice assistance prowess to your desk, kitchen, nightstand, or any other part of your home. If you want an Alexa speaker primarily for listening to music, you’ll need to upgrade to the $99 Echo or the $199 Echo Studio.
More for Alexa, Less for Music
We’ve reviewed Echo Dot speakers for years, and they’ve always been good choices for everything but music. Of course, that’s because Alexa is about far more than music: It’s about answering questions, controlling smart home devices, listening to podcasts, talking to family members with an in-home intercom, getting homework help, and thousands of add-on voice skills. The Dot is your gateway to all of that.
Its top competition in the Echo world is the $24.99 Echo Flex, which looks like a plug-in air freshener except it’s full of Alexa rather than a chemical "fresh breeze" scent. The Flex is good if you have another speaker to connect to it, but its tiny driver isn’t even strong enough for calls and podcasts if there’s any other sound in the room. Meanwhile, on the Google Assistant side of things, the Nest Mini offers similarly helpful smart features through Google’s voice assistant rather than Amazon’s, though its audio quality is a bit worse than even the Echo Dot’s.
There’s little reason to get the new Echo Dot if you already have a third-generation model. It’s effectively the same speaker, just in a different design. But if you’re just looking to get a smart speaker and want something with a little more power than the Echo Flex, the fourth-gen Echo Dot is a fine choice that costs half as much as the full-size Echo. You should consider spending the extra $10 on the Echo Dot with Clock, though—that helpful display really makes it stand out as an ideal nightstand speaker, and earns it our Editors’ Choice award.
Amazon Echo Dot With Clock (5th Gen, 2022 Release) Review
I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).
The Bottom Line
The fifth-generation Amazon Echo Dot With Clock adds new visible information like song titles and weather conditions, making it an ever smarter speaker than the previous model for the same price.
PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.
Amazon Echo Dot With Clock (5th Gen, 2022 Release) Specs
| Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Channels | Mono |
| Bluetooth | Yes |
| Wi-Fi | Yes |
| Multi-Room | Yes |
| Physical Connections | None |
| Portable | No |
| Water-Resistant | No |
| Speakerphone | Yes |
| Built-In Voice Assistant | Amazon Alexa |
Amazon tends to push its Echo smart speakers forward with small steps more often than big ones, and sometimes small steps are just enough. The fifth-generation Echo Dot With Clock ($59.99) doesn’t sound much different from the previous version, but its revised LED display is far more useful with more to show than just the time, and new motion sensors let you interact with the speaker with a tap. Considering the Echo Dot series has been a favorite of ours for generations, it’s little surprise that the 2022 iteration of the Echo Dot With Clock earns our Editors’ Choice award.
Same Sphere, Better Display
The fifth-generation Echo Dot With Clock looks almost physically identical to the fourth-generation model. It’s a slightly squat 3.9-by-3.5-inch sphere (HD) available in light blue or white. The sphere is split diagonally, with the top and forward half covered in grille fabric and the bottom and back half bound in matte plastic. Four rubber buttons (action, mic mute, and volume up and down) protrude from the fabric along the top of the sphere. A light ring runs around the flat base; it glows blue when you interact with Alexa and will focus a particularly bright point to indicate the direction from which it registered the command.
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The clock part of the speaker is hidden behind the fabric grille when it isn’t active. It’s a rectangular, 5-by-24 array of white LEDs. This fifth-gen model expands the functionality of the LEDs with scrolling alphanumeric strings and simple symbols. By default it shows the time in digital clock format and any timers, just like the previous model. New support for scrolling numbers and symbols allows the Echo Dot With Clock to show the current weather, current song title and artist, and other information. It isn’t nearly as powerful as the screen of a smart display, but it’s much more useful than the numbers-only LEDs on the previous model.
Interior Renovations
In addition to the obvious exterior LED update, Amazon has upgraded the internal speaker driver. It’s slightly larger, measuring 1.73 inches across compared with the 1.6-inch driver of the fourth-generation Echo Dot. Despite the larger membrane, the newer speaker is an ounce and a half lighter at 10.7 ounces. Since this isn’t a portable speaker and is designed to be stationary, that weight reduction doesn’t make much of a difference in everyday use.
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New motion sensors in the Echo Dot With Clock lead to additional ways of interacting with the speaker beyond using your voice and the few physical buttons on top. Now you can lightly tap the top of the speaker to play or pause songs, end calls, stop ringing timers, or snooze alarms.
Amazon has also added eero mesh network support so the Echo Dot can serve as a node for your eero network if you use one. Amazon says the node allows for up to 1,000 square feet of eero Wi-Fi coverage, with speeds up to 100Mbps for up to 10 devices at a time. The Echo Dot With Clock also supports Bluetooth and dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and can work with the Amazon Sidewalk shared network (though we recommend not enabling this during setup due to privacy and security concerns).
Unfortunately, Amazon cut a critical feature of the previous Echo Dot: a 3.5mm jack. This means the new Echo Dot With Clock cannot be connected to a larger speaker.
The Power of Alexa
As an Echo speaker, the Echo Dot With Clock is designed to use Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Alexa is eight years old now—almost a tween!—and Amazon has ceaselessly pushed a steady stream of updates to its assistant to give it more functionality. It’s a powerful voice assistant that lets you seek out sports scores, weather reports, and other useful information; set alarms and timers; search for and play music and audiobooks; control smart home devices; and make voice calls.
For entertainment, Alexa can sift through music on Amazon Music and page through audiobooks on Audible. It can also access Amp, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Saavn, SiriusXM, Spotify, Tidal, and TuneIn to play music, podcasts, and radio stations via those services. If you pair the Echo Dot with an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Fire TV Cube, or Fire TV, you can control that streaming device and various video services through Alexa, too.
Alexa is one of the most widely supported voice assistants for controlling smart home devices. Thousands are supported across all major consumer home automation brands, and include video doorbells, security cameras, smart bulbs, smart locks, smart plugs, and smart thermostats. You can set up routines to control multiple devices with a single voice command or when certain circumstances are met, such as the time of day. Alexa can develop Hunches, wherein it evaluates the state of smart home devices based on your past behavior and prompts you to do things like lock the doors or turn off the lights when you’re away from home.
Alexa supports making voice calls through a variety of services. You can call any standard (non-toll-free, premium-rate, or emergency) number in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, and receive calls by linking your AT&T or Verizon phone account. You can talk to other Amazon users through Drop In, which lets you directly speak to your Amazon contacts through their Alexa devices (or the Alexa app on their phone). Alexa also supports Skype calls through the Echo Dot With Clock.
Most of these features are comparable with those available to Google Assistant and Google’s Nest line of smart devices. Whether you choose to be an Amazon household or a Google household is a personal one. Historically, Google Assistant is better at natural speech recognition while Alexa supports more third-party skills. At a base feature level, however, they are more or less equal.
Balanced, But Not Booming Audio
Despite the larger speaker driver, don’t expect a lot more power from the fifth-gen Echo Dot With Clock. Our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” sounds weak on the speaker, with little low-frequency response. It also distorts at higher volume levels. “Silent Shout” is a particularly punishing sub-bass-heavy song, though, and the Echo Dot With Clock sounds significantly better with other music.
The opening acoustic guitar plucks in Yes’ “Roundabout” sound full and get plenty of low-mid resonance combined with a bit of high-mid clarity to bring out some string texture even if it isn’t very crisp. When the track fully kicks in, the bassline, drums, guitar strums, and vocals all share attention fairly evenly. The bassline doesn’t have much low-frequency presence and sounds a bit poppy, and the cymbals and guitar don’t have enough high-frequency response to really cut through the mix, but within the small speaker’s modest frequency range it sounds full and nicely balanced.
The riffs and vocals in The Crystal Method’s “Burn Too Slow” get plenty of https://jiji.ng/ high-mid attention, though again the fairly limited range of the speaker is apparent. The backbeat gets some low-mid power, but it isn’t the deep, ominous thump the track should have. Similarly, the voice and riffs, while prominent, don’t have a lot of high-frequency edge.
These complaints are to be expected for a tiny $60 smart speaker. A small, single driver just can’t deliver the kind of frequency range that a larger speaker with multiple drivers (like the much larger $199.99 Amazon Echo Studio) can. Ultimately, the Echo Dot With Clock provides a balanced, if limited, sound that can capably fill a small room.
A More Useful Dot
The fifth-generation Amazon Echo Dot With Clock is a notable upgrade over the previous version thanks to its more useful display and convenient tap gestures. It doesn’t sound much better as a speaker, but for $60, it isn’t designed to be the main speaker for most rooms. That said, it sounds better than the $49 Google Nest Mini, and the LED readout is easily worth the $10 premium over the Nest Mini or the standard Echo Dot, earning the Echo Dot With Clock our Editors’ Choice award. If you want a smart speaker with more power and superior audio, the larger Amazon Echo and Google Nest Audio are both excellent picks at around twice the price, while the Echo Studio is even more impressive, with room-filling spatial audio for $199.99.