Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edited 10/19/18: After 2 updates, the volume problem mentioned in my review is fixed. When using normal volume speech, but with the Echo volume set fairly low, Alexa now answers at a suitably low volume. And today, I was able to activate the new Whispermode, which works great! You whisper to Alexa, she whispers back to you. I'm raising my rating to 4.5 stars. If Amazon would ever remove the annoying “Try this” messages ruining my home screen photo (and music screens as well), I would probably rate this as 5 stars. (This is unfortunately unlikely to happen, as Echo Show users have been complaining about this for a year and a half, but it hasn't changed.) I upgraded from the first generation Echo Show. I’ll get my one real complaint out of the way first. On the second generation Show, you can lower the volume for music and videos, but not for the Alexa voice. Even with the volume set very low, so I can listen to music without disturbing anyone, if I need to interact with Alexa, her response will be very loud. This didn't happen with the first generation Echo. On that one, if I turned down the volume, everything was turned down, including Alexa. I did send feedback to Amazon about this, and I see someone else here commented on the problem. I'm eagerly awaiting the new whispermode, which isn't on my device yet, but really, I just want the voice volume to work the same way it did on the first generation. I do really like the bigger screen size, which is a pleasure to watch. I'm also enjoying using the Silk browser to access YouTube. (You get to it by saying “Alexa, open Silk.” ) You can't use voice to search for YouTube videos, but if you're willing to sign into a YouTube account, you can access your saved video lists and get to the videos quickly that way. I also used the browser to access my local PBS TV station and watched some on demand video on that.