Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, I want to thank everyone who has commented here sharing their experiences. Have a lot of people lending credence to this issue being widespread, while others are sharing their positive experiences with their new Dot's. It's great to see this cross section of experiences, and doubly so that they are shared civilly. Now, on to the review! So, I was part of the initial wave of testers for the full sized, original Echo. That has been constantly getting better, while always providing a solid ability to pick up my voice commands. This 2nd generation Dot? Woof. It is shocking to see such a complete faceplant from another device in a family of solid devices. It is truly a step down in every conceivable way. Now, I understand the drop in audio quality from the internal speaker. Cost cutting, much smaller, and the bonus is you can now hook it up to better stereo via BT or 3.5mm jack - which is great! However this thing CANNOT hear me. It is sitting on my nightstand about 3 feet away - a pretty ideal scenario I'd think. In a quiet room, it picks up my voice commands about...70% if I'm being generous. It doesn't matter if I'm staring right at it, it shrugs off my commands regularly. Here's where it goes from a downgrade to an embarrassment. If my alarm is going off, if music is playing (on the device or another speaker), if a movie is playing...it just won't hear me. Period. Again, I'd generously estimate it hears me maybe 20% of the time. This morning was the absolute culmination of this - my alarm went off, I issued the "off" command and...nothing. Alarm blaring, I try again...nothing. I pick it up, PUT IT NEXT TO MY MOUTH, issue the command....NOTHING! I had to hit one of the physical buttons on the top to turn it off. I've never experienced anything like this with my 1st gen original Echo. That aside, the device is a good size, feels decently built for the price-point, and can be powered off low-powered USB. Don't get this to listen to music on its inbuilt speaker though, it is definitely meant to be hooked up to an external speaker for anything more than Alexa's responses. Surprisingly, I may be returning this. I'll chew on things for a few more days and post anything worth updating (and clean this review up a bit), but I wanted people to know in the early going that not everything was rosy with this device - at least from my experience. ----------- SMALL UPDATE (10-27-2016): A forum goer gave me a suggestion to rerun the Voice Training, which I realized the app did not ask me to do since I had an Echo already set up I suppose. It appears to have helped a little, at least when the room is quiet. Picking up commands is a bit more consistent. With sound it still struggles - still picks me up less than half the time - but it does do a bit better. Others have mentioned this making a HUGE difference, with the Dot being able to pick them up a few rooms away. Wanted to throw this out for anyone in the event it may help them. Go to the Alexa app --> Settings --> Voice Training --> then select your device from the drop down at the top (if you have Fire TVs or other Echo's, it may not be the first device you see). Good luck! --------- UPDATE 11/04/2016: I tried a few more layouts (one where I even put the Echo on its side and pointed the top towards me so the microphones had the best chance of picking up my voice...still no joy) and was hoping for an update or new tip to come to light that might ease my woes. Unfortunately, that just hasn't happened. There seem to be enough people in the comments of this review stating their Echo's are responding as expected and are impressed with it overall. So I'm going to leave this review as-is for now and have Amazon send a replacement to see if it is just my luck with this unit or perhaps an issue with the timbre of my deeper voice. Of the latter, it seems possible that the cheaper Echo has less fidelity in the extreme upper/lower registers as compared to its older sibling but that is pure conjecture. If I get a new one I'll check it out, put it through its paces, and then get back to you fine folks! ----------- UPDATE 11-10-2016: I delayed the return of the Dot since I really like the idea and functionality of what it should do so I kept - somewhat stubbornly - trying different things and positions to see if I could find a way to make it work without the hassle of return or exchange. However, I failed to get enough of an improvement and finally messaged Amazon last night with my concerns with the product to see what they would say. I'll let you know what I hear from them if there is anything of note mentioned. From my continued futzing, I found it does seem to work somewhat better if it is in front of you rather than off to the side, even to the point of being 10+ feet in front of you versus a few feet to your side. Unfortunately any improvements I've been able to muster have solely effected how the Dot reacts in a quiet room. When alarms or music are playing, the issues continue to be too problematic to be functional, much less overlook. A recent oddity, though, was when I went to try and rerun the Voice Training through the app again as it just kept forcing me to the app's homescreen. Resetting the phone, Dot, app, re-pairing the Dot...nothing allowed me to select or run the Voice Training. So that is currently a negative point for me, and possibly even more so for others who may not have had the chance to run it at all yet. I'm hoping Amazon respond with a message discussing an incoming update or with the knowledge there is something deeply wrong with a certain batch of units and that mine possibly came from that early batch. I got mine a week or two before official release, so perhaps some of the earliest production units had issues. ---- UPDATE (11-22-2016): Quick update, but Amazon responded to my message with a kind of boilerplate response and suggestion, but one I hadn't tried. It was to factory reset the Dot by holding down the "mic mute" and "volume down" buttons until the unit starts flashing the orange light. Then go through the process all over again. I still had issues with getting voice training to work with my Android phone, but I COULD get it to work with an iOS device running the Alexa app. So using that awkward combination, I was able to reset and retrain my Dot. I haven't spent a lot of time with it since then, but in my very, very limited hands on it seems to have improved things a little. Again, I haven't found any sweeping changes, and I've heard a new update was released recently that helped other people having issues with their Dot out. I can't easily separate if the minor improvement came from the update or the reset, but it might be worth trying if you are frustrated with your Dot's performance. I'm considering a bump to 3 stars since I feel like maybe these little improvements are starting to creep the Dot towards an "average" ability to understand my commands, but I have to test the performance more and give more attention to the bigger bugaboo - if performance with ambient noises/alarms/music has improved meaningfully as well.