I’ve been using these for a couple years now and as time goes by we find ourselves using them more and more. Now we have one in just about every room of the house.

Let me first address the biggest concern that many people have about such things. PRIVACY: I seems everybody is freaking out these days about other people and devices spying on them. Simple: If concerned about that, then flip off the mic switch unless you want to use it for something or slide the physical switch to cover the camera. I’ve taken apart mine to see how these things are disabled and satisfied they work as designed. As a former electronics and software engineer, I am too curious about things that potentially could spy on me.

On to the features and what we use it for. There are many. I ask it for weather reports, stock market reports, and lots of general questions. The wife watches TV and wonders about things like how old is that actor. I ask Alexa. Sometimes we use it to video chat with relatives that have one. Even with a relative in another country it works nicely with no hiccups. The wife likes it to get the status on delivery of her Amazon packages. It gives good reminders when something is due to arrive or informs her when they have arrived.

We have configured ours through the settings to occasionally show things we are interested in knowing and turn off the things we don’t care about.

When we ask it questions, it has no issue understanding our questions. The display is high quality and easy to read. Frankly we like it better than the Google devices we had and the results are more accurate with Alexa. We gave away our Google devices.

We use apps that let the device turn on or off lights when we ask it, or something as simple as setting a timer for something cooking or waking us up in the morning. I’m sure I’m missing to mention other features I forget.

Summary…. don’t know what we would do without them. We are sold on the Echo Show.