The tiny fifth generation Echo Dot has a particularly efficient voice capture system, capable of seamlessly passing your requests to Alexa in the vast majority of cases. In a quiet environment, in the same room or in an adjacent room, you can interact with the voice assistant without much difficulty. This is also the case when you’re in a relatively noisy room (a kitchen with many appliances running, for example) or when the same speaker is broadcasting content at a moderate volume.
In these cases, you will have to think quickly enough to be within a few feet of her and speak at least in her direction and loudly to ensure that the message gets through. This will be all the more necessary when the ambient noise becomes more intense (in the evening or with several people huddled together, etc.), or when the speaker is pushed to its limits to play a piece. A passer in the immediate vicinity will sometimes be mandatory to trigger the wake word.
Our new connection with Alexa allowed us to see some changes in the assistant itself. First, we didn’t notice any hiccups as inopportune as might have been the case during our previous Echo Dot testing. Moreover, even if the interpretation of requests is not always incredibly convenient, there is an amazing gain in processing and response time, sometimes almost instantaneously. Sometimes it has a strange and undesirable effect, because it happens that certain beginnings of sentences are cut off, for example for an advertisement.
