Once upon a time, the Amazon Echo Dot was the company's least expensive smart speaker, selling for $50 or less during Black Friday. Those days are long gone, but Amazon thinks it's added enough to the new Echo Dot to justify its new price of $99.
The sixth-generation Echo Dot, which comes four years after its predecessor, has a similar design, with an acoustic fabric covering the front of the speaker, and a hard plastic shell around the back. The Alexa bar — the small LED strip that lets you know when the AI is listening — is now just a small arc in the front, rather than a circle running around the bottom of the device. Maybe Amazon thought it looked a bit too much like the Google Home Speaker?
Despite the outward similarities, Amazon has beefed up the internals of the Echo Dot. It has a marginally larger full-range driver (1.75 inches vs. 1.73 inches) that the company says will deliver crisper vocals and 50% more bass than the previous generation. Its new A23 processor is also better suited for handling on-device Alexa+ requests, so that you'll get faster responses.
And, the addition of a fourth microphone means that Alexa+ should be able to more easily pick up your voice, even if the room is noisy.
While the previous Echo Dot had both presence and temperature sensors, the newest model has Amazon's Omnisense sensor, which is basically those two sensors in one, but also uses AI to help provide more proactive suggestions.
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