Third-gen Echo Dot review: sound is surprisingly loud and rich, has improved aesthetics, and the ability to pair two Dots in stereo is nice, but bass is lacking
The cheap Echo is no longer a bad speaker — I'm going to cut right to the chase: the new Echo Dot smart speaker is so much better …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Amazon announced the refreshed $49.99 Echo Dot and $149.99 Echo Plus in September 2018, the pitch was updated designs and better sound — this review is the verdict on whether the cheapest Echo stopped being an audio compromise. It largely did: loud, rich output plus stereo pairing of two Dots, with bass as the remaining gap.
The review matters because the Dot was already Amazon's volume leader among Prime Day shoppers and part of an Echo franchise that hit one million pre-orders in under two weeks, giving Amazon its edge over Apple and Google in the voice-computing paradigm. Later coverage confirms the trajectory this review started: the 2020 Echo Dot kept improving sound at a low price, and by 2023 even the cheaper Echo Pop could ship 'good sound' at $40.
First-order effects
- At $49.99, buyers no longer trade away listenable music for an Alexa puck — the Dot now competes for actual speaker purchases, not just gadget purchases, and two-Dot stereo pairing gives Amazon a $100 bundle against single larger speakers.
Second-order effects
- Apple and Google's entry-level smart speakers now face a rival whose cheapest device clears the bar on sound, forcing their low-end hardware to compete on audio rather than price alone.
- Amazon's own higher-tier speakers lose some differentiation: if two Dots can be paired in stereo, the case for stepping up to a pricier Echo narrows to bass and room-filling volume.
Third-order effects
- If each generation keeps closing the audio gap at the bottom of the lineup — as the 2020 Dot and 2023 Echo Pop reviews suggest — smart-speaker competition shifts from hardware quality to the assistant layer itself, which is where Amazon's scale advantage lives; the 2025 Echo Dot Max running Alexa+ shows that endpoint.
The trend: Entry-level smart speakers are converging on genuinely good audio, pushing competition between Amazon, Apple, and Google up the stack into the voice-assistant software layer.