The best Alexa speakers of 2021: the top smart speakers to control your home
Anyone who's tried Amazon's Alexa will know it can feel just as much a part of their household as their pets. That's why it makes sense to find the best Alexa speaker to really make the most of the AI-powered assistant.
Adding an Alexa speaker to your home is a great way to bring together all your smart home devices into one central hub. Alexa also allows you to play your favorite tunes, tell you the weather forecast, set timers and switch on your smart lights using just your voice.
The good news is, over the past few years, Alexa has evolved. Originally, you could only get the AI voice assistant to answer simple questions or play music on Amazon’s speakers. Now there's a massively expanding Alexa Skills set and constant upgrades are being made to sound quality.
This can be seen in Amazon’s Alexa set of speakers, like the audio-focused Echo Studio through to the latest versions of the Echo and Echo Dot. It might have been an afterthought before, but now Amazon is increasingly focused on giving users a better-sounding experience.
But you don’t have to buy an Amazon product to bring Alexa into your home. Brands like Sonos, Bose and Yamaha all offer fantastic audio quality, as well as integration with Amazon’s must-have smart assistant.
There's a wide range of Alexa speakers to choose from. But you'll need to ask yourself what you want. An alarm clock? Video calling device? Home cinema system?All of these products and more now come under Alexa’s control as the smart speaker matures.
We've selected the best Alexa speakers you can buy today, including those from the Echo range and beyond.
- Looking for more voice assistant options? Check out the best smart speakers of 2021
Is this the best smart speaker? After years pushing its own multi-room home audio system, Sonos went and produced the spectacular Sonos One, complete with touch-sensitive controls, two Class-D digital amplifiers, one mid-woofer and one tweeter, its soundstage is punchy, energetic and bassy.
It’s easy to set-up, with a nifty Trueplay Tuning process (which requires you to take your phone around the room while it plays test sounds), while a new update has just added Hi-Res Audio to the mix. It’s so good as a standalone speaker that you can even buy it without Alexa.
Read more: Sonos One review
[Update: If you're looking for an Alexa speaker you can take on the go, check out the Sonos Move, or the more recent Sonos Roam. Both portable speakers deliver all the smarts of Alexa without being confined to your home.]
Amazon’s first high-end smart speaker for home cinemas is its best-sounding Echo so far. One of the most powerful speakers you’ll find for the money at 330W, buy two Amazon Echo Studio speakers and you can set them up in the Alexa app to create an immersive home cinema system.
It’s a seriously impressive Alexa speaker, though to get the best from it consider becoming a subscriber to Amazon Music HD. Our only complaint is that its up-mixing of stereo tracks to Dolby Atmos is inconsistent.
Read more: Amazon Echo Studio review
The new Amazon Echo is a serious step up from its predecessors, even if it still doesn't have the best sound of all the Alexa speakers you can buy. Add to that the built-in Zigbee smart home hub and a new AZ1 neural edge processor that will reduce the time it takes for Alexa to respond to commands, and you’ve got the recipe for the best Echo design yet.
Of course, while the hardware is all new, it’s still the same ol’ Alexa under the hood. Alexa will still be able to answer your basic questions or make calls within your country of residence, as well as control any number of smart devices you have around your home.
Read more: Amazon Echo (2020) review
The Amazon Echo Dot has always been the best option for those who aren’t sure about smart home tech and want to take the first step. This Alexa speaker provides a place for the voice assistant to live inside your home and packs in enough sound performance to fill a room. All that for under $50 / £50 / AU$80 and it’s easy to see why it’s long been one of the most popular smart speakers on the market.
In some of those ways, the Amazon Echo Dot (2020) lives up to the legacy set down by all of the previous Echo Dot devices – it’s small, decently loud and, thanks to Alexa, it’s pretty smart, too.
Read more: Amazon Echo Dot (2020) review
There’s not much to get excited about on this, the newest version of the Echo Dot Alexa speaker. That is, unless the question you ask most frequently of Alexa is “what’s the time?”
Like its predecessor, the Echo Dot with Clock can double as a bedside alarm, albeit one that comes with all the smarts of Alexa on board alongside the ability to control your smart home devices (via a separate Zigbee-supporting speaker).
It has undergone a rather radical design overhaul over the previous Echo Dot with Clock, sporting a space age-esque spherical design that's available in both gray and white color schemes. All the features of the previous Echo Dot with Clock remain, including a 3.5mm AUX-in port, and the blue Alexa light ring – although this is now located at the bottom of the smart speaker rather than the top.
Read more: Amazon Echo Dot with Clock (2020) review
If you’re searching for one of the the best-sounding Alexa speakers, you can stop looking. With Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa built-in, the sleek anodized aluminum Home Speaker 500 has the smarts alongside room-filling sound.
An eight microphone array, designed for near and far-field listening, lets you talk to Alexa even when music is playing loud. However, setting the speaker up on a Wi-Fi network using the Bose Music app is harder than it should be.
Read more: Bose Home Speaker 500 review
Pitted against the Echo Show 5 for the title of ‘best compact smart display’, the mango-sized Echo Spot Alexa speaker is the more affordable and better looking of the two.
With a round 5.5-inch screen that’s about the size of a smartphone, it’s cute and quirky, and is designed for use anywhere in a home. Ideal to use for intercom-style video chat around the house and beyond, it crops widescreen video and zooms-in to fit faces to its circular screen, and its tiny speaker is surprisingly good.
Read more: Amazon Echo Spot review
Why shouldn’t Alexa get involved with home entertainment?
Despite bringing Alexa to the living room, the headline act on this 2.1-channel soundbar is audio quality. It’s got a 100W driver and 200W of power for the entire system spread across two front-firing speakers, and a separate wireless subwoofer. Cue a big soundstage that also features crisp, clear vocals, well-integrated bass and – thanks to DTS Virtual:X processing – an immersive sonic experience.
Read more: Yamaha YAS-209 review
The Sonos Move is the company's first foray into portable Bluetooth speakers that launched in 2019. Since launch, it's topped our list of the best Bluetooth speaker and is perfectly suited for both indoor and outdoor listening.
The Sonos Move offers on-the-go Bluetooth play, as well as integrating with a multi-room networked speaker system over Wi-Fi. In this way, it’s got most of the functionality of a regular Sonos, along with the very appealing ability to untether it from a power supply, thanks to an internal battery.
Since launch, we've seen a new and improved Sonos Move that brings improved battery life with an extra hour of charge to ensure those trips to the beach – or just out of reaching distance of a plug socket – are packed with quality sound as long as possible. Plus there's a new Lunar White version of the Sonos Move gives a white/silver new look to the portable speaker, and should provide more variety.
Read more: Sonos Move review
Unlike any other Amazon smart display, the Echo Show 10 Alexa speaker can follow you around the room when you move so that the screen and camera are always within your gaze, whether you’re following a recipe, making a video call or watching Netflix.
The Echo Show 10’s 13MP camera pans with the screen, and also zooms automatically when you’re on a video call, making sure you’re front and center of the picture at all times. The camera can also be used for home security, with its live feed available through the Alexa app any time you want to check in on your abode.
Like all Amazon Echo devices, Alexa is built-in and offers a hands-free way to set timers, shop online, follow recipes, get your burning questions answered and get the latest weather and news. As well as an audible response, the Amazon Echo Show 10 will offer up extra information on screen, too: ask for the weather forecast, for example, and it’ll announce the day’s temperature while on screen an hour-by-hour breakdown, along with the wind speed and real-feel temperature, is displayed.
Previous iterations of the Amazon Echo Show 10’s have had a ‘voice first, touch second’ approach. This is still the case with the newest model, although the reliance on voice has been reduced somewhat. Swipe left from the home screen and you’ll find shortcuts for making calls, announcements and drop-ins, as well as for playing music and video services, setting routines and controlling smart home gadgets.
Read more: Amazon Echo Show 10 review
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Reviewed by mimisabreena
on
Friday, August 27, 2021
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