New Amazon Echo Spot Alarm Clock Speaker Offers Better Privacy Features

It was seven years ago when Amazon launched an Echo device designed for the nightstand, giving you easy access to Alexa’s trove of features right next to your comfy bed. This year, they’re finally following it up with a worthy replacement in the form of the Amazon Echo Spot.

That’s right, the Alexa-powered alarm clock speaker is getting a second-generation version, bringing with it more powerful hardware, an improved display, and a better audio experience. They also ditched people’s biggest gripe about the original, the integrated camera, which brought up privacy concerns, especially since it’s a device built to live in the bedroom. Basically, that’s no longer a thing you have to worry about in this iteration.

The Amazon Echo Spot has a round face, with the upper half taken up by the screen and the lower half covered by the speaker grille. It has a 2.8-inch screen with a 320 x 240 resolution, making it big and detailed enough to serve as a useful time display for bedside alarm clock duties. Of course, it offers multiple clock faces, along with a whole host of other screens, since the device uses the display as a primary visual interface. The screen is touch-sensitive, by the way, so you can just tap it for control, in case you don’t feel like talking to Alexa when you wake up in the middle of the night.

It’s equipped with a 1.7-inch front-firing speaker, which, the outfit claims, deliver clear vocals and deep bass. This appears to be a similar driver to the one used in the Echo dot, so it should produce decent-sounding audio, regardless of what kind of music you enjoy playing. As an alarm clock, it’s designed to wake people up using music and gradual light similar to sunrise alarm clocks, putting both the display and the speaker to use. According to the outfit, it’s designed to ease people into wakefulness, so the display probably brightens and the sound volume gets higher gradually to gently rouse you up from bed.

The Amazon Echo Spot can detect touch, so you can simply tap it anywhere to snooze the alarm if you’re not ready to get up yet. There are also physical volume buttons and a mic off button, making it easy shut down the mic when you want to ensure privacy in the bedroom. According to the outfit, it also offers the ability to delete all your voice recordings, giving you full control over your Alexa experience. The device, by the way, measures 4.5 x 4.1 x 4.4 inches (width x depth x height), making it the right size to sit on the bedside table.

Aside from its alarm clock and music playback functions, the device gets the full breadth of Alexa features, from letting you check on the weather and providing reminders to letting you control compatible home automation products. You can also define routines that prompt Alexa to perform sequences of actions at various times of the day, making it easy to automate various things around the house from morning till night.

The Amazon Echo Spot is available now.