Tech
I’ve Tested 17 Different Alexa Speakers in the Last 3 Years. These Are the Ones Worth Buying
Comparing Our Favorite Alexa Speakers
Other Alexa (or Alexa-Compatible) Speakers
There are a lot of Echo devices out there, and some third-party speakers that are Amazon Alexa–compatible. Here’s every Alexa smart speaker we’ve tried and what we thought of it.
Amazon Echo (4th Gen) for $80: Amazon’s fourth-generation Echo notably changed the shape of the cylindrical speaker into a sphere. It was previously our top pick, but now has been discontinued as Amazon has launched new speakers, and there’s very limited stock available at third-party retailers like Walmart.
Amazon Echo Hub for $180: The Amazon Echo Hub is similar to an Echo Show, but without the speaker. Instead it’s a thin device that feels a bit like a tablet, designed to be mounted on the wall (or placed on a separately purchased stand, which is how I used it) and used to control your smart home devices. It’s a great choice for anyone who wants something focused on smart home control only. You can still ask Alexa questions and even play music, but the thin speakers aren’t worth playing music from. But you can tell your Echo Hub to play music on a different set of speakers, and even set up default speakers to work with it. It’s a great companion device if you already have a smart home setup.
Amazon Echo Pop for $40: The Echo Pop is a perfectly fine little speaker, and the cutest one in Amazon’s lineup. Does it have great sound? No. It’s fine enough for background tunes or if you’re limited to a dorm room, but you’ll get much better sound for a similar size from the Echo Dot (but you’ll pay a little more, and you won’t get as cute of colors!)
Amazon Echo Show 5 (3rd Gen) for $90: This smart display is another just-fine option, but it’s too small to be a great display, and the included camera makes it a no for a bedside table; better to go with the above Echo Spot or an Echo Dot.
Amazon Echo Show 8 (4th Gen) for $180: I usually love an Echo Show 8, but this model didn’t have the same sound quality as the older model. If you’re going to get one of Amazon’s new displays, you’re better off getting the Echo Show 11 ($220) for the same experience with a slightly larger screen (while it’s a three inch difference, it doesn’t feel that big) and better sound.
Amazon Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) for $250: This smart display has big sound, but its wonky shape makes it hard to seamlessly fit into your home. It’s cool that it can follow you around while you speak to it, but also kinda weird. It’s great if you have a big kitchen island you’re always moving around, but not much else. It’s been out of stock for a while now, though, and with the new Echo Show 11 out, we’re guessing we won’t see it return.
Amazon Echo Show 15 (2nd Gen) for $300: This smart display is a good display, but it clearly wants to double as a TV and isn’t very good at it yet. I’m hoping we see better TV-related performance in the future to make it worth adding to a kitchen or office. It does a great job with widgets, though, thanks to the massive 15.6-inch screen. There’s also the larger Echo Show 21 ($400), which is essentially the same thing but larger.
Amazon Echo Sub for $130: This subwoofer was our top pick for bass, which can be paired with other Echo speakers to add some bass to your jam sessions. It’s currently unavailable on Amazon but still around for third-party retailers like Best Buy, and we’re keeping a eye out to see if it comes back in stock or not. Amazon did not confirm whether or not it would when asked.
JBL Authentics 200 for $380: This JBL smart speaker speaks both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, letting you split between the two for different tasks without having to switch your preference in the app. That makes this speaker particularly appealing for folks with a sprawling collection of smart products from both.
Sonos Era 100 for $199: If you’re looking for a speaker that can talk to Alexa but isn’t necessarily made by Amazon, the Sonos Era 100 is a great option. We just wished we liked the Sonos app better. You can catch our entire guide to the Sonos ecosystem here.
Meet Alexa+
Photograph: Nena Farrell
Amazon has started rolling out the new and improved Amazon Alexa, named Alexa+. It’s available right now for free in early access, though you’ll have to join a waiting list and wait to get selected. I got to check out Alexa+ on my Echo Show devices (which are the only devices you can use Alexa+ on during early access), and it’s been a pretty positive experience. I like the updated, more conversational voice, and Alexa+ did a good job answering all kinds of questions quickly and thoughtfully. Check out our early access hands-on for everything I thought while testing.
Alexa+ has caused some changes, even for those not using it. It requires that all voice recordings be sent to Amazon to be processed. Amazon has changed its features wholesale—now all recordings with regular Alexa go to Amazon, too. There used to be a “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” privacy feature that you could select to have voice requests processed locally, but that feature was killed on March 28, 2025, per an email Amazon sent out to current users of that feature.
There isn’t a timeline for when early access will be done and the final version will roll out. Once out of early access, Alexa+ will be available for $20 a month, or free if you have an Amazon Prime membership. While you likely have a membership if you added an Alexa device to your home, it’s a big jump from the previously free assistant. Still, it’s a nice upgrade and much more on par with the AI assistants of the world, which isn’t a surprise since it’s built on generative AI.
FAQs
What’s the Difference Between an Echo and an Echo Show?
A regular Echo is a smart speaker, or a speaker with microphones in it so it can hear you speak to it and respond. An Echo Show is a smart display, which has a screen and a camera to let you make video calls, stream content, and see your questions answered on a screen. Both have similar capabilities when it comes to smart home control, answering questions, and playing music, but Echo Shows have extra abilities thanks to the screen. All Echo Shows have a camera and come with a physical camera cover for privacy.
When’s the Best Time to Buy an Echo?
The best time to buy any Amazon speaker is during a major sale event like Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day, when there are often steep discounts. You’ll often see the cheaper speakers discounted for around 50 percent off, and the larger speakers see some nice sale prices too.
How and Where Should You Set Up Your Alexa?
Alexa speakers get the best use in spaces you’re in often. I like setting mine up in my kitchen and living room—usually a display in the kitchen, so I can pull up a recipe or the weather while I make my morning cup of tea, and a speaker in the living room so I can play music and command the lights without a screen to distract from the TV or playing with my son. You can also set one up in the bedroom to use as an alarm clock, but make sure it’s a model without a camera for the best privacy.
Ultimately, what’s most important is that the speaker is somewhere it can hear your commands. Where that will be will vary based on your home, but think about where you’ll be when you ask for the weather or to dim the lights, and place your speaker accordingly.
You’ll set up Alexa speakers using the Alexa app, which allows you to manage multiple Alexa speakers if you own more than one through your Amazon account. Third-party speaker setup methods may vary.
Is Alexa Always Listening?
Alexa is always listening, to a certain extent. It’s designed to only listen for its wake word, and shouldn’t be recording or processing any audio unless it hears that word. But Alexa can sometimes mishear a word and think it’s the wake word, or hear a word similar enough to activate the speaker. If you’ve owned an Alexa, there’s likely been times that the assistant suddenly responds when you weren’t speaking to it. Once it hears the wake word (or what it believes to be is the wake word) it will start listening to everything in an attempt to hear what you need and respond.
Alexa+, the latest version of Alexa, will also remain on for a little bit after you ask a question to listen for follow-up questions, no wake word required. Both Alexa and Alexa+ light up in some fashion (regular speakers will turn the light ring blue, while the displays will have a blue bar appear on the screen) to let you know the assistant is listening. Most Echo devices also have a physical mute button, and will display a red light or red bar to let you know when the mute is activated.
How Do You Remove Ads and Spam From an Echo Show?
If you’re using an Echo Show device, you’ve likely noticed there’s tons of default content the device will show you. Sports scores! Local news! A recipe you might be interested in! It makes the device exhausting and annoying to be near.
Here’s how you can control what you see:
- Swipe down from the top of your Echo Show to pull up the menu, and select Settings.
- In the Settings menu, choose Home Content.
- There are upward of 40 options you can toggle on and off on this menu, and you should remove as many as you can that you don’t use. I usually remove all but weather forecasts and recently played audio.
While you’re able to turn off interest-based ads from third-party skills (this is under Alexa Privacy in the Settings menu), it won’t stop all ads. The only setting that is ad-free is choosing Photo Display mode, which can use either Amazon’s included library of photos or your own. The downside is that that turns it into a digital photo frame, so you won’t even see a clock or features like widgets.
Can I Have My Alexa Requests Locally Processed, or Do They Have to Go to the Cloud?
There used to be a privacy feature called Do Not Send Voice Recordings that let you have all your voice requests processed locally on your Alexa device, instead of being sent to Amazon’s cloud storage. That feature was killed in March 2025 to support Alexa+, and even if you continue to use the old Alexa, you don’t have access to that feature any longer.
Alexa+ is still only in early access, and you can only get it by joining the wait list and waiting to be selected. It’s random, and so far Amazon doesn’t have a timeline for when everyone on the list will get it or when early access will be over. You’ll just have to join the wait list and wait to see when you’re chosen. Once you do, check out our hands-on for what we liked about Alexa+ so far.
How Does WIRED Select Smart Speakers to Test? How Are These Speakers Tested?
For this guide, we specifically test speakers that are compatible with Amazon Alexa. It’s a big limitation and narrows down the options significantly, especially compared to speaker options you’ll see in our other guides like the Best Bluetooth Speakers. That’s mainly Amazon’s own ecosystem of speakers, and while there are third party options, the best options tend to be of Amazon’s own design to work with its own voice assistant.
Each speaker gets installed in a tester’s home to test for day-to-day use, as well as to see how the microphone performs, how the speaker sounds with different types of music, how well the smart home control features work with compatible devices such as smart lights and video doorbells, and other features as necessary (e.g., streaming features on smart displays).
How Does WIRED Get Models? What Does WIRED Do After Testing Them?
We acquire review units usually as a press sample, though we will also independently purchase samples if need be. All review units in this guide were provided as press samples with no obligation to cover or promises for what that coverage would be.
After testing, we keep most of our picks either installed for long-term testing in our homes, or in storage to compare against updated models and new speakers that come out. If the sample becomes irrelevant or unnecessary to keep, we donate it locally.
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I tried the battery version, which does require you recharge it every couple of weeks, but the wired-in version is the top recommendation on our guide to the Best Video Doorbells.
A Better Birdhouse
I had a new-to-me problem this spring: bird invasion. A little bird made a nest in my front-door wreath without us noticing. One evening, my sister opened the door, and the bird flew out of the nest and straight into our house. After a 30-minute battle to get it outside again (and keep my cat from eating it), it wasn’t until we saw the bird fly off the door again the next day that we realized it was calling our home its home, too.
If this is a common problem at your house, our resident bird-gear tester Kat Merck has a solution: a smart nesting box. Birdfy makes a few different smart bird feeders we like for bird-watching, and the Nest Duo is a birdhouse that lets you watch the birds while they nest inside of it. It’s a slim, attractive box that will add to your front yard’s style while also packing two solar-powered cameras (one facing the entrance, one focused inside) so you can bird-watch from multiple angles. It comes with different hole sizes to appeal to different species, metal predator guards to prevent chewing around the hole, and a remote control to reset or recharge the camera without disturbing your feathered neighbors.
Stylish Smart Lights
Govee
Outdoor Clear Bulb String Lights
I’ve liked Govee’s smart outdoor string lights before, usually for my holiday decor, and have previously recommended something similar with a bistro-light-like look that happened to be smart. These clear bulb string lights are part of Govee’s current lineup and have a contemporary twist with a triangle in the center instead of the wire filament. These are a fun option for outdoor lights you can enjoy on warm nights, and they can do every color and shade of white without looking as bulky as permanent outdoor lights. (Added bonus, these lights are also Matter compatible!)
Fresh Bulbs
Cync
Smart LED Light Bulb, PAR38
If you have light fixtures you want to remote-control, add an outdoor smart bulb. There are tons to choose from, and you can usually find one from any brand you already have at home. The only downside is that outdoor-rated smart bulbs are usually 4.75-inch-diameter PAR38-style bulbs, so they’re best for downward-facing floodlights on your porch or balcony. They’ll likely be too big to fit in a wall fixture as a replacement for a normal-sized bulb. Don’t just grab any smart bulb—not all are outdoor-rated. Check for mentions of outdoor use and waterproof ratings to make sure they’re safe to use. I’m a big fan of Cync bulbs, and the brand has an outdoor version of the Cync Full Color bulbs I like to use indoors. You’ll be able to add fun colors as well as shades of white, so you can turn the porch a spooky orange or red for Halloween, pink for Valentine’s Day, or the colors of your favorite sports team on game day.
Remote-Controlled Garage
If your garage is the centerpiece of your home’s curb appeal, you can control it as easily as a smart door by adding a smart controller. You can do two different styles: I have the Chamberlain MyQ professionally installed smart garage opener, which means the device that controls my garage has these smarts built into it (plus a camera, but I find it doesn’t work great with how far the device is from my Wi-Fi router), or you can get a smart garage controller that can add smart features onto an existing garage door. Both let you check whether the garage is open or closed and operate it remotely, and you can add a video keypad that doubles as a video doorbell and can let you open or close the garage without your phone.
Smart Shades
The front of my home faces west, so it’s absolutely baking at the end of the day. What I need to add are some of our favorite smart shades to automate closing the shades on that side of the house at the right time of day. These also give your home a nice, cohesive look and immediate, controllable privacy from the outside world. WIRED reviewer Simon Hill recommends the SmartWings shades as his top picks, and Lutron’s Caseta shades if you’re looking for a more upgraded look.
Invisible Swaps
Looking to add some smarts without touching your existing setup? These switch-ups can make your front door and yard smart without being visible.
Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.
April might be springtime in the northern hemisphere, but some of the best streaming services seem to think it’s the perfect time for a dry run of spooky season. How else to explain the arrival of some exquisitely dark slices of horror, like 28 Days Later: The Bone Temple arriving on Netflix, Weapons coming to Prime Video, or Shelby Oaks landing on Hulu? If you prefer your off-season Halloween viewing to be in the vein of campy B movies rather than serious scares though, horror specialist Shudder has you covered with Deathstalker, a gloriously cheesy reboot of a near-forgotten ’80s series.
Reality is often scarier than fiction though, as shown by Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere—his first documentary film with Netflix, exploring the dark side of social media and the world of toxic male influencers. (Be sure to read our interview with the filmmaker.) And if the thought of that leaves you wanting something a bit more wholesome to watch, thankfully Zootopia 2 has popped up on Disney+—and there’s even a rabbit in that, for some appropriately springtime imagery.
Here are WIRED’s picks of the best movies to watch right now.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
The fourth film in the long-running postapocalyptic horror series switches focus from rampaging rage zombies to a more dangerous threat: humans. OK, OK, “people are the real monsters” isn’t a hot take for the genre, but The Bone Temple offers a unique twist, with 28 Years Later survivor Spike (Alfie Williams) trapped in the company of a murderous gang led by deranged satanist “Sir Lord” Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). The villain is modeled on disgraced British TV presenter Jimmy Savile, whose sexual abuse crimes hadn’t been revealed by the time of the initial outbreak in 28 Days Later, adding a dash of real-world terror.
As the group stalks what remains of the English countryside, Spike’s only hope might be Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whose experiments on curing alpha zombie Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) might hold humanity’s last hope. Although best watched back to back with its predecessor for the full, horrifying picture, director Nia DaCosta’s chapter stands on its own—and earns bonus points for one of the best uses of Iron Maiden’s “Number of the Beast” in film history.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere
It’s the silence that does the trick; British documentarian Louis Theroux always knows when not to speak and instead let his subject expose themselves for the world to see. It’s a masterful technique whether Theroux is investigating the Westboro Baptist Church or UFO conspiracy theorists, but it is rarely put to better use than in his latest outing: exploring the online “manosphere” subculture of self-appointed “alphas” offering toxic advice on how to be a “real man.” Speaking with key figures in the loosely defined movement, Theroux’s mild-mannered approach often leaves them to do most of the talking, exposing shockingly misogynistic and extremist views. Even more distressing? The quiet revelation that for many of them their performative masculinity is all just one big grift, and how they rationalize the harm they cause in pursuit of a payout. Depressing but compelling viewing—not all men, but definitely all of these men.
Crime 101
Jewel thief Mike (Chris Hemsworth) is the best in the business, a meticulous planner who pulls off his heists without leaving a shred of evidence—much to the consternation of LAPD detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), who doesn’t even know exactly who he’s hunting for a string of thefts. Elsewhere in the City of Angels, Sharon (Halle Berry) is an underappreciated VP at an insurance firm, frustrated at being passed over for promotion for years. She’s the perfect insider to help Mike orchestrate an elaborate $11 million diamond heist. But as Lou uncovers evidence connecting to Mike’s past, and the chaotic, violent biker Ormon (Barry Keoghan) aims to take the score for himself, even the most masterful planning can’t prevent everything spiraling dangerously out of control.
Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s former chief product officer who was recently tapped to build a new AI workspace for scientists, Prism, is leaving the company, WIRED has confirmed. Weil was previously an early executive leading product at Instagram.
OpenAI is also sunsetting Prism, which the company launched as a web app in January this year to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is folding the roughly 10-person team behind it into Thibault Sottiaux’s Codex team. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the changes, and tells WIRED this is part of the company’s effort to unify its business and product strategy. OpenAI has broader ambitions to turn Codex, its AI coding application, into an “everything app.”
Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he would be starting a new initiative inside of the company called “OpenAI for Science.” Now, OpenAI is dispersing those employees throughout the company’s product, research, and infrastructure teams. An OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the company’s commitment to accelerating scientific discovery, and says it’s one of the clearest ways AI can benefit humanity.
OpenAI is currently trying to refocus the company around a few key areas, such as enterprise offerings and coding. Last month, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployment Fidji Simo told staff that the company needs to simplify its product offerings. The push to divert resources to more consequential efforts resulted in OpenAI discontinuing its Sora video-generation app.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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