Amazon has just unveiled a new line-up of Echo devices, led by a revamped Echo Dot, a brand new bedside alarm clock and a version of the Echo Studio with a built-in camera – and they’re all coming to the UK.
The new Echo Dot now doubles as a smart home hub, and gets more bass, a fourth microphone and a faster chip. The Echo Time is a smart alarm clock with a round touchscreen, designed to wake you up while you’re in a lighter stage of sleep.
And the Echo Studio with Home Camera lets Alexa see what’s in front of it – so it can, say, explain the rules of the board game on your table.
All of them are built around Alexa+, the new AI-powered version of Amazon’s voice assistant, which has been rolling out in the UK since March.
None of them is cheap, though. The new Echo Dot costs £94.99, and for most of the last four years, an Echo Dot cost £54.99. The Echo Time is £184.99, and the Studio with Home Camera is £239.99.
And the jump didn’t start today. Back in August, Amazon quietly raised prices across its own devices overnight, from Fire TV sticks to the Echo Dot you can buy right now.
The reason comes with a bit of irony: the same AI boom behind Alexa+ is a big part of why the chips inside these speakers now cost so much more.
The New Echo Dot
If you’ve never owned one, the Echo Dot is Amazon’s small, round smart speaker, the one you’ll find on kitchen worktops and bedside tables up and down the country.
You talk to Alexa through it to set timers, ask questions, play music and radio, and control smart home gadgets like lights and plugs. Amazon calls it its best-selling smart speaker.
Here’s what Amazon says is new:
- A built-in smart home hub with support for Zigbee, Matter and Thread, so it can connect directly to compatible lights, sensors, plugs and locks without a separate hub.
- Amazon’s AZ3 chip, which it says powers faster, more natural conversations with Alexa+.
- A fourth microphone, so Alexa can hear you better as you move around the room.
- A redesigned speaker driver with 50% more bass than the previous Dot.
The smart home part needs a bit of translation. Zigbee, Thread and Matter are wireless standards used by lots of smart home gadgets, especially battery-powered ones like door sensors and motion detectors.
Many of those gadgets need a “hub” to talk to, usually a separate little box plugged into your router. With the hub built into the speaker, that’s one less box to plug in.
That’s useful, but it isn’t new to Echo. Last year’s Echo Dot Max already has a built-in Zigbee, Matter and Thread hub, and it runs on the same AZ3 chip.
Amazon also lists a built-in eero Wi-Fi extender among the new Dot’s features, which it says adds up to 93 square metres of coverage to your network.
That one isn’t quite new either: the current Echo Dot already works as an eero extender, with almost exactly the same coverage (Amazon lists it as up to 92 square metres).
There’s also a catch with the extender that Amazon’s announcement doesn’t mention. It only works if your home Wi-Fi already runs on an eero router (eero is Amazon’s own mesh Wi-Fi brand), and you’ll need an eero account to set it up. According to Amazon’s current listings, the extender also tops out at 100 Mbps and 10 or fewer connected devices on the 5GHz band. If you’re using the router your broadband provider gave you, and it isn’t an eero, it won’t extend anything.
So the new Dot’s real upgrades over the current one are the extra microphone and the bass, plus the hub and chip it borrows from the Dot Max. That makes it look a lot like a smaller Dot Max, at £94.99 – just £5 less than the Dot Max cost when it launched last year.
Amazon hasn’t said yet whether the new Dot replaces the Dot Max, which currently costs £119.99, or sits below it.
Echo Time: A £185 Alarm Clock
The Echo Time is a smart alarm clock for the bedside, with a circular touchscreen showing your next alarm, the weather and whatever’s playing. Amazon says there are hundreds of clockfaces to choose from.
Amazon is making a point of it being camera-free, which makes sense for a device that sits next to your bed.
The headline feature is the smart alarm. Using what Amazon calls Omnisense technology, the Echo Time can detect when you’re in a lighter stage of sleep and wake you then, anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes before the time you’ve set. You don’t need to wear anything for it to work, and the feature is optional.
As the alarm gets closer, the screen brightens like a sunrise, and the tone builds up every time you hit snooze. At night, it cuts down on blue light and dims to show just the time.
You can switch sleep sensing off in the settings, and Amazon says pressing the microphone off button turns it off too.
The obvious comparison is the Echo Spot, Amazon’s current smart alarm clock, which launched in 2024 at £79.99 and now costs £109.99.
The Echo Time costs £75 more than that, and more than twice what the Spot cost at launch.
Sleep tracking without a smartwatch is a real selling point, and I’m curious to see how accurate it turns out to be. But £184.99 is a lot of money for something that lives on a bedside table.
Kids Editions
There are also Amazon Kids editions of the Echo Dot and the Echo Time. Both come with a year of Amazon Kids+, Amazon’s kids’ content subscription, with parents managing everything through a Parent Dashboard.
That includes Stories with Alexa, plus wind-down content from Calm and Moshi through a feature called Sleep Studio. The Kids Echo Time comes in Galactic Grape and Cosmic Lime, but it doesn’t have the sleep sensing feature.
Echo Studio With Home Camera
The Echo Studio is Amazon’s biggest and best-sounding Echo speaker. When I reviewed the original Echo Studio, I loved it, especially the bass, and it could double as a wireless speaker for your TV when paired with a Fire TV device.
The new version keeps the audio side: three custom drivers, a high-excursion woofer and Dolby Atmos, with Amazon’s room adaptation tuning the sound to wherever you put it.
What’s new is a 13-megapixel camera, which Amazon says gives Alexa+ “visual intelligence”.
In plain English, Alexa can see what’s in front of it. Amazon’s examples are explaining the rules of a board game, and recognising a cereal box so you can reorder more flavours (from Amazon, of course).
There’s also Live View, so you can check in on the room through the camera while you’re out.
In the US, Amazon says the Studio with Home Camera will soon pair with compatible Fire TV devices for video calls on your TV. It hasn’t said yet whether that’s coming to the UK.
A camera on a speaker in your living room will make some people uneasy, and Amazon clearly knows it. A dedicated button turns off both the camera and the microphones, and an LED lights up whenever the camera is streaming to the cloud. The regular Echo Studio, with no camera, stays on sale.
The Studio with Home Camera costs £239.99, which is £20 more than the standard Echo Studio’s current £219.99. For a camera and everything that comes with it, that’s one of the smaller price gaps in this launch. The original Studio launched in the UK in 2019 at £189.99.
Two more devices were announced in the US today, but neither is part of Amazon’s UK line-up, at least for now. The Echo Show 16 is a redesigned 16-inch smart display with the full Fire TV experience built in and a remote in the box, plus a 13-megapixel camera with night vision.
It’s up for pre-order in the US at $499.99, shipping later this year. And the Alexa Photo Frame is a 10-inch digital photo frame with Alexa built in, which syncs with Amazon Photos and costs from $199.99 in the US.
Why The Echos Cost So Much More Now
If these prices feel familiar, that’s because we’ve already seen the same thing happen to Fire TV.
On August 21, Amazon raised prices across its own devices overnight, without an announcement. For Fire TV, that meant the £100 Firestick: the 4K Max went up to £99.99, and even the cheapest HD stick jumped by 50%.
Most Echo speakers went up at the same time. Here’s what the closest current equivalents cost before and after the rise, next to the new models.
| Device | Before the rise | Now | New model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Echo Dot | £54.99 | £79.99 | £94.99 |
| Echo Dot Max | £99.99 | £119.99 | – |
| Alarm clock (Echo Spot / Echo Time) | £79.99 | £109.99 | £184.99 |
| Echo Studio | £219.99 | £219.99 | £239.99 (with camera) |
Amazon confirmed the increases at the time and blamed memory chips. An Amazon spokeswoman told Fortune that the industry is “facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs”, and that Amazon had adjusted prices “after absorbing these increases for as long as we could.”
It’s the same squeeze that pushed up the price of Manhattan’s Aero Freely box, Roku’s players in the US and Apple’s Macs this year.
Companies building AI data centres are buying up the memory chips that also go into everyday gadgets, and prices have gone up for everyone else.
And Amazon is one of those companies. In July, chief executive Andy Jassy told investors that Amazon now expects to spend $220 billion this year, mostly on the data centres that power its AI services, and said higher memory costs were part of the reason.
The same AI push that gave us Alexa+ is helping push up the price of the speakers it runs on.
What Alexa+ Will Cost You
Alexa+ is the generative AI version of Alexa, which Amazon says can hold more natural conversations and get more done for you. In the UK, it’s been in free Early Access since March, and buying a new Echo gets you in.
Once Early Access ends, Amazon says Alexa+ will be included with Prime, or cost £19.99 a month without it. It hasn’t said when that will happen, only that it’ll give at least 30 days’ notice.
For Prime members, that’s no extra cost. Without Prime, a year of Alexa+ would come to £239.88, almost exactly the price of the Echo Studio with Home Camera.
Should You Buy One?
Probably not at these prices, and not yet, unless you need one right away.
Amazon discounts its own devices heavily and often, and Echo speakers are no exception. Even after the price rise, the current Echo Dot was cut to £39.99 in a sale, and the Dot Max has dropped to £59.99 in recent months.
When the new Fire TV Stick 4K launched last month, it came with an introductory price of £32.99, against a full price of £69.99.
With Black Friday a few weeks away, I’d be surprised if the new Echos stay at full price for long. Paying £94.99 for an Echo Dot today doesn’t make much sense when a discount is this likely.
If it’s the smart home hub you’re after, the Dot Max already has one, so check its price before you buy the new Dot. And if you just want Alexa in the kitchen, the current Echo Dot is still on sale and still does the basics well.
The new Echos may well turn out to be good devices. But a £94.99 Echo Dot is no longer the cheap impulse buy it used to be, and I’d wait for the first sale before buying one.
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