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UPDATE:I finally figured out the problem with Echo Spatial Perception (ESP). What it turned out is who the Dot is registered to. AKA, who did the set up initially. For instance ... My wife has the Amazon Prime account. I am a member of her household. Some of the Dot's in our house are "registered" to me and others to her. It depended on which of us set them up that day. Even though we can switch accounts on the dots to make them the same for things like music and skills, ESP will not work across the "registered" account. Look in the settings, pick a Dot, then look for "Device is registered to:". It has to be the same name for every Dot you want to share ESP. Once I deregistered the ones my wife registered and then set them up again using my credentials, ESP works. For those nervous about deregistering one, it is easy and all settings stayed after I set it up again. I only had to press the "on" button to make the ring turn orange so it would set up again.I said below that the Harmony skill is no good. It only took a couple of days later for Logitech to come up with their own skill. That skill works better than IFTTT. The key word is "Turn On" and "Turn Off". Those make more sense. Read my review in the skill itself for more details. It has some limitations such as if you have too many alias names of just channel numbers, it gets confused when you speak them, and it can't tell the difference between FX and FXX. Otherwise, it is pretty slick.I installed the ToDoist app on my phone and tablet. I really like it's widget better than the other to do list app that Echo supports. It is pretty cool. I can now see and edit my to do and shopping lists much easier using a widget on my tablet and phone. My wife also has it installed so we get those lists shared. There are some tricks to doing it, but it works well. It is also bi-directional if you do it right. You have to use the built in Inbox only as the To-Do list. If you try to move things or rename them, they don't sync. Also, don't set due dates, or make them today or earlier or they won't sync until they are due. Once you set up the link, it will create a Project List called "Alexa Shopping List". Use that one to keep the shopping list in sync.I installed an Echo Dot for my father in his 80's who is not tech savvy. It kind of works. He has a problem speaking fast enough for it to not quit listening. And, he stumbles and says some words twice. Alexa isn't smart enough to know what to do with that. They listen to the TV loud, and the Echo Dots can not hear very well to begin with, so she often does not understand them. I have them mostly using it with the Harmony Hub to control the TV. This is so they do not have to remember how to switch between local over the air channels and satellite ones. It only understands them about half of the time. That is not enough. Alexa needs to learn to listen better. I have trained her a couple of times with their voices and it does not help. I even did a reset and started over and that did not help either. She is just not good at understanding old people who talk slow and may slur words a bit. My Dad also has a thick upper Midwest accent. One of the channels he likes is 13. She doesn't always understand when he is trying to tell her to "Turn On 13".ORIGINAL:We have 6 Amazon Echo Dots. 1 is still in a box and is going to an elderly couple if I become confident enough in how well it works. 1 is on a separate Amazon account I created just to use with the Echo Dot. This is due to the limitation in the shopping list and to do list. The other 4 are in an Amazon Household with myself and my wife. They are in locations of Upstairs, Downstairs, Bedroom, and Office. Upstairs and Office are within easy voice range of each other. I had to rename Office to Amazon due to it responding when I did not want it to.Setup is pretty easy. You must have a mobile device to set one up. After that you can go to alexa.amazon.com to manage them. The first one is part of the mobile applications install and setup. After that you can add another dot inside the app. Each person in a household can set any of them up. That dot becomes registered to that person. It does not seem to matter who sets them up other than the default name given to the dot. I don't mean the wake word name of Alexa. I mean the device name. It uses your amazon account name "Bob's Echo Dot" as the name. The second dot gets "Bob's Echo Dot 2".In the app you can go to Settings and rename them like I did to Upstairs, Downstairs, and so on.One irritation is there is a video during the setup that you can not fast forward through or by pass. You have to watch it.It is worth looking at Things to Try in the app. You may get some new ideas for how to talk to Alexa.Changing the Wake Word is also in Settings under the individual dot device. There are only 3 names you can give it. Alexa, Amazon, and Echo. This comes in handy when you have more than one in the same room. For instance, I have one named Amazon and one named Echo in my office. Amazon is part of the Household while Echo is for me to have my own shopping list and to-do lists by using a different Amazon account. It is not in the same amazon household as the rest of them. Particularly, it is my test dot for figuring out if I can set one up for my parents to use some day.You will want to tell each device what it's Device Location is. It guesses, but mine were not quite right. That is in setup in the app.Let me start with what does not work. You want to know that first, right? ;-)ESP is the feature that they said the dots would ship with to keep more than one from responding at the same time. It does not work. Any dot that hears my voice responds. I have had multiple entries added to the shopping list due to this. Sometimes the Upstairs dot and the Bedroom dot respond if I am in the hallway. The office and upstairs both respond if I am in the dining room. Only upstairs answers if I am in the living room. Only downstairs answers if I am downstairs. But, if I am in the kitchen sometimes both upstairs and downstairs respond since the stairs are near by! I have a question into support why this feature does not work.Next are the things I consider serious limitations.There is only one shopping list and one to-do list. There are multiple people in this household. At the very least let each account have it's own lists.You can not delete anything from the lists with your voice. You have to use the app or the web interface.Traffic is hard coded to one start point and one end point only. It is not dynamic.Alexa can not play a particular message like "Time for Bob to take his morning pills." If it could do this based on a particular alarm time it would be very much more useful! It needs to repeat until someone says "Alexa, Stop" also, so someone is sure to hear it.You have to understand some terminology before I go on.At the top of the nomenclature there are devices. Each Echo Dot is a device. Each device has a Device Name. That is changed in Settings.Each device has it's own Wake Word. That is the "name" you call out to wake the Echo Dot up. Alexa, Amazon, or Echo.Every Dot is in an Amazon Household. A household may only have one person's Amazon account in it, or it may have multiple people like we have. 4 of the dots are in an amazon household shared with my wife and I. 1 is in a amazon household with only (a different) me in it using a different email address as the account holder.You need to understand these differences because some features are specific to a single dot device, some are shared between devices, some are shared between household accounts, and some are particular to each individual account in a household.Each dot can be in a different account if it's in a household. Ask "Alexa, What account are you in" to find out the account name. It is easy to change them. Say "Alexa, switch account". It will change to the other account. I assume if you have more than 2 in a household it will ask which one to switch to. Our household only has 2 user accounts in it.Each dot device has it's own Timers and Alarms. They are not shared across devices at all. If you set an alarm in the bedroom, only the bedroom echo dot will make an alarm noise when it is time. You can pick from a list of alarm sounds and there are some celebrity voices with pre-set words in that list. You can not add your own alarm sound. You have to use one of the provided sounds.I already said that there is only one set of Shopping Lists and To-Do lists. The entire amazon household shares one set of lists. It does not matter the context of which user account is active. The list is the same. This is one of the things I consider a serious limitation.I don't have books, but my wife does. I will skip that part and talk about music. Pandora in particular. I set up my Pandora account with credentials in the app. Once I did that I can tell it "Alexa, play Pandora <my favorite> station". It looks for a station by that name and plays it. Once you play that station, you can skip the station name if you want the same one as it assumes you want the same station again. If the device is currently in my wife's account it will not play my Pandora station. I have to tell it to switch accounts to mine. Then it will play. This is one example of how there are contexts in each dot. Each dot in the same amazon household has all of my Pandora information available. But, unless that particular dot device is currently using my account name, it does not know what to do.The same goes for skills. Skills are shared across all dots in a household, but they are particular to each account name in that household. This gets complicated later when I will talk about IFTTT.I have the skill for my thermostat set up in both accounts. If it were only in my account then when I say "Alexa, raise the temperature upstairs 1 degree", it would only work with my account. Since I wanted it to work in both, it is simple enough to install that skill in each account separately so it will work from both. Now with that skill added in both accounts, it does not matter who's account is active, any dot in any room will change the temperature when asked to.If on the other hand, I wanted a special skill that is only available in my account, I could just add it to my account and not my wife's. I don't have any reason to do this yet, but you could do it. Keep in mind that a simple "Alexa, Switch Accounts" would make that skill available to anyone in the voice range of Alexa!Flash briefing is particular to the user account name. My wife has one set of news and I have another. News kind of sucks. It is hard to get out of it once it starts and it drones on and on forever. Saying "Alexa, skip" works through the news, but it seems to want to keep going back to play more news even if I say stop! I may be saying the wrong key words yet. There may be a special command I don't know about that stops news and resets it back to the beginning of the news.Traffic is a joke. You have to set up the app with where to start from and where you are going. You only get one start address and one destination. To change them you have to go into the app or the web interface. You can not use your voice to change that. The traffic is particular to each account inside a household. My wife gets one traffic setting and I get one. I guess you could say we have 2 by using Switch Account to check the other one. I really want to be able to tell it both a start and destination addresses via voice and ask how long it will take.I set up my Google Calendar. It appears that you can only have one main calendar "service". I don't remember what choices I had for what kind of calendar. There may have been more than just Google Calendar as the choice. Google allows me to have multiple calendars, but that is a feature of Google Calendar, not Alexa. Alexa lets you pick which of the Google calendars it includes. Since my wife and I share our Google calendars with each other, having the one Google calendar works since I can set the dots up to see both of our calendars. What it does NOT do, is tell me which calendar the event is on. I also have special Google Calendars like Holidays, Stardates, and Phases of the moon. If I include them Alexa will let me know the stardate each time I ask what's on my calendar today. :-) If I uncheck Stardates and Phases of the Moon in the app, they no longer get read back to me, but Holidays are. All new entries are added to only one calendar inside google. You set that ahead of time and can not use your voice to pick a different one. For example, I chose my wife's google calendar which she shares with me as the default one to add events too. I did this because my other dot, the one I named Echo on my own account, is set up to add events to my own calendar. That way I can add events to one or the other by talking to the stand alone dot that is not in our regular amazon household to add to my personal calendar or by talking to any of the other dots to add it to my wife's calendar. Simply, if I say "Alexa, add Meet at Joe's Bar on the 23rd at 6 PM". Alexa will repeat back what she thinks you asked for and if you answer "yes" it gets added to my wife's calendar. If I say the same thing, but to Echo, it gets added to my personal Calendar. However, since both Amazon households are set up with the same Google Calendar, when I ask either one "What's on my calendar for today.", they all tell me everything on all of the calendars. That being, my wife's, mine, and Holidays. Again, if I have Stardates checked on in the app, it will start with what today's stardate is. Calendars seems to work across all devices and across all accounts in a household. My wife did not set up her own Google calendar in her own account. I am not sure what would happen if my wife tried to add her own calendar under her account. That may make the calendar become account context sensitive. It works the way we want now, so no hurry to test it any further. Using the calendar is very easy. Ask "Alexa, What is on my calendar for December 25th", and Alexa tells me. Seems to work very well so far.IF This Then That!So you want Alexa to do a little more than she can right now? Check out the ifttt.com web page. It is not a skill that Alexa knows, instead Alexa is a skill that IFTTT knows! I don't want to review IFTTT, but I want to talk a little about limitations. IFTTT has something called Recipes. A recipe is simple a fill in the blank command set. If <something happens> Then Do <something else>. IFTTT is used, after setting it up a recipe, by saying "Alexa, Trigger, <keywords>". Trigger is the only word that tells IFTTT to do something. I wish it could be different, but it is not. Keywords is something you set up in IFTTT to start it doing something. For example ... I have a Harmony Hub remote system. I first teach Harmony some Activities. Activities is a concept in Harmony that is more commonly called a macro. Name them unique things. I have Activities called Watch Dish, Watch FX, Watch DVD, Volume Up 1, Volume Up 3, Volume Down 1, Volume Down 3, and TV Off. I teach IFTTT to listen for those same names and if it hears them from Alexa, to send that Activity name to the Harmony Hub. I can say things like "Alexa, Trigger, Watch Dish". Alexa responds "Sending Watch DISH to IFTTT". In IFTTT I have a recipe of "If Alexa says Watch Dish, Then Send the Activity Watch Dish to Harmony". IFTTT sends that Activity to the Harmony Hub, and the Harmony Hub sends all the commands I taught it (the macro) to turn everything on (like the TV, Soundbar, and Dish Reciever) and then set the TV to the Dish HDMI input. This all happens across the cloud in about a second of delay time. I set up Volume Up|Down 1 and 3 so that I could vocally tell Alexa to tell IFTTT to tell Harmony to turn the volume up or down without the remote. Since each Activity is a macro on it's own I need one that turns the volume up 1 click and another for 3 clicks to make it faster if I want more than just one volume up click. If I wanted more options I would have to create each as an Activity (aka macro). In the real world, changing the volume is easier from the remote. I made these as practice to see how hard it would be to program Alexa to control almost every thing I would want to do with the TV. Although I can tell it to go to a specific channel, doing things like pulling up a menu and selecting things will be much more complex. Not impossible, but it would make for a LOT of Activities that I would need to teach/program to Harmony, IFTTT, and Alexa. This actually works quite well!BTW: If you find a skill that does Harmony directly in Alexa, it is not nearly as good as IFTTT. I am not reviewing that skill right now. I just didn't find that it did what I needed it to do.IFTTT can do a lot of crazy things. The Harmony Hub things above are about the best example of how it integrates with Alexa. Alexa is a one way device though. It doesn't mind telling IFTTT what to do, but it will not listen back from IFTTT. I wish it would so I could set alarms in Alexa from IFTTT.IFTTT is like a skill as far as accounts in a household go. My wife and I both have IFTTT accounts. When I set up Alexa in IFTTT, it asked what account I wanted to use. I used mine. So now if the dot is using her account it will say it does not know the IFTTT Trigger word. I say "Alexa Switch Account", and then it works since it will be in my account context again. It is available on every dot device in the amazon household, but you have to be in the account it is set up for to work. If my wife were to set up her IFTTT account to talk to her Alexa account, then it would work for her account, but only with recipes she set up in her IFTTT account. As I said a while ago, this gets complicated! Each IFTTT account will ONLY listen to a single account in an Amazon Household. When a dot is in a particular household account, it will only send the keywords to that IFTTT account and not to both. So, although the IFTTT accounts are shared to all dots in an Amazon Household, the spoken keywords will only be sent to the IFTTT account that is tied to that particular Amazon account.That's all for now!So far I am enjoying the Echo Dots. They have some growing yet, but not bad for a Second Generation.4 Stars because it has some serious limitations.

The media could not be loaded.  Having worked in the electronics retail industry for years now, I've seen scores of Smart devices come and go. Until now, nobody quite got it right. In the Echo Dot, Amazon has created a near perfect blend of hardware and software. I've seen plenty of the former, but truly seamless multi platform software has eluded everyone but Amazon. We're talking major players like Samsung and Google who have been at it for much longer than Amazon. The main problem is that excellent products like the Samsung Smart Things hub, which do a fantastic job of unifying a slew of different connected devices from different companies (Nest, Honeywell, Phillips, and so on), still lacked the web connectivity and entertainment support I wanted, so I'd still end up needing my tablet or phone. Thanks to fantastic third party support, the Dot has no problem controlling all of my smart stuff while allowing me to listen to music, order food, check the weather, listen to the radio, set alarms and timers, all of which is easily accomplished through simple voice commands. To me, this is the exceedingly rare product that I didn't know I needed, and now can't live without. Similar to the smartphone and tablet I use every day that didn't exist just a few short years ago.If you're even a little bit curious you owe it to yourself to give the dot a try. Add a good speaker and enjoy just how simple a connected life can be!Update: After a bit more time with the dot, or maybe I should say dots since I went out and bought another one for my living room, I've come up with a few tips.1. Use the best speakers you can with it. I found that while Bluetooth was convenient I got much better sound out of my JBL duet computer speakers.2. Take the time to voice train Alexa at least once. It's kinda tedious but really improves the accuracy. I've now gone through three trainings with each dot, the phrasing gets more intricate with each, and it really is amazing how much of an improvement it makes. Kinda hard to quantify, but I'd guess Alexa is at least twice as likely to understand long, complex phrases and has also gained noticeable accuracy when ambient noise I'd present.3. If a phrase doesn't yield the results you're looking for, reword it and try again. For instance, "Alexa, lower the temperature to 75 degrees" got no result, so I tried "Alexa, Honeywell Thermostat, 75 degrees" and she picked it up perfectly.4. Take the time to look through all the skills. There's a lot of helpful and just plain fun stuff in there, from strange facts to a calculator and everything in between, that really helps to enhance the experience.5. I'd never really used my prime music prior to setting up my dots. Now I can't live without it! I can say basically whatever I want and I get a result. My favs so far: "Alexa, play 90s music", "Alexa, play indie music", and "Alexa, play thunderstorm sounds". The last one I ask to repeat and it plays all night. Really a great "freebie" if you're a prime member.6. I was a bit worried initially that Alexa might be triggered accidentally by ambient TV or general household noise, so I'm really impressed that it's only happened twice so far. Both times in my living room when I was watching TV at high volume. If it's a concern, the mic can be temporarily disabled, so the dot won't trigger and listen accidentally.7. I've had no problem pairing the dot to a variety of devices including: two different Bluetooth speakers, my Galaxy S7 edge, and pioneer receiver. I need to look into it further, but each time I paired my phone the Bluetooth connection to the speaker was lost, so I ended up having to listen to the built in speaker. Definitely not ideal for music, but no big deal if you're using wired speakers. Plus, most Bluetooth sets offer an auxiliary input for wired listening.8. It's fun to ask Alexa general questions to see if she's capable of finding the answers. So far I've gotten accurate responses to "Alexa, what's the definition of", "Alexa, how far away is", "Alexa, Wikipedia" (just about anything you can think of and she'll tell you more if you ask "Alexa, tell me more"). If you have the time, ask her a set of questions and you'll quickly get used to her nuances.9. Even though the microphones are extremely sensitive and quite accurate, I've found that the Dot works best when placed on a surface that's close to the level of the person speaking to it. Generally speaking, three to five feet off the ground. Alexa had some trouble hearing my requests when the dot was placed above or behind me. If you'd like to place the dot higher, it works much better when flush with the wall, instead of sitting on a shelf etc. I tried both setups and found with a couple nails set apart to make a cradle facing the dot out towards the room works best for me (sorry for the run on sentence lol).Suggestions for Improvement:1. Unlike the upcoming Google Home BT speaker, the Dot and other Alexa devices are unable to answer general web queries. They do a decent job of answering factual questions like "How far away is the sun" but I'd really like too see Amazon add a "search" function.2. Not Amazon's fault, but several of the news briefing skills update infrequently and volume levels vary enough that I'd find myself constantly changing the volume level to match.3. I enabled briefings from several outlets like NPR, BBC, AP, and so on. I'd suggest you pick one or two and stick with them, otherwise you'll here the same news over and over. I ended up going with BBC and AP briefings.