Amazon has delivered a home run with the Echo, a voice-command device that plays music, answers your questions, and adds things to your grocery list just by listening to you. It's an always-on personal assistant and the first such device that's simple enough for the average consumer to begin using right away, without any technical knowledge. Although it's a relatively small cylindrical device about the same size as two stacked soup cans, Echo delivers impressive sounds-lifelike speech and full-bodied music. Echo is fun, useful, and a great value. Just think what it would have cost you two or three decades ago to assemble a decent home stereo-plus hundreds of dollars more for a record or tape collection! Forget that, the Echo delivers impressive sound from a collection of a million songs (through Amazon Prime) and streaming via your home Wi-Fi connection to music sites such as iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Its pricetag is a bargain for the music function alone and new features are being added every day. And as the first generation of voice-commanded devices from Amazon, who knows what it will be able to do in a year or two's time. Echo is the second big innovation delivered by Amazon's laboratory in Silicon Valley, following the Kindle eBook reader. The gadget runs wirelessly on the "Cloud," also known as Amazon Web Services. And that's how it's seamlessly updated with new features, as soon as they are developed by Amazon or its army of third-party software partners. You may wonder if Amazon's Echo is just Apple's Siri in a can or Google's Now and Microsoft's Cortana, which all work with certain smartphones. Echo's Alexa may just well be another voice in the dark, but she's a sure sign that the tech giants are gearing up for computers that talk back, perform menial tasks, interface with other electronic devices, and make our lives easier and more fun. Hopefully this book will answer all of the questions you have about the Echo. And if there's more you need to know, you can speak with an Echo product specialist at Amazon by visiting the link http: //echo.amazon.com/#help/call . Type in your phone number at the site, and an Amazon rep will promptly call you back. Or just ask Alexa your question.