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That’s still good advice, but Eufy (the smart home subsidiary of tech-accessory maker Anker) has recently released the Genie, a cheap speaker with Alexa built into it.
To sweeten the pot further, the Genie is currently $ 5 off and buying one gets you three free months of access to Amazon’s Music Unlimited service if you haven’t subscribed before.
Taken together, that’s a savings of between $ 29 and $ 35 on a product that typically costs $ 35.
If you’re familiar with the Echo Dot, the form factor and functionality of Eufy’s Genie won’t surprise you. It’s a relatively small, hockey puck-shaped speaker that can control all of your smart home accessories when you ask it to.
But the Genie is taller than the Dot, which allows it to make up for the Dot’s sole shortcoming: bad audio quality. This still isn’t a speaker for audiophiles, but Eufy promises it’ll produce dynamic, room-filling sound. If you’re still not satisfied with its internal speaker, you can connect it to an external one through a cable.
This seems to be a feature Eufy is confident in, so much so that it’s bundling three months of Amazon’s Spotify competitor, Amazon Music Unlimited, with the purchase of each Genie. This promotion is only available to new subscribers to the service, but three months is more than enough time to put the speaker through its paces.
One surprising feature the Genie doesn’t have is Bluetooth, but that really only matters if you want to connect it to a Bluetooth speaker. It does support Apple’s Airplay standard, though, so you can wirelessly stream music to it directly from your iPhone.
Although somewhat unexpected, this new entry in the smart home world is perfect for people who want the power of an Echo product without having to pay full price. Eufy is also rolling out its own smart home accessories that can be controlled directly from the Genie, but its full support of Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem is its top feature.
Eufy Genie Smart Speaker With Amazon Alexa, $ 29.70 (originally $ 34.99), available at Amazon
