[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by mpeg2

If you plug into the headphone jack, does it cut off the internal speaker??

Rich

According to aftvnews:

When the Echo Dot has a 3.5mm cable connected to it, regardless whether it’s even connected to a speaker on the other end, the internal speaker goes silent. So if you have it physically connected to a speaker, that speaker needs to be powered on to interact with Alexa on the Echo Dot in any way.

Okay, I got the Echo Dot to connect to the Amazon Tap via bluetooth. While connected to a bluetooth speaker, the Echo Dot pipes all audio through the bluetooth speaker, so again, the Echo Dot internal speaker is disabled while the bluetooth speaker is on. The advantage here is that when you turn off the bluetooth speaker, the Echo Dot automatically starts using its internal speaker again. Even if the bluetooth speaker is turned on, if you want to use the Echo Dot’s internal speaker, you can just say “Alexa, disconnect bluetooth” to switch to the Echo Dot’s internal speaker, and then say “Alexa, connect bluetooth” to switch back to the external bluetooth speaker on the fly. Because if this, I’d say the Echo Dot works better with bluetooth speakers then wired speakers. I’d even go as far as to recommend that wired speaker owners should get a bluetooth receiver so they have the flexibility to switch between the Echo Dot’s internal and external speaker source without having to mess with cables each time.