[OtinG]

I gave up on using BT with any of my Echo devices and bought a Sony XB20 Portable Wireless Speaker with Bluetooth a few years ago. BT to Echo just never seemed to work well at all.

Amazon gets really close to having great Echos, but they never quite get there because, IMO, the designers and programmers don’t actually use these devices so they don’t have a clue as to how we customers want them to operate.

I tried using my Echo Plus 2 with a Dot 3 to work as a "baby monitor" of sorts. No kids, but I have a radio scanner in another room and wanted to listen in on it from my study. No matter how I set the darn things up I got horrible feedback. I finally gave up.

I bought a cheap Fire tablet a while back to connect with my Echos for listening to music so I could see which song was playing, read the lyrics, and have better control. That also never worked as the Fire tablet Alexa app would freeze after a few songs. I also tried that with my iPad running the Alexa app and had the same results. I gave up on that too.

I tried using an Echo to control my Fire TV, but that was a total disaster. Most of the channels won't come up as Alexa can’t find them, and most commands result in a lot of advertisements for other shows rather than taking me to a specific show. Very disappointed with TV control via Alexa!

I do like my Echo devices and they work fairly well for listening to music and asking Alexa questions or having her control smart devices. Although smart device control needs a lot of improvements too. But trying to use them for other advertised tasks often ends in failure.

I have been using my Echo Plus 2 for playing a white noise skill at night. It works really well most of the time, when it remembers to loop, but occasionally forgets to loop and just stops. The problem with running skills is that if the WiFi drops, even for a few moments, the skill can stop. My WiFi is very stable and rarely drops, but it does happen, especially in bad weather. I wish the Echos could load apps and run them without having to rely on a WiFi connection all the time, but I doubt that will ever happen.