Late night/early morning blog posts may just be the best way to describe Brentandnaomi.com. This post was meant to be a Tech Tuesday but due to a scheduling conflict this will be going out after midnight making it actually Wednesday. So Santa blessed me and my family with a few new tech products for the holiday season and one of those is the Amazon Tap. This gift was looked at in wonder and amazement when it finally got unwrapped and then almost immediately with profound confusion when the family realized they had no idea how it worked.
First off the Amazon Tap is summed up best as a smart bluetooth speaker, that can do basic tasks such as streaming music from a site or from another device via bluetooth and advanced tasks such work with home automation devices. The Amazon Tap is a smaller device with the height being about the same as an Iphone 7 plus
and no bigger in total dimensions than a standard drink cup. This makes the device sleek and easier to travel around with.
Second, the Tap is a lot of things and that makes it useful to a large amount of people and thus an amazing tech invention and a device that receieved many different votes for top tech gift of 2016. When I say a lot of things that is exactly what is meant we have a bluetooth speak, 3.5 mm jack compatible, built in rechargable battery with an included charging craddle,
9 hour battery life, Alexa smart assistant, wifi compatible, and capable of learning new activies through the Alexa app for IOS and Android.
Now the first few features that were mentioned were nothing new but truly had not been combined together with a smart assistant such as Alexa. With this particular Amazon Alexa product the tap requires the user to physically tap the microphone button on the device to get Alexa activated and ready for use.
Once the button is pressed Alexa is ready for a command such as “Alexa play Childish Gambino”, “Alexa play my cooking playlist”, “Alexa play ‘hit jams’ on Pandora, “Alexa whats the weather like?”, “Alexa whats my news briefing”, and many other request or commands. The Alexa even allows users to add more personalized request and commands that take this device to the next level such as “Alexa ask Uber to request a ride” “Alexa ask Dominio’s for my last order”, “Alexa order more paper towels”. These request would reqire additional accounts to continue these more complex operations but really make for a great experience once fully set up.
I had a hard decision to make when we got the device because the Amazon Echo and Amazon Dot were also available and have similar feature sets. The Echo is the biggest Alexa device and features an always on set up that allows you to just say Alexa and the device becomes active and waits on your command. The main reason that we did not go with this device is because it had to always be plugged in and for a family of 5 that idea just did not seem to make sense.
The Amazon Dot is the smallest Amazon Alexa device that also feautures always on technology but speaker did not sound good enough to fill a house and wasnt a truly portable device either.
Now truthfully I have not set most of the Tap’s features up but will definitely follow up with a 90 day review with more in depth features of the device. The overall device works great so far and with this nice night stand I got for the bedroom makes for a nice additon for the bedroom.Let me know your thoughts!
Brent
The BRENT & Naomi blog 
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