Echo Show 5 Charcoal with Blink Mini Indoor Smart Security Camera, 1080 HD with Motion Detection

We use this Alexa show every day and also purchased the mini for another room. We use it for regular reminders (take the clothes out of the dryer, take pills, etc). We use it for music and love to see the lyrics. We use it for recipes, news, phone calls with view, etc. We have all our Amazon stored photos streaming on it. We have the dots in every room but this Echo show is in our kitchen and is an integral part of our daily lives. Thanks Alexa!

We placed this echo and camera in our kids playroom. We actually have an echo in every room in the house.But having the indoor camera in the playroom we can check on the kids when they are upstairs in the playroom or tell them to come down for lunch, etc

I purchased this product because I wanted to have some thing in the living room plus it was on sale for prime day. The camera works great and the bottom when you listen to music is very good.

Functional and helpful

The 5th Gen Echo Show is a considerable improvement over the prior versions, with a much-improved speaker, and faster response times. The Alexa voice recognition has improved and is generally better than all others (I use Alexa, Google, Cortana, and Siri). The Alexa smart home control capabilities are the best of all I have tried over the past ten-plus years. Smart home control can still be problematic at times, yet I would not want to be without it. The Blink camera is decent, especially, if you are going to use multiple Blink products. The controls are lacking as compared to Wyze, Ring, and Google's camera controls. The Blink subscription is simply too expensive when operating only one Blink camera device. I currently use multiple Wyze cameras (multiple models with multiple generations) which performs better than the Blink camera. I prefer the Wyze except for the slowness of notifications which seems to be an issue with all smart detection notices from all suppliers. I have not yet gotten any of the newest models (last 30 days) that support more on-board AI (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) that might speed up the smart notifications. Motion notifications without the AI-selective features are too noisy to be of any real value except for inside.

While i love this thing and use it regularly i do want to note that it does not hear me or seem to pick up on voices as well as the Alexa’s with no screen. I have used this to watch videos of recipes while i am cooking. I have used it to look up certain things on Amazon and YouTube. We have had video chats with my niece and mother. The cousins love sending messages back and forth to each others Alexa’s. This will show me the local news right on the screen and since it is touch screen, i can tap the screen if i want to see more of something that it is showing. I have mine set up to cycle through photos that i have in my phone. That feature does not seem to work as well as i had hoped. Honestly it looks all the photos showing are ones from many years ago or ones i either did or should have deleted. My kids and i play games on it all the time.. Harry Potter trivia, hide and seek, Akenator,?, daily trivia…. Etc. I would want to get another one if this one broke so yes, i would recommend.

It works as expected

My review is going to touch on both Alexa the system as well as this particular unit, the Show.I'm sure this could be improved. I have one of these show 5s in my art room and one in the kitchen. I do like that I can tell echo to show me the different security cameras all around the property right on the screen, and we can do video calls on it as well. I can see who is at my front door, ringing my ring doorbell. Sometimes. We'll get to that.Overall, it does what it says it does, but it's slow to respond and picture quality isn't great at all. And specifically with echo herself, she doesn't understand a lot of what's asked of her, causing quite a bit of frustration within me. I mean, these things aren't cheap! I would like for her to show me who is ringing the doorbell *before* they walk away. I would like if she could get the group correct the first time of where I tell her to play music (which units to play on). She's just really slow and doesn't understand a lot of simple requests and will often begin playing the wrong music that I didn't even ask for. The touch screen is a joke.One feature I really do like about Alexa is the "find my phone" feature, but she only does it for my phone. I would like it if she could do that with everyone's phone in our household.I do like being able to shut lights off or turn them on without being in that room. Drawback on lights that have dimmers you can only do with a unit that has a screen. With ones without a screen, you can't see what percentage it's at or what percentage you're changing it to.All in all Alexa is still a novelty. There are a ton of glitches and kinks that need to be worked out, and all units really need a screen.I would love to be able to use email with Alexa but haven't figured out if I can or not yet.I do like you can change her accent! I don't like how she will wake up if someone in a movie says Alexa, so I had to change her wake word to echo. I would really like to be able to make the wake word whatever I want it to be but it doesn't have that capability at this time.A lot of shortcomings but still fun to play with. Hopefully Alexa is greatly improved sooner rather than later.