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Amazon slashes the price of the Amazon Echo smart speaker in pre-Prime Day push

Revving up for Prime Day 2019, Amazon slashed its price for the Amazon Echo smart speaker to $50. This isn’t the hockey-pucked shaped Echo Dot, but the standard full-sized, second-generation Echo that can fill a room with Dolby-processed music in addition to performing the robust and growing universe of Alexa skills. Now, matching the recent Amazon Echo Dot third-generation deal, the Echo is on sale for half its normal price.

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Many of the best Amazon Prime Day deals are for smart home devices. When Walmart and Google announced Google Nest pre-Prime Day deals across the board for Google Assistant smart speakers, Amazon responded with by dropping the pre-Prime Day price on the Echo Dot. You win either way with an Echo Dot for $25 or an Amazon Echo for $50 .

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The 5.8-inch high and 3.4-inch diameter Echo has a seven-microphone array on its top surface for far-field voice recognition paired with enhanced noise cancellation. These features hear when you ask questions or make requests, even in noisy areas. A Dolby-powered 2.5-inch downward-firing subwoofer and 0.6-inch upward-firing tweeter produce vocals with more clarity and dynamic bass not possible with the  1.7-inch high Echo Dot and its single 1.6-inch speaker. So whether you request a single song from Amazon Music or run through a Spotify playlist, the Echo’s ability to pump out pleasing music is the significant difference between the two devices.

The Echo can help you control more than 10,000 available Alexa-compatible smart home devices with Alexa voice commands, to manage your home entertainment, security systems, cameras, lights, and locks, and even change room temperatures. You can also use the Echo to connect with family members via other Echo and Dot devices in your home or with Skype voice calling in more than 150 countries.

Usually $100 and recently discounted to $70, now the second-generation Amazon Echo is just $50. The heat is on for Prime Day 2019, and this latest price drop is an indicator of how hot the sales will be, especially for smart home products.

If you’re looking for your first smart speaker or want to add to an existing Alexa-centric smart home configuration, this is the absolute best deal today. Because quantities of hot products are not unlimited even with Amazon’s seemingly boundless inventories, and as many learned to their disappointment, we recommend jumping on this deal now if you’re shopping for an Echo.

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Editors' Recommendations

Bruce Brown
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
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