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Design & Setup
The Eufy Genie is Anker’s take on the extremely popular Amazon Echo Dot. It’s a voice-controlled smart speaker that has Alexa already built into it. That means that most all commands and features that you find in the Echo Dot are also available on the Eufy Genie.
Now, in terms of the design I really like its sleek black glossy look with the added rubberized material on the top and bottom. You get the standard buttons up top: volume up and down, a mute button, and also a button to activate Alexa manually. It is significantly larger than the Dot yet it isn’t too bulky and fits in quite well with any room.
Setting up the Eufy Genie was easy and only required downloading the EufyHome app. From there it was the same sort of setup that I had to go through with the Amazon Echo Dot. To keep it simple, the setup was seamless and I had no problem getting it up and running.
Sound Quality
Eufy Genie boasts great sound performance with audio that’s crisp and volume levels being loud enough for my liking. It was significantly louder and much clearer than the Amazon Echo Dot — especially with vocals while playing songs — but I found the bass to be lacking.
Most users will probably want a better audio experience which is why connecting an external speaker using the 3.5mm jack is a nice option. That being said, there is no Bluetooth option on the Eufy Genie so if that is an issue, you may want to consider investing a tad more to get the Echo Dot.
Features
The Eufy Genie can enable any of the 10,000+ skills Alexa has to offer. You can ask it to check your schedule, order you an Uber, control your smart home devices, and much more. My main gripe was the fact that, unlike the Echo Dot, Spotify doesn’t support Eufy Genie’s voice-control feature which means you’ll have to manually skip a track, pause your music. Eufy did say they are planning on releasing an update to add this feature within a few weeks for those avid Spotify users. The Genie is compatible with all smart home devices that work with Alexa, so I was able to control the lighting in my house with a simple voice command which is easily my favorite feature.
Conclusion
Eufy Genie is set at a very affordable price of just $34.99. This is much lower than the Amazon Echo Dot ($50) and has more or less the same features, just a different build. Then again, you get what you pay for and the Eufy Genie does lack certain features like not being able to change the wake word, no Bluetooth support, and lack of far field microphone array.
I would recommend the Eufy Genie for those that want to get started with Amazon Alexa — but if you’re already invested in Amazon’s Echo products then it might be best to stick with that. If you’ve tried either, let us know in the comments below what you think.
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