If you’re thinking of buying the Amazon Fire TV Cube because you’re delighted by the idea of having an Amazon Echo and a Fire TV device mashed into one device, let me stop you right there. Alexa on a TV interface demands a level of conversation like no other streaming TV product I’ve used before.
“Alexa, show more.”
“Alexa, show more.”
“Alexa, select option one.”
“Alexa, go back.”
“Alexa, scroll right.”
“Alexa, go home.”
After a few nights of using the Cube, I began to hate the sound of my own voice. Maybe you’ll still be delighted by the Cube at first if you buy one. Maybe if you have kids, they’ll love shouting at the TV to get their cartoon fix. But there’s a good chance you’ll end up doing what I did: going back to the fuddy-duddy Fire TV remote, because that’s the easiest way to scroll through multiple media options. Even if you really enjoy chatting with your TV, your significant other or roommate may very well move out within a week.
It turns out Amazon’s promise for the future of TV doesn't quite come through in its earliest form. And while the company deserves a lot of credit for democratizing a pleasant-sounding virtual assistant in our homes, this next push in voice feels like a strange combination of features, none of which stand out as exceptional.
The promise of the new Amazon Fire TV Cube is a voice-first TV experience. You can bark commands at your Cube and tell it what streaming video you want to watch, or what games you want to play. You can also tell Alexa to turn your TV on and off, and ask it to switch inputs. (Amen to that.)
The Fire TV Cube has the full microphone array of an Echo, with a new design—most Echos are round, the Cube is square. It’s shiny, with sharp edges and four physical buttons on its matte-black top. There’s an LED strip that runs across the top of the cube’s face, which lights up blue when you're talking to Alexa. On the back of the box there are ports for HDMI, microUSB, and an IR extender. It doesn’t ship with an HDMI cable, though it does come with an Ethernet adapter.
The Cube runs on an Amlogic quad-core 1.5GHz processor and a Mali-450 MP3 GPU, the same family of chipsets that powers some Android TV boxes. It supports 60Hz 4K, HDR10, and Dolby Atmos. In many ways the Fire TV Cube is similar to last year’s $70 Fire TV Stick. But the Cube has the Echo functionality, as well as HDMI-CEC support and IR emitters.
Amazon also borrowed features from the Echo Show, its voice-controlled gadget with a screen, to create the Cube's UI. You don’t need a remote to control the Echo Show, goes the thinking, so why not apply some of the interactions to a voice-first TV device?
The results of this feature combo are mixed. The Fire TV Cube is indeed an Echo, but not a good Echo. The speaker quality is on par with the Echo Dot puck. You can ask Alexa on the Fire TV Cube to tell you a joke or set a timer, and Alexa will oblige—but it also interrupts whatever you were just watching on TV. Somehow I didn’t mind this, but maybe that’s because that was the least irritating thing about it.