The Echo Dot – a Cheap Intercom System?

We purchased two Echo Dots when I had the epiphany that we could use them as an intercom system in the house.  Now, I hope to save some legwork for someone out there who might be in my shoes.

The Echo Dot works with the Amazon Alexa App, so it is easily controlled with your phone.  We use our Tap extensively, so we were looking forward to leaving the Tap in our kitchen as a hub and then placing the two Dots upstairs, one in the boy’s bathroom (enhance their grooming experience) and one in the upstairs play area (for spontaneous play and for fun Q&A sessions).  The feature that turns the Dots into an intercom system is the “Drop In” feature. It turns out it is inactive in the Tap, so that left us with our phone as the downstairs “intercom”.  Overall, it works fairly well.  Pros: I am able to mess with the boys song lists while they are getting ready, the Echo has its own alarm (Alec Baldwin or Sharknado) for morning wakeups, and they can now call our phones with a simple voice command, which effectively increased our phone system to two more working speakers.  The Cons would include that sometimes it takes a while to connect and the boys can now ask all kinds of questions to our little robotic friend…I will let you guess the questions they might have asked but we definitely had to give them a lecture about how EVERYTHING is recorded on the Alexa app, so whatever they are asking, we will see it!!  I believe we will be purchasing one more Echo Dot to complete our new intercom system.  At $30 each, it is way better than the $1,200 system we were looking at to replace our old, nonworking system that the house had!