Amazon Fire TV Cube: Just Add Alexa

Amazon’s Fire TV devices have offered the Alexa voice assistant, voice search, and voice commands for a few years now. All you have to do is press the button on the remote and speak into the pinhole microphone to control the Fire TV with your voice.

- Will Greenwald

Amazon’s Fire TV devices have offered the Alexa voice assistant, voice search, and voice commands for a few years now. All you have to do is press the button on the remote and speak into the pinhole microphone to control the Fire TV with your voice. You can pair an Echo, an Echo Dot, or another Amazon device that lets you use Alexa with a Fire TV to control your streaming media experience by voice. Or you can get an Amazon Fire TV Cube and enjoy all the features of the Fire TV–Echo combination, including hands-free control of your home theater, in one package.

The Fire TV Cube has a far-field microphone array that can pick up your voice and activate Alexa with a wake word instead of through a button press and a single mic on a remote. It’s certainly more expensive than the Fire TV or the Fire TV Stick, but the addition of hands-free Alexa commands makes it an excellent media streamer for anyone who doesn’t already own Fire TV and Echo devices—and earns it our Editors’ Choice.

DESIGN AND REMOTE

The Fire TV Cube is a near-cube that measures 3.0 by 3.4 by 3.4 inches (HWD), with sharp 90-degree edges between each side. The sides of the Cube are glossy black plastic, the top panel a less shiny matte-black. The front face features an etched Amazon logo and a translucent bar on the top edge that lights up blue when Alexa is listening. The top panel has eight pinholes for the far-field microphone array, along with four buttons typical of most Echo devices: Volume Up, Volume Down, Microphone Mute, and Alexa (for manually activating voice control without using the wake word). The Cube sits on four very shallow rubber feet that lift the device up slightly so the downward-firing speaker on the bottom can be heard..