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- Surprisingly robust sound quality
- Great fresh design
- The display is so much better
- The interface isn't well designed
- The price has jumped up
- Alexa+ is only available in the US and Canada
It wouldn’t be mean to say that the Echo Show is a slightly confusing device. First appearing in 2017, this smart speaker has had models in 5in, 8in and 10in sizes, a flat version in 15in and 21in sizes, and an Echo Hub, which is just for Alexa home control.
In 2025, Amazon added to the chaos, introducing two new speakers – the fourth-generation Echo Show 8 and the completely new Echo Show 11, both of which have been designed for Alexa+. Even more bewilderingly, that service is currently only available in the US and Canada, and the price has risen, from the £150 of the Echo Show 8 (3rd gen), to £180 today.
What do you get for the money?
Despite these gripes, however, there is still plenty to like. The fourth-generation Echo Show 8 has powerful hardware and new speakers, all wrapped in a fresh, attractive new design. The screen appears to float in front of the main body of the speaker and the bezels have been slimmed down, too. It’s a better-looking speaker, there’s no doubt about that.
The screen is an 8.7in affair with 1,340 x 800 pixels, while there are two full-range drivers and a 2.8in woofer to boost the sound quality. Inside is a new AZ3 Pro chip, which has an AI Accelerator to speed Alexa+ along (when it arrives) and makes for a snappier experience.
The Echo Show 8 is equipped with Zigbee, Matter and can act as a Thread Border Router, so it will play an active part in connecting and controlling your smart home devices – while it also supports Wi-Fi 6e and Bluetooth.
Hidden within the hardware is a temperature sensor, presence sensor and a camera, which no longer has a privacy shutter. There are volume controls and an Alexa mute button to the side.
Compared to the Echo Show 11 there’s a difference in size and resolution of the display, but otherwise the difference is really about cost and size.
What did we like about it?
The star of the show here is the new display. I compared this 4th-gen Echo Show 8 side-by-side with the 3rd-gen model, and the new display is brighter, cleaner and a much more pleasing tone – less yellow – than before. The smaller bezels frame a larger display, while lifting it so it appears to float making it look better overall.
It’s hard to criticise the new design. It looks more expensive, which might assuage the concerns about the jump in price. Just as I liked the mesh covering of the new Echo speakers, its inclusion around the back of the new Echo Show is very welcome.
Amazon has always been pretty good at getting decent quality sound out of small packages, flexing that skill here, too. The Echo Dot is the best example of this – and the Echo Show 8 easily sounds better than the Echo Dot, with much more robust bass delivery.
It’s the addition of the 2.8in woofer that really makes the difference. Compared to the 3rd gen model, the 4th gen is capable of crisper, more accurate bass delivery. That difference is less obvious with spoken word content, but when it comes to music, it’s easy to hear.
There’s a 13-megapixel camera on the front that will keep you in the frame as you move around – handy for Alexa Calling. This enjoyed its heyday during the pandemic and only you’ll know if Alexa Calling is still useful – with video calling through a smartphone a lot more convenient, I’m not convinced many people will make much use of it.
Alexa remains a star for smart home control. It’s still incredibly easy to control devices from a full range of manufacturers, and creating Routines for automation is a doddle, while Alexa+ promises to make this even easier. The Echo Show also offers widgets for favourites, so you can tap the screen to make changes or turn things on or off.
The display comes in handy for viewing cameras and showing you who’s at the front door. Having controls for music is useful, and access to YouTube is provided via the Silk browser. With a full suite of streaming apps available, you can even watch Netflix if you want. It’s just a bit small for that, but if you need an extra screen in the kitchen when cooking, then the Echo Show will do that job.
Not only that, but the visual redesign that’s set to arrive alongside Alexa+ will add another dimension entirely to the Alexa experience: Alexicons. These animations rise up from the blue light bar that runs along the bottom of the screen, adding more expression to the whole experience.
What could it do better?
The user interface of the Echo Show 8 isn’t great, but I suspect that impression comes from it not really knowing what it wants to be. It can rotate through images (your own, or on a theme), while there’s also circulating smart home content, weather, stocks, recipes and sports updates.
Swiping down presents quick access to, well, basically everything this speaker does, while swiping in from the right opens up the widgets, but these aren’t customisable in the way that they are, say, on an Android phone. The lack of a deeper ecosystem of apps lets things down here.
That all leaves me with the sense that most of what the Echo Show displays throughout the course of a normal day doesn’t matter. The pretty pictures are nice – I picked Amazon’s travel selection – but they changed with such pace that they were a distraction.
And while a visual element to Alexa makes sense, much of the interaction still needs to happen through voice. You can browse to a small degree, but many “apps” lead to a dead end where the only escape is to return to the “home” screen.
Visually, the UI is pretty untidy, too, with all sorts of loose ends in evidence. I was surprised, given how core recipes are to Show 8’s offering, to find that it was pulling through square thumbnails from BBC Good Food, leaving the edges to be colour-filled. For a home page experience, that’s surprisingly inattentive to the visual design.
Here’s another example: while listening to Spotify, I asked Alexa to show me a picture of a cat. A search window appeared on the right-hand side with a picture of a cat and then it vanished instantly. On other screens, the full results of the search appeared, showing me the cats. It just feels unrefined and incomplete.
Of course, this could all change with the introduction of Alexa+, with its agentic skills and greater need for confirmation on the display, but the real sense I get from the Echo Show 8 is that it highlights that Alexa was designed for voice and at its best when experienced through that medium.
Should you buy the Amazon Echo Show 8?
The Echo Show 8 looks good, it sounds good, and it’s packed with clever skills, powered by Alexa. It’s more expensive than the older model, but it’s better, and I wouldn’t recommend stepping back to the 2023 model if buying new today.
The Echo Show 8 will undoubtedly be improved by the arrival of Alexa+ in the UK, but with that missing, it’s a hard sell right now. To want the Echo Show 8, buyers really need to find a good use for the display – otherwise, buying a cheaper Echo speaker that will just fit into the background might be the better option.
