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My Amazon Echo just got an incredible new feature and I love it

Two of my favorite tech products, which I’ve only discovered this past year, are Amazon Echo and Spotify Premium.

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And now, they work together.

On Thursday, Amazon and Spotify announced Spotify Premium now works with the company’s incredible Echo speaker.

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Tech Insider/Dave Smith

Amazon Echo isn’t just a speaker; it’s a virtual assistant housed in a sleek black cylinder that sits in your home. It’s always on and always listening, and it can hear you from anywhere in your home thanks to its stellar audio system with seven different microphones and a 360º omni-directional grille for speaking.

It’s like Siri, but in my experience, it’s much better at understanding my commands and much more versatile when it comes to tasks. It can add items to shopping lists and to-do lists, read audiobooks, tell me the news or the weather, find good restaurants nearby, and so much more.

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I use Echo all the time. I keep it in my kitchen, and I like to play music when I’m cooking or doing dishes.

Amazon Echo
Dave Smith/Tech Insider

When you ask Amazon Echo — which responds to “Amazon” or “Alexa” — to play music, it will play songs, artists and stations from its vast Amazon Prime Music library. It has a great collection of music, from new hits to old favorites, but as long as I’ve owned this device, I’ve wanted it to work with my favorite music service: Spotify.

If you’re going to spend $10 on a music service, you should spend it on Spotify. It’s the best music service out there right now. Vast library aside, its key features relate to curation, or how it presents all this music. You’ll find playlists based on the time of day — music to help you work, or enjoy during your commute home — and you’ll find playlists based on genres, moods, and artists you already like. Spotify does all the work for you, giving you these dynamic personalized playlists that change every moment of every day and week. Spotify truly cares about music, and it shows.

I’ve become a huge fan of Spotify since I tried it last year, so I was excited to learn that it would finally work with Echo starting Thursday.

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This morning, I got to try the integration for the first time.

spotify amazon echo
Tech Insider/Dave Smith

Linking my accounts was super easy to set up. You can control most aspects of the Echo via Amazon’s Alexa smartphone app, so adding Spotify simply entailed opening the app and adding my Spotify username and password.

It worked immediately. I asked Echo to “play Spotify” and it played the last thing I was listening to on Spotify, picking up right where I left off.

You can also ask Echo to play artists — and even moods and genres — from Spotify’s vast library.

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I asked Echo to “play Chill music on Spotify” and it played Spotify’s top chill playlist, “Your favorite coffee house.”

I asked Echo to “play Kanye West on Spotify” and it started playing the top track on his artist page, “FourFiveSeconds.”

The only thing Echo can’t do just yet is play Spotify stations — that’s when you follow an artist, song, playlist, or album on Spotify, it gives you similar music you might like. Alexa even says “Spotify stations not yet supported” when you ask.

Spotify Stations aside, the rest of the Amazon Echo integration works exceedingly well. I was surprised that Echo would play not only artists and albums from Spotify, but also its dynamic playlists based around genres, moods, and the time of day. These playlists, to me, are the best part of Spotify, and I’m so glad they’ll now play through the most-used speaker in my house.

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Spotify and Amazon Echo are two great individual products, so I’m pleased to report that this integration lives up to the high standards of both services. I look forward to using this all the time.

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