Hi.

Basically the amazon echo is a voice activated assistant, there are several models, the echo, echo dot, and echo show and I'm not %100 sure of the difference, I got the echo dot myself because my brother bought me one in christmas of 16. I initially had problems with it but have set it up now and am having fun with it as you may gather.
It does various things from streaming amazon music and audible audiobooks (the music is pretty cruddy imho but your milage might be different), to making notes and review lists, alarm, reminders, looking up things on wikipedia,and buying things from amazon.
it also contains what are called skills, these are short, free aps developed for the system (well most are free though a few have payments based on an account system).

Because  you control it mostly with your voice it's very accessible (you do need to set some things online but that should be okay), which means it's good for audiogames, and while a lot of games for it are fairly short affairs, there are some that aren't, plus since it's voice recognition is pretty good and it can understand a lot, the amount you can do with your voice is nice, eg, trivia games are rather more fun when you can speak to the thing.

An ever growing list of games with short mini reviews by yours truly can be found here

Hth.
I'm still learning about the thing myself, but feel free to ask further questions if needed.

Hi Orko.

The echo dot does  have it's own speaker, or at least mine does, albeit it's not a brilliant speaker. It's certainly not bad, better I'd say than the default speaker on an Iphone but not up to  a decent set.

It does have a line in so theoretically you could connect it  to stereo speakers or headphones if you wished and  they're commonly used with bluetooth speakers,  as I've not been impressed with the music options and I'm not really into streaming music anyway I won't be looking into this myself, since for gaming the default speaker is fine.

Interesting, I always thought the whole idea behind the Dot was to make a lower cost Echo by elimination the speaker and amplifier and rely on users hooking it up to an existing sound system.

Even so, I'm glad I got the Echo as I have no complaints about the sound quality I get from its built in speaker. I doubt I'd be so satisfied with the Dot's speaker since I do stream music from a local radio station through it. The station plays nothing but classical music and is far enough away that streaming it is the only way to get a listenable signal.

maybe, if you're saying the dot is slightly better than an Iphone, the basic echo has far better sound than that, in fact it's sound is almost as good as the speakers I used surround sound on my PC. for the model I use, though I'll say the Codename Signus sound quality isn't great through it though that might have some more to do with the program and that it is a port.