I found the sound in this speaker has improved quite a lot and does pretty good for a small speaker. I love that I can tell it to play and give it a timeframe to continue and it automatically turns off with a bunch of fussing setting sleep timers. I like that I can be in bed and give voice commands without having to get up. Voice recognition is generally pretty good but there are the odd times when it doesn't appear to hear me and I have to be careful to say Alexa, then have a slight pause before I continue with the command. It doesn't seem to be able to recognize a request when the awake word is run too quickly into the rest of the sentence and I have to repeat myself. I do love it.