As Kinja Deals commenter ImALeafOnTheWind recently and correctly noted, the best place for your Echo Dot is on the ceiling, or even better, fully subsumed into another product. The Ecobee4 Smart Thermostat is one of the first products to offer the latter.
Alexa isn’t the only trick the Ecobee4 has up its sleeve, it also solves the problem of thermostats only measuring the temperature in one spot in a room, by using optional remote wireless sensors, one of which is included in the bundle. Counterpoint: adding more products to the room goes against the spirit of eliminating some with the full Alexa integration.
We’ve already seen the Ecobee4 drop to $198 over on Kinja Deals, while the Eufy Genie, Anker’s even cheaper answer to the Echo Dot, got down to twenty bucks recently. That combination compares favorably even to the lower-end Nest E, which has none of the above features we outlined, and has gone as low as $195.