For a long time, I relied on Microsoft Corporation's Cortana, through my newly minted (at the time) Xbox One, connected to my multi-zone moderately expensive Pioneer Amplifier that drove the living room speakers, bedroom speakers and kitchen speakers. Come home and say Hi Cortana, turn on the TV or Cortana, play my ride right playlist that used to be driven by Microsoft's awesome music app Zune/Xbox Music/Groove Music all enabled by SkyDrive/OneDrive. I was able to watch TV, listen to music in every room in my house, if it was connected to my Pioneer multi-zone amplifier.

That was then... (Microsoft ended up killing off all that was good about what you just read above...so I had to look elsewhere to enable my need for multi room entertainment with just an ask...)

So, I tried a google speaker and google cast device, and amazon fire stick (gen 2) and echo speaker (gen 2)

The google devices weren't as connected to the services I used like amazon was able to provide so the amazon family of products won the replacement search.

Now being a prime member that also made it a little easier to make that move. When you have echo dots in every room, you now can ask Alexa to turn on anything that is on your network wireless or wired. And since no one owns their entertainment anymore, everything is streamed, it is easier to listen or watch anything everywhere, unfortunately for a price.

Enter the forced move to Spotify that Microsoft made all of us Music Pass members make when they shut down the Streaming Music / Purchase service that I was a member of since its inception in 2006 with Zune Music Pass and the over 100GB of pristine music I own forever....while most of you reading this probably have never downloaded an mp3 so you can listen offline on whatever device you want DRM be dammed!

Well, its 2021 and for the past 4 years I have had Echo's in every room enabling any audio entertainment to be played throughout the house, and fire sicks (4k) to turn any screen into a speaker.

Now if you aren't an audiophile like me, you can get something as simple as an echo dot 3rd gen or above, they sound very good for a small speaker and do well in most size rooms in terms of being able to hear it clearly. And if you are a Spotify user like I am, you can take advantage of the echo's ability to group speakers and allow playback of music or podcast through more than one speaker at a time. (This also works for amazon music) The best kept secret about the Echo dots is that you can connect them with a 3.5 audio cable to another larger speaker if you really want to get louder, and it still reacts to commands just the same.

So if you do not want to spend money on the larger echo speakers because you already have some let's say Bose mobile speakers laying around, you can just hook the two up and bam your plain old Bose is now a dance partner with your echo that makes great music together...lol

Other benefits of having Echo's everywhere (if you're not too worried about them listening to you all day) is that you can use echo's to call into other rooms like an intercom, you can also use echo's to make phone calls without your home phone or cell phone. If you are not home and just wanting to let people in the house know you're on your way you can send announcements to individual echo's or every one of them in your house. It gets even crazier if you have Echo shows.

So for those of you, like me, enjoy listen to music all over the house, you could get a Sonos system, which is hands down one of the best WIFI speakers you can get, or you can get some full sized Echo's which sound just as good or echo dots which meet the need just without as much bass, and for a fraction of the cost, you can bring your streaming services, audio books and podcasts with you in every room without a second thought.

You can start your home audio tour here:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=9818047011&ref_=nav_em__ods_ha_echo_cp_0_2_4_15

This is not a paid endorsement.