“The reason for buying the Atom Echo was to add local voice control to Home Assistant. While updating the software is pretty straight forward using online examples, the microphone in the Echo is tiny, making it pretty useless for family use!
It has I2C connections on the base, which should mean I could add an extra microphone, but the documentation says doing so would damage the internal mechanism. Contacting the manufacturer, they say "If you need an external microphone, AtomS3+Atomic Speaker Base would be a better choice". Comparitavely, adding an external speaker (or better, a jack cable to connect to an amplifier) is a pretty simple matter of soldering two wires.”
