Why Halloween Need GGMM E5

The holiday season is in full swing, which means we’re all whipping out our decorations and decking our homes out for the festivities ahead. First up: Halloween. That means it’s time to get your spook on. Between monstrous masks that evoke the horror icons who haunt our nightmares (thanks, Chucky), and our favorite home decor (like dangling skeletons and that cobweb gunk you can never seem to fully scrape off), you’ve got plenty of ways to make your house the scariest on the block.

But it’s 2017, and you don’t need to pull out all your decorations just to get in the Halloween spirit. We’re living in the future, and all you need is a smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo and a few connected devices to transform any pad into a creepy crypt fit for the damned.

For a company that makes a voice-controlled assistant, it has become table stakes to have a smart speaker for the home that uses it: Amazon’s Alexa debuted on the Echo smart speaker three years ago, Google now has a complete lineup of Home speakers that use the Google Assistant, and Apple’s forthcoming HomePod is powered by, you guessed it, Siri.

Not one to be left out of the party, there’s now a smart wireless speaker that uses Microsoft’s Cortana assistant. The $129.99 GGMM E5 wireless speakers with Amazon Alexa is not hugely different than the Amazon Echo or Google Home. It has seven far-field microphones to hear your voice commands from across the room. It has a circular light on top that illuminates when it hears its wake word or is responding to a request. And it can be used to deliver facts, perform unit conversions, set timers or alarms, look up directions, control smart home gadgets, or add things to a to-do or shopping list.

Ditch your old school bulbs, and install a couple of Philips' color-changing LED lights to give your house a creepy vibe for your poppin’ Halloween party. Using Philips Hue bulbs, you can paint any room in whatever spooky color your choose and tell your voice assistant of choice to change the lighting whenever you feel like scaring the neighbors. Plus, using apps like Sync My Lights and Hue Disco, your lights can sync to whatever scary movie or tune you're enjoying. If you use Hue bulbs outdoors, you can give your home an ominous lighting scheme at the touch of a button.

At launch, the GGMM E5 works with Spotify, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio, with support for Pandora promised to come. I was able to pull up specific albums or playlists from my Spotify account, and even save new tracks to my library or follow a playlist with just a voice command. The GGMM E5 wasn’t able to find everything, however, and it tended to fall back to a generic artist playlist when it couldn’t find the specific album I asked for. Other music services can be played via Bluetooth, but voice commands are limited to volume control and pause / resume / next / previous track control in Bluetooth mode.

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