Routing Echo Dot through my computer to my speakers

Question

I am thinking about purchasing an Amazon Echo Dot. I currently have a computer which is hooked up to external speakers via auxiliary.

I would like to hook up the Dot to my computer via a second auxiliary port. This way I can use Alexa to play music to my external speakers using voice commands while also playing music right from my computer (without the use of the Dot).

Is this possible or do I have to hook up the Echo directly to the speakers?

Answer 1

Yes, this is definitely possible—in fact, someone's tried it already with an Echo Dot to confirm it works on Reddit.

Assuming you're using Windows, you need to:

1. Connect the output of the Echo into the microphone port of your computer.
2. Open the "Sound" settings dialogue in Windows. This is most easily found by just searching for "Sound" in the Start Menu (or for Windows 8, going to the Start screen and typing "Sound").
3. Find your microphone input, and go to Properties > Listen and check "Listen to this Device" (the Reddit author provided an image of their setup here).

And... that's it! You may need to vary the volume levels of the microphone, but you should be set by following those steps.

Answer 2

Effectively you are asking how to get audio from an arbitrary source (could as easily be your old portable video game as your Echo Dot) to share the speakers with your computer.

Routing it through your computer is an option, you would need to use the computer audio systems mixer controls to enable this - how you would access these of course depends on the operating system running on the computer, in many traditional desktop systems it would be on the volume control panel or an "advanced" tab thereof.

Another option could be to buy a small 2-input audio mixer and combine the output of your computer with the output of the device to feed into the speaker. This would have the advantage of avoid and additional set of analog to digital and digital to analog conversions going into and out of the sound card, and it would also mean that your Echo's audio output would work when the computer is off.