The Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass is not a good product, the way we at PCMag measure good products. It doesn’t have a compelling feature set, nor is it made of high-quality materials. It’s a $39.99 mounted faux largemouth bass that reacts to Amazon Alexa. It isn’t a standalone smart speaker like the Echo Dot, and it’s so poorly made we can’t imagine it lasting very long. But your dad is probably going to love it.

Not a Speaker

The Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass is an approximately 11-inch-long rubber fish attached to an oval plastic stand. You can mount it on the wall or use it with a built-in, fold-out easel stand. It gets power via micro USB or four AA batteries.

Everything about its construction is poor. The front of the stand is cheap plastic with fake woodgrain or shiny metal color painted over it. Billy’s own material is disturbingly shiny, and not like a wet fish, but like dollar-store plastic. If you buy it, don’t assume it will last for an extended length of time.

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This talking fish has Amazon Alexa inside

Functionally, Billy is an “Alexa Gadget,” like Amazon’s Echo Buttons. These are devices that connect via Bluetooth to your main Echo speakers and are controlled by them, but they are not Echo speakers themselves.

You need an Echo, of any variety, to use Billy. To set it up, you hold down the red button until the fish announces it’s ready for Bluetooth setup in its Billy Bass voice, and then you direct your phone’s Alexa app to search for Alexa Gadgets. It took me four attempts to find the Billy Bass, but then it paired and stayed paired as long as I didn’t move it. Take Billy more than about 15 feet away, and you’ll need to reconnect in your Alexa app. While connected, Billy uses your Echo’s Bluetooth connection, so you can’t link your Echo via Bluetooth to another speaker.

Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa

What Can Billy Do?

When you ask Alexa a question, Billy turns to you, and then (with significant delay) lip-syncs Alexa’s answers. The actual audio comes out of your Echo speaker, and it’s in Alexa’s feminine voice rather than Billy’s growl. For third-party skills, Billy will lip-sync some, but not all, of the responses. Remember, Billy is not a speaker.

Billy’s actual voice is reserved for a few setup messages and “Fishin’ Time,” a bizarre honky-tonk song. Unlike older Billy Bass units, this model is not motion activated, and does not sing “I Will Survive,” “Take Me to the River,” or any song other than “Fishin’ Time.” Once again, and I can’t repeat this enough, Billy is not a speaker.

While Billy won’t sing, it’ll dance. Ask Alexa to play something on Amazon Music, and Billy will twitch and wiggle, enthusiastic but pretty far off the beat. The fish basically has two points of articulation, head and tail, with a very disturbing fold in the middle that essentially collapses if both the head and tail are working at the same time. Its fixed expression, with its staring eye, makes the dancing joyless. It quickly starts to feel like Billy is cursed to perform for your pleasure, and its tiny brain is too limited to understand why it’s stuck to this board, twitching to the beat of Billy Joel, Merle Haggard, or LCD Soundsystem.

Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa 1

Billy has one more trick. Set an Alexa timer or alarm, and the fish will go a little berserk when it goes off. It’ll twitch all over the place until you cancel the alarm. This makes me think Billy could actually be a good gift for Deaf people, enabling Alexa timers in a visual way.

Conclusions

There’s really not much else to say about 2018’s iteration of the classic Billy Bass. Mostly I want to get across that the fish doesn’t actually speak Alexa’s answers itself and doesn’t function as a Bluetooth speaker, which is part of why it’s cheaper than an Echo Dot.

If you set up your dad’s Echo speaker for the holidays last year and now he uses it for timers and to get the sports scores, the Alexa-enabled Billy Bass is a totally ridiculous thing to stick on his wall this year that will make him laugh. But we can’t give it more than two stars, because ultimately it’s a fake fish that lip-syncs badly and is not a speaker.