Tech reviewers will fight to the death over their favourite smartphone, laptop, or music streaming service of choice, but the one thing we all seem to agree on is bluetooth speakers. I’ve never met a reviewer who wouldn’t recommend the UE Boom.

The tube-like speakers are ridiculously loud, virtually indestructible, waterproof, and simple to use. Now Ultimate Ears has released two smarter, even louder versions of the speaker, the UE Blast and UE Megablast.

The $279 Blast is huge, and even louder than the Boom we use as our backyard and BBQ speaker. (The $379 Megablast is essentially the same concept, but louder and bigger again.)

The smarts come from Amazon’s Alexa service and, just like with the Echo, you can simply ask the speaker to play a song and as long as it’s connected to Wi-Fi the song will play. Amazon has its own music service, which I didn’t bother testing because the Blast also supports Spotify, the service we use at home.

Amazon’s Alexa is good enough, if a little cold for my liking. We already have a home full of Google’s smart speakers, and I much prefer the information we get from them, and the more conversational tone you can use to ask your questions. Google’s voice recognition is incredibly forgiving when you mumble, mess up your request, or ask for something like "play me that song from the Trainspotting trailer”. It can even understand our two-year-old when she requests the Frozen soundtrack for the umpteenth time.