Can the echo do ANYTHING when not connected?

[badbob001]

I have an echo dot in my car and I normally have it connect to my phone's hotspot to function. But when my hotspot is not on and I say 'alexa, connect', to enable bluetooth so my wife can stream audio from her phone, alexa kept complaining about the lack of internet. I would hope some basic non-internet-related functions would still work when offline like streaming from bluetooth.

[jwlv]

The problem is voice processing is done at the Amazon HQ servers. Even with simple words & phrases like "Alexa, connect" it can't process your voice to know that is what you said. Echo devices have very, very little processing power. It solely relies on being able to connect to Amazon servers to process anything it hears. Without your hotspot, you can't do much with your Echo Dot.

[asianrocker]

you can play music via BT without wifi as long as echo and her phone had been connected before. I maybe wrong. You can play it not via voice but MANUALLY. But honestly if you play it in your car, then I'd rather use the car speaker than the dot's speaker.

I don't think echo needs to be connected to Amazon server if you are only using it as BT speaker.

Also you're using wrong command it's 'pair'. And since your dot is not connected in the server, it will likely still give you an error message. So you have to pair them MANUALLY.