(Image credit: Future)

Once upon a time, the Amazon Echo Dot was the company's least expensive smart speaker , selling for $50 or less during Black Friday. Those days are long gone, but Amazon thinks it's added enough to the new Echo Dot to justify its new price of $99.

The sixth-generation Echo Dot, which comes four years after its predecessor, has a similar design, with an acoustic fabric covering the front of the speaker, and a hard plastic shell around the back. The Alexa bar — the small LED strip that lets you know when the AI is listening — is now just a small arc in the front, rather than a circle running around the bottom of the device. Maybe Amazon thought it looked a bit too much like the Google Home Speaker ?

Despite the outward similarities, Amazon has beefed up the internals of the Echo Dot. It has a marginally larger full-range driver (1.75 inches vs. 1.73 inches) that the company says will deliver crisper vocals and 50% more bass than the previous generation.…