Amazon Echo Show – New Alexa Family Member With A Touchscreen
We've been hearing rumors of a
touchscreen-equipped Alexa device for months now, and now, Amazon is making it
official. It's called the Amazon EchoShow, its first smart speaker with built-in touch screen. It costs $230, and it'll start shipping next month. Like previous
Echo products, it features the full capabilities of Amazon's virtual,
voice-activated assistant, Alexa. What's new is the 7-inch touchscreen that
she'll use to 'show you things'. The new device was announced just weeks after
Amazon presented the Echo Look,
its first Echo with a built-in camera.
So what sort of things can Alexa ‘Show’
you? For starters, the Echo Show uses its built-in 5-megapixel camera to function
as an intercom, letting you make hands-free video calls to other Echo Show
users (or to anyone who's willing to take a video call using the Alexa app).
You'll also be able to place voice calls and voice messages to Echo and Echo
Dot owners thanks to a new free voice-call feature available now on both the devices
or the Alexa app, the Echo Show's front-facing camera can use this feature for
video chats. Think Apple's FaceTime app, but on your kitchen counter.
The new messaging service includes
a feature called "Drop In," designed to let people connect more
easily with close friends and family members who also have an Echo Show. People
can whitelist others for Drop Ins and are able to reject a Drop In call or only
allow an audio call.
The messaging and calling service
builds on Amazon's new video conference call service, called Chime, which
targets businesses.
You can also pull up YouTube
videos, view the lyrics of a song as it plays, watch a video version of your
daily news "flash briefing," scan your calendar for appointments and
view weather forecasts. Hooking it up with a compatible smart home camera and
using it as a voice-activated baby monitor seems like an especially handy use
case.
Of course, after years of cranking
out budget-friendly Fire tablets, maybe that's exactly what Amazon is getting
at here. The Echo Show is really just a dedicated touchscreen device for your
home, and one that leans quite heavily on Alexa with its voice-activated user
interface.
As such, it doesn't look like you'll
actually need to touch the touchscreen all that much -- but that's still a bit
of a departure from the hands-free approach that made the original Echo so
appealing.
To that end, it's a bit telling
that Amazon chose to call this the Echo Show and not the Echo Touch -- the
emphasis isn't on the new way you'll interact with Alexa, but instead on the
new thing that Alexa can do for you. Time will tell whether that proves to be a
natural evolution or a wrong turn, but for now, it's clear that Amazon is taking
something of a risk here.
Apart from the touchscreen, the
Echo Show appears to work just like the Alexa devices that came before it.
There's an array of far-field microphones at the top of the device that are
always listening for the wake word ("Alexa" by default, though
"Amazon," "Echo" and "Computer" are also
options). Once the Echo Show hears it, the device will begin recording your
command and then upload it to Amazon's servers, which process the audio and
tell Alexa how to respond.
Like existing Echo devices, the
Echo Show uses Amazon's "ESP" feature to keep it from responding to
your command if another Alexa device is closer to you. You can stream audio to
it from your phone over Bluetooth, but, disappointingly, you still can't
connect multiple devices together for synchronized audio playback, the way you can
with the rival Google Home smart speaker, which costs $100 less.
In terms of connectivity, the Echo
Show can link up to smart home products including Ring, WeMo, Philips Hue,
SmartThings, ecobee, and Wink, among others.
Amazon has placed a huge bet on its
suite of Echo devices, hoping to use them to dominate the growing smart-home
market and gain even more loyal retail customers. So far, that strategy has
been working pretty well for the company, with 71 percent of smart speaker
customers in the US buying Echo devices, according to eMarketer.
The newer Google Home speaker has 24 percent of the market.
Additionally, it's hard to say
whether consumers will want to pay for a product that includes many of the same
features one can already find in a cheaper Amazon Fire tablet (which have Alexa
included) or a phone.
The Echo Show is available for
preorder at Amazon now with an early-bird discount of $100 for anyone who buys
two. Like the Echo and Echo Dot, it's available in both white and black. The
expected release date: June 28.
As for availability outside of the
US, an Amazon representative said that it doesn't have any news to share today,
but adds that "internationalization of all of our products is incredibly
important to us." For what it's worth, that $230 price tag converts
to about £180 in UK where Amazon sells Echo devices or AU$315 in
Australia, though Amazon has yet to sell any of its devices Down Under.
Amazon Echo Show Specs
Dimensions: 7.4 by 7.4 by 3.5 inches
Weight: 2.5 pounds (1.13 kg)
Display: 7-inch touchscreen
Camera: 5 megapixels
Audio: Dual 2inch stereo speakers
Processor: Intel Atom x5-Z8350
Warranty: 1-year limited
App compatibility: Alexa app available on Android, iOS and
Fire devices
Wi-Fi connectivity: Dual-band support for 802.11 a/b/g/n
(2.4 and 5GHz) networks
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