Amazon will soon have its very own voice-activated personal assistant to take on Siri, Cortana and Google Now, the company announced yesterday. Named Amazon Echo, the large cylindrical speaker is designed to sit anywhere in your home so you can talk to it whenever you like without having to whip out your phone.
Measuring 83mm wide and 235mm high, Echo is always on and (provided it's connected to your home network) will begin working whenever you say the wake up word "Alexa". With its far-field voice-cognition technology, Echo uses seven microphones to hear you from any direction, according to Amazon. It can even hear you ask questions when you're playing music thanks to its advanced noise cancellation feature.
Much like other voice-control digital assistants, Echo will be able to search the web to answer queries and set alarms and timers, but it can also add items to your shopping and to-do lists and play music using its dual downward-firing speakers.
These comprise of a 2.5in woofer for deeper bass and a 2in tweeter for crisper high notes, and together they should produce 360-degree onmi-directional audio. It also has a volume ring at the top of the cylinder.
It's not yet clear whether Echo will have built-in support for popular note-taking apps such as Evernote and Google Keep – something that would be a killer feature in our eyes – but seems less than likely given Amazon's preference for its own home-grown alternatives. You will be able to play music directly from your Amazon Music and Prime Music libraries, TuneIn Radio and iHeartRadio, but will you be able to access your own MP3s over DLNA.
Echo also doubles up as a Bluetooth speaker so you can use it to stream other services such as Spotify and iTunes from your phone or tablet, but Amazon hasn't announced whether Echo's voice-control will be available here. We hope it will, as it would much more convenient than having to have your phone handy all the time.
It seems as though Echo will have some form of cross-platform compatibility, though, as Amazon's introductory video of the device (below) showed it tapping into local radio stations and ESPN via TuneIn to give news and weather updates in the US.
While UK availability of the Echo has yet to be announced, it will be interesting to see whether it will be able to do the same for British radio, and whether you'll be able to hear shows from iPlayer for example and pause or start playing them using only your voice. This would be a great feature if it came to fruition, but we fear it may pull an Amazon Fire Phone on us and be heavily tied into Amazon services rather than anything else.
At the moment, Echo is currently only available in the US - and by invitation, no less. You can request an invitation on Amazon's launch page for the device, and you'll be notified within two weeks if you've been selected to buy it. We suspect it will only come to the UK if it finds success in the US, but we'll bring you all the latest information as soon as it's confirmed.
