Echo

We heard a couple of months ago that Amazon was working on a smaller, more portable version of its Echo voice assistant speaker, and now it’s here. Actually, Amazon has announced today two new Alexa-enabled devices, the Echo Dot (which is the aforementioned smaller version of the larger Echo), and the Amazon Tap, which is essentially an Alexa-enabled portable speaker…

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Amazon has a “fail fast” mindset that results in them creating many services and then quickly shuttering them if they don’t succeed. According to a report from The Information, Amazon is having another go at smartphones, though this time without hardware and instead through software partnerships with OEMs, not taking the failed Fire Phone approach.

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A report in the WSJ suggests that Amazon is most likely abandoning plans to make any further smartphones after the failure of the Fire Phone.

In recent weeks Amazon has dismissed dozens of engineers who worked on its Fire phone at Lab126, its secretive hardware-development center in Silicon Valley, according to people familiar with the matter […]

The company told some smartphone engineers earlier this year that further phone development would be shelved, though one of the people said Amazon has shifted the effort to its hometown of Seattle … 

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkOCeAtKHIc]

Amazon today announced a new hardware product called Echo. It’s essentially a speaker unit dedicated to being a voice-control system. It kind of sounds like Google Now but in a speaker for a single room instead of in your Android smartphone, tablet, or watch.

You can set alarms, control music, ask about the weather, search the web, ask questions, and access local news. It streams content via Bluetooth and WiFi, and connects to the Fire Phone (if you have one), iOS via the browser, Android, and desktop computers via the web. Instead of “Okay Google,” you say “Alexa” to start speaking the device. You’ll need a Fire OS/Android device to take full advantage.

The whole concept is very futuristic, and it’s unclear how beneficial this will be to people with voice-controlled phones. But, hey, this comes from the developers of a faux-3D phone, so this is not completely out of left field. The Echo is $99 for Amazon Prime users, $199 for everyone else, and (for some reason) you need an invitation to receive the honor to buy one of these things.

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