Amazon Echo is the connected speaker with voice commands you never asked for.

Amazon Echo is the connected speaker with voice commands you never asked for.

 

Amazon is no longer content to simply sell hardware made by other companies. The online retailer is increasingly making its own devices, not all of which have been a smashing success. Amazon’s latest stab at the hardware market is the Echo, an internet-connected wireless speaker that responds to voice commands. It’s an unusual product to say the least, and not the kind of thing you’d expect out of Amazon. The Echo is $200, but Prime members can get one for $100. However, it’s available by invitation only right now.

Functionality aside, Echo is actually a rather handsome device. It’s a matte black cylinder a little over nine inches (23 cm) tall and three inches wide. The bottom half houses a speaker that Amazon claims can produce omnidirectional sound that fills a room. That’s probably part of the reason it’s designed to look nice — Amazon wants you to put this speaker in your living room where you can shout commands at it whenever the need arises.
As for those commands, Amazon built Echo with seven recessed microphones around the top edge. They use beam-forming technology to home in on your voice while using mics on the opposite side to cancel out background noise. Using Echo is actually somewhat reminiscent of Google Now voice search — you say the trigger phrase, and Echo wakes up. You might expect the trigger phrase to be something about “Amazon” or “Echo,” but it’s actually “Alexa.” That word might sound familiar because Alexa is a commercial web traffic monitoring service that happens to be a subsidiary of Amazon. That makes almost no sense in the context of a consumer product, though.
Amazon has never been big on voice search, but the Fire TV did include some voice integration to help you find content. Echo is supposed to do more by giving you access to music through Amazon Cloud Player, iHeartRadio, and more. There’s also streaming news and Google or Siri-style search queries. If you want to know how tall Mount Everest is or how many leagues in a furlong, Echo could tell you. In the kitchen, you might ask Alexa for an ingredient list, or unit conversion. Cool.

Amazon Echo watching you sleep. Not creepy at all.

So, it’s a fancy speaker you can talk to — is that going to sell like mad? Amazon has seen great success with its Kindle Fire tablets, but the Fire Phone has been nothing short of a disaster for the company. The value proposition just wasn’t there — the Fire Phone was an expensive device that relied on gimmicky features instead of including the things people wanted. Echo has the potential to wander into that same realm of gimmicks no one really wants.
CEO Jeff Bezos has a reputation for being a very intimidating figure, but it’s starting to look like he might need someone around to tell him “no.” Following up the catastrophic Fire Phone with a niche product like the Echo is risky. Amazon might be hoping that consumers who want a nice wireless speaker will just go with the Echo out of curiosity (the price isn’t too bad compared to similar speakers), but that probably isn’t a huge market. Maybe that’s the reason for the invite system. Amazon doesn’t want to end up with million of dollars in unsold inventory, a la the Fire Phone. If the Echo is going to be a success, Amazon has to make a case for why anyone needs a speaker that has voice commands in addition to a phone that probably does it better.