Show and Tell from Amazon

Amazon Gives Echo a Face with Show

Yesterday Amazon opened a new front in the battle for control of your home.

Amazon officially announced the Echo Show, the latest addition to its range of Echo smart speakers, equipped with a display. The Echo Show features a seven-inch touch screen, eight microphones with far-field beam-forming technology and noise cancellation to improve voice input, dual two-inch speakers powered by Dolby, a five-megapixel camera, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. Like all Echo devices, the Echo Show offers access to Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. It’s available for pre-order in the US for $230 and ships on 28 June 2017.

The Echo Show is a significant deviation from the other products in Amazon’s Echo portfolio. The display makes this device much more like a PC, providing visual access to limited Web content, and, perhaps the most interesting development, supports video telephony communications with other Echo Show users or those running the Alexa app. Users can also create visual to-do and shopping lists and place orders through Amazon.

Echo can now act as a central home hub to manage smart home devices such as cameras, locks and doorbells. This will make the Echo Show an important control point in the home as more households are installing an incompatible array of smart devices.

The Echo Show device proves how Alexa has, in the two years since its introduction, morphed into something quite remarkable, especially now that it has a way to show and not just tell. Amazon continues to favour a voice-first, mostly hands-free user experience, but a screen in the Echo line-up greatly expands uses for the platform. For example, it could be used in a workshop to display how-to videos or in the kitchen to run recipes. And if any tool or ingredient is lacking, users could place an order for the next time.

The same Alexa skills that work on the speaker versions of Echo also work on the Echo Show device. But Amazon is opening new tools for developers to add a visual component to their content. For example, Uber could display a car on a map, Philips could offer users of its Hue smart bulb an interactive colour wheel for mood lighting, and with the Echo Show users could watch a morning news briefing.

Amazon has enjoyed huge success with Echo, and was clever to push Alexa as a greater ecosystem by opening up the platform for content and to hardware developers. Alexa has established natural-language input as a common user interface, connecting users to content, and as an easy way to place orders through an Amazon account.

This has been a visionary strategy. Amazon has been piecing together its Echo products over the past two years like a puzzle, rolling out products with increasing levels of utility. Last month Amazon launched the Echo Look, adding computer vision and including a camera to expand the types of functionality and responses provided by Echo (see Alexa, Does My Bum Look Big In This?). With each successive device, Amazon is focussing on different ways of exploiting its advances in artificial intelligence.

As Amazon does this, new questions arise about how its products join up, and how they work with other services that are deeply entrenched with consumers. For example, early Echo users will quickly want to use the Echo Show with other original Echo devices as an intercom in the house. Some people would like a Skype skill on the Echo Show to extend both the reach of the service geographically and the range of devices it supports. Having found a video on the Echo Show, they may want to ask Alexa to play it through their Fire TV. Amazon will face growing requests both within its own ecosystem and between ecosystems.

With a leading position in the smart speaker market, Amazon has got the jump on its competition. In fact, we are somewhat perplexed by the relatively slow response from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Google and Microsoft have products but seem to lack the momentum or urgency of Amazon’s efforts. We’ll have to wait and see if Apple announces a device at the forthcoming Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, but with Amazon expanding its offering in all directions — it recently encroached on services such as Google Hangouts, Skype calls and Apple’s FaceTime — rivals certainly need to react.

With Echo Show, Amazon is putting a shopping kiosk in the living room. Now more than ever, Alexa is getting a face.