Frankly, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is the last company some experts would have expected to come up with the next completely new idea. Its hardware ventures so far have been very much in the Us Too department. E-book readers, touchscreen phones, tablets — we’d seen all that before.
But not the Amazon Echo, which just became available for sale to the public (following an invitation-only, testing-the-waters release last November). Somehow, nobody’s thought of this before.
The big idea: Create a voice-activated smartphone assistant like Siri or Google Now — but take it off the phone. Make it a smart, always-listening machine in your house. Engineer it to understand you from across the room, hands free, as you’re cooking, reading, doing homework, discussing, living. Make it good enough to be just like the conversational, environmental computers on Star Trek or in the Iron Man movies.
That’s what the Amazon Echo attempts to be.
If you wanted to make a conversational computer for the home, what should it look like? Because Amazon was creating the first one of something, there was no existing design model, no accepted size or shape.
So Amazon went with a nine-inch-tall, sleek black metal cylinder. And why not? It works. It fades into the clutter of your house, along with whatever else is on your bookcase or shelving unit or kitchen counter, just as it should.
The bottom part is perforated, hinting at the speakers inside. The top disc rotates — it’s a giant volume knob — and lights up in various cool LED colours and patterns to telegraph what the thing is doing. On the very top is a power button and a mute button that means both "stop speaking" and "stop listening."
The Echo is indeed listening all the time to the conversation in your home, but it doesn’t pay attention until you say, "Alexa." (You can change the attention word to "Amazon," but that’s your only option. It would be so much more fun if you could make it any name you liked — say, "Hal," "Jarvis," or "Skynet." But you can’t do that. Yet, anyway.)
Why is the product called Amazon Echo, but its starter name is Alexa?
Anyway, once you say "Alexa," the Echo is just like Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. You ask things in conversational English, and it answers in a clear, fluid, natural-sounding woman’s voice. Actually, Alexa sounds much better than Siri, Cortana, or Google Now. In part, that’s because she’s being projected by a 2.5-inch woofer and a two-inch tweeter instead of a phone speaker the size of a fingernail clipping.
The most amazing engineering achievement is the Echo’s ability to understand commands in terrible acoustic conditions. It understands you whether you’re close to it or a whole room away. It understands every member of the family without training. It understands you when there’s background noise. It even understands you over the music it’s playing.
Amazon shares opened Tuesday trading down $2.55, or 0.5%, at $485.55 U.S., within a 52-week trading range of $284.00 U.S. to $493.20 U.S.
