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Amazon has made several new product announcements this year, including the exciting new Kindle line. The retail giant is back with another round of updates; this time in the field of smart home. Amazon unveiled the new Echo Dot, Echo Studio with Home Camera, Echo Time, Echo Show 16 and Alexa Photo Frame.
All but the Echo Show 16 are available starting October 28 – the Echo Show 16 is available for pre-order today and will ship later this year.
I got a first look at the devices, so let’s take a look at what’s new:
Echo point
The new Echo Dot is available in graphite, glacier white, agave green and coral pink.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
The goal of the new Echo Dot is twofold: better music listening and more advanced smart capabilities. It features a full-range speaker for greater rear volume, delivering clear vocals and 50% more bass than the previous generation.
The smart speaker is powered by Amazon’s AZ3 custom silicon, which enables advanced on-device processing for faster, more natural conversations via Alexa+. It has four microphones, up from three in the previous generation, which helps Alexa hear you better as you move around the room and determine who’s speaking to personalize the experience.
Echo Dot users likely own other smart devices, and the new Echo Dot serves as a smart home hub with built-in support for Zigbee, Matter, and Thread, allowing them to control thousands of devices right out of the box.
Arguably the most exciting feature of the new Echo Dot is its ability to act as an eero WiFi extender, which adds up to 1,000 square feet of coverage to an existing eero network. The Echo Dot costs $99.99 and is available in Graphite, Glacier White, Agave Green, and Coral Pink colors.
Echo Studio with home camera
Amazon’s best-performing speaker now comes with even smarter features.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
Still Amazon’s best speaker, the Echo Studio with Home Camera has been updated with, you guessed it, a built-in camera. It features Dolby Atmos sound that fills the room with spatial sound: the new Advanced Room Adaptation detects your space and automatically adapts the room’s acoustics.
The camera expands the capabilities of Alexa+. It can tell who’s who, meaning each member of the household can ask Alexa to play music, and it pulls it from their individual playlists. You can also go to a room in the Alexa app if you need to check in a pet or make sure you’ve turned off the lights before leaving the house. And you can hold objects up to the camera, and Alexa will help you with a myriad of questions or tasks. Alexa can explain the rules of a board game you’re holding up or help visually impaired people figure out what’s in their hands.
If you have a Fire TV (or Fire TV Stick), you can pair Echo Studio with the home camera to make video calls on the big screen.
In terms of privacy, the camera does not record; it simply broadcasts live. And there are indicators when the camera is active. Like all Echo devices, there is a dedicated button to enable/disable microphones and cameras.
The Echo Studio with Home Camera costs $249.99 and is available in graphite.
Crushable speed of light
Echo time
The Echo Time is super customizable.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
The Echo Time builds on what Amazon did with the Echo Spot and has even more reason to earn a place on your nightstand. The Amazon team initially designed it as a clock: they didn’t want it to look like a visible digital asset. It doesn’t have a camera and the clock face screen is the main feature. You can customize the clock face and choose different widgets, such as date and time or weather, to display on it.
With Echo Time, you can personalize your relaxation or wake-up routines. The device has sensors that monitor your breathing and detect when you are sleeping lighter. It wakes you up at your optimal sleep stage within 10-60 minutes of the alarm set, helping you wake up less groggy. It’s not like the Hatch Sleep Clock, which tracks your sleep stages entirely, but there are some similarities.
The screen adapts throughout the day to mimic natural sunlight, dimming and reducing blue light at night. If you have smart lights, you can pair the two to wake up together to a sunrise and gentle sounds.
There’s also a kids’ version of the Echo Time, which features more fun designs and attractive clock faces. Amazon Kids Echo Time supports Amazon Kids+ and Sleep Studio. The latter turns the device into a complete bedtime system, with sleep content curated by Headspace, Calm and Moshi.
While the standard Echo Time is geared more toward waking up, the kids’ version is designed to make bedtime easier and help kids sleep better.
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Echo Show 16
The Echo Show 16 is a complete smart home hub.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
The Echo Show 16 is Amazon’s most powerful Echo Show yet. It offers three new screen styles, so your home screen can serve as either a smart home hub, family organizer, or digital photo frame. It also comes with the full Fire TV experience, so you can watch your favorite shows and movies while you cook (or wherever you place your device).
The new Echo Show has a 10% larger viewing area than the Echo Show 15, is 40% thinner with a sleek aluminum frame, and can be wall-mounted or placed on a stand. It’s equipped with eight custom micro-woofers and two tweeters for full sound no matter where it’s placed.
Amazon has given serious thought to what the AI ​​UI should look like and feel like. So they redesigned Alexa conversations. Rather than a simple list of transcriptions, your conversations now appear as cards grouped by category or request. You can tap into the cards and a rich conversation unfolds. Along with your interactions with Alexa, you’ll see suggested next steps, related videos, and more.
So, for example, let’s say you asked Alexa to plan a trip to go hiking and see fall foliage in New York. Alexa will create a map, and once you tap on it, you can find suggested hikes on AllTrails, YouTube videos of peak foliage times, and suggestions for other excursions to take while you’re there.
LEFT:
Your conversations appear as cards.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
RIGHT:
Tap one and you’ll get a full conversation with Alexa.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
In the Echo Show 16’s smart home hub, you’ll be able to access the new Alexa Home Map, which lets you virtually map your home to control all your smart devices room by room. To set it up, enter your address, then walk around your house scanning each room with a compatible iPhone. Once the map is created, you can place your devices where they are in your home. The map is interactive, so if you turn on a smart light in real life, you’ll also see it glow on the map. It also integrates with Ring cameras, so you can get a complete view of what’s happening in and around your home.
The Echo Show 16 is available for pre-order today, but won’t ship until closer to the holidays. It costs $499.99 for a standard display or $569.99 with a Nanomatte display. However, if you pre-order the device, you’ll get an introductory price of $100 off the MSRP.
Alexa Photo Frame
The Alexa photo frame blends into your decor with black, birch and walnut finishes.
Credit: Miller Kern / Mashable
Digital photo frames aren’t new technology, but Amazon is integrating Alexa into a digital frame, making it one of the smarter options in the category. The Alexa photo frame has a 10-inch anti-glare touchscreen. It syncs with the Amazon Photos app, which offers unlimited storage with a Prime membership. Again, the team didn’t want this product to scream “digital asset” and, after seeing it in person, it blends incredibly well with the printed and framed photos.
It does more than just browse your camera roll. Alexa intelligently groups images based on people, places and activities. And to avoid black bars on the sides of images in portrait mode, Alexa will place two vertical photos side by side, grouped by context. So you might find two photos side by side from your trip to Japan, or an image of your child at 6 next to a photo of them leaving college (Alexa goes for the waterworks). You can also ask Alexa to show you specific images, like “Show me all the photos from our trip to Japan,” and Alexa will browse that specific set of photos.
In the Alexa Photos app, you can also attach voice notes to individual photos. This adds a touch of sentimental value and acts like writing on the back of a printed photo, explaining when and where it was taken.
The Alexa Photo Frame would be a great holiday gift, especially for parents. I know my mom would love one. And Amazon knows it too. These are actually designed to be extremely giftable. You can buy a frame for someone else and you’ll get a link to collaborate and fill their photo frame with images from your library. And you can add a special touch with voice notes.
The Alexa Picture Frame starts at $199.99 in the black finish and costs $229 for the real birch or walnut wood frames.
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