SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ:AMZN)—Seven months ago, Amazon introduced Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice. Echo was available on an invitation basis to customers who wanted to help shape the device as it evolved.
Here’s what reviewers are saying about Echo:
- “A Perfect 10” – ZDNet
- “The Echo is one of the most compelling cases I’ve ever seen for the power of voice control, of talking to our gadgets the way we talk to each other.” – The Verge
- “The Echo is Amazon’s latest futuristic gadget experiment. It’s one part Bluetooth speaker and one part personal voice assistant. And it blew my mind.” – Mashable
- “The Echo may be the closest thing we’ll have to a Star Trek computer at home.” – CNET
Customers have given Echo a 4.5 star rating—here’s what customers are saying:
- “The Echo is truly a genius piece of technology. The voice recognition and long range speech detection is the best I have seen. It understands what you are asking almost every time, and responds quickly.”
- “Overall this is a fantastic, game-changing device.”
- “Home just wouldn’t seem like home now without the Amazon Echo standing ready for my next command or question. Bravo, Amazon!”
- “The voice recognition is great and it keeps getting better as we use it...This is definitely one of the best electronic purchases we’ve ever made.”
- “I couldn’t be happier with ‘Alexa’! ‘She’ is invaluable to my household – couldn’t imagine life without her. I am so impressed with all the features and continuing enhancements by Amazon. I recommend the Echo to absolutely everyone I encounter.”
- “The power of this device right now is amazing. Each week it appears more features – simple to use and configure – are added. Truly the future today.”
- “I could not possible overstate how much I love my Echo. Seriously my favorite gadget purchase ever...and I purchase a lot of gadgets. I use it many times per day. Alexa (how one addresses Echo) is the first ‘person’ I talk to in the morning and the last at night.”
Today, Amazon is excited to announce that Echo is now available for all customers. Order now for $179.99 at www.amazon.com/echo. Echo will start shipping July 14.
“The customer response to Amazon Echo has been incredibly positive, and we’ve been working hard to build more as quickly as possible. We are grateful to our early customers for their incredible engagement and for providing us with invaluable feedback to help shape Echo as it evolves—with their help, we’ve been able to add features like Audible, Pandora, home automation, sports scores, calendar, and more,” said Greg Hart, Vice President, Amazon Echo. “We’re excited to get Echo into the hands of even more customers and continue to invent new features and experiences.”
Echo is designed around your voice and is hands-free and always on—ask for information, music, news, traffic, weather, and more from across the room and get results instantly. Echo uses far-field voice recognition with an array of seven microphones to clearly hear you around the room. Advanced beam-forming technology combines the signals from the individual microphones to suppress noise, reverberation, and even competing speech. Echo’s advanced audio design includes dual downward-firing speakers that produce 360˚ omni-directional, room-filling audio.
Alexa—the brain behind Echo—is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. At launch, Echo introduced hands-free voice control for music (Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn), information from Wikipedia and the web, weather, timers and alarms, news, and shopping/to-do lists. Over the last seven months, Alexa has added dozens of new features to expand its skillset, gotten better at answering all types of questions, and improved accuracy and speech recognition. New capabilities added since November include:
- Connected home: With integration of Belkin WeMo and Philips Hue products, use Echo to switch on the lamp before getting out of bed, turn on the fan or heater while reading in your favorite chair, or dim the lights from the couch to watch a movie—all without lifting a finger.
- Pandora: Access Pandora’s library of over 1 million tracks simply by asking Alexa for a station by genre, artist, or song. Once music is playing, you can pause and skip tracks using voice commands, and tell Alexa to give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down to train the station to your taste.
- Audible: Listen to audiobooks from Audible with Echo. Simply say “Alexa, read my book.” Echo also supports Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to seamlessly switch between reading and listening without losing your spot. Start reading on Kindle, and pick up on Echo right where you left off.
- Google Calendar: Access your Google calendar events with Echo—just use your voice. Hear what’s on the calendar for the day or check if you’re free for dinner with friends.
- If This Then That (IFTTT): Create IFTTT recipes using Echo’s Shopping and To-do Lists to make your life simpler and more manageable. IFTTT is a service that connects your devices, apps, and websites with simple rules called “recipes.” With IFTTT recipes, you can use Echo to add shopping items to Evernote, automatically email your to-do list to your spouse, add your Echo to-do list to your iPhone, and more.
- Re-order Prime-eligible products: If you’re low on kitchen supplies, want to restock on snacks, or need more rolls of duct tape for the garage, simply ask Echo to place an order for you. Echo uses your order history and can order the Prime-eligible item for you using your default payment and shipping settings. If Echo can’t find the requested item in your order history, it may suggest an item for your approval using Amazon’s Choice, which picks highly-rated, well-priced, Prime-eligible products.
- Sports scores and schedules: Alexa will tell you the results of your favorite team’s last game, the current score of a game they are playing, and the time and date of the next game. To give it a try, simply say, “Alexa, what’s the score of the Mariners game?” or “Alexa, when do the Seattle Sounders play next?” Alexa knows scores and schedules for the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, MLS, and NCAA basketball, with others coming soon.
- Traffic: Just save your work address and Alexa will tell you the quickest route and travel time to work each morning so you know exactly what to expect before leaving the house. You can also add a stop to your commute in case you need to drop off a child at school or stop by a coffee shop on your way to work—just add the stop to your settings, and Alexa will give you the route and travel time.
- Prime Stations: Prime members can ask Echo to play hundreds of ad-free, personalized streaming music stations via Prime Music. Like, dislike, or skip as many songs as you wish while you discover songs from the Prime Music catalog.
- Customized news: You can now hear from more sources in your news Flash Briefing including The Economist, NPR Business, TMZ, and ESPN Radio via TuneIn.
In addition, developers have been using a private beta of a free SDK to build new capabilities and skills for Alexa, which will start rolling out later this year.
Amazon Echo is $179.99 and is available for customers in the US to pre-order today at www.amazon.com/echo. It will start shipping July 14.
About Amazon Echo
Echo is designed around your voice and is hands-free and always on—ask it for information, music, news, and weather from across the room and get results or answers instantly. Alexa is the brain behind Amazon Echo—since Alexa is built in the cloud and leverages AWS, it is always getting smarter and adding more functionality.
Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where it leverages the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request. Echo uses far-field voice recognition with an array of seven microphones to clearly hear you around the room. Advanced beam-forming technology combines the signals from the individual microphones to suppress noise, reverberation, and even competing speech. This audio signal is then used by our deep neural networks based speech recognition system trained on a large amount of far-field speech data to recognize your utterance from a distance. Enhanced noise cancellation allows you to wake up the device even when it is playing loud music.
Echo has been fine-tuned to deliver crisp vocals with dynamic bass response. Its dual downward-firing speakers produce 360° omni-directional audio to fill the room with immersive sound. Plus, in addition to streaming music from the cloud, Echo is Bluetooth-enabled so you can stream other popular music services like Spotify and iTunes from your phone or tablet.
About Amazon
Amazon.com opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995. The company is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire phone, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Amazon Echo are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.
