Amazon Unveils New Echo Devices and Alexa gets an AI-Powered Makeover
September 27, 2023
I’ve posted a lot in the past regarding Amazon products and their smart home efforts. I’ve built our smart home around the Alexa platform as it seemed to bring the most integrations with a large number of smart home products. Amazon has yet to disappoint.
During Amazon’s recent Devices and Services event, Amazon announced new products across a wide spectrum of product areas and plans to incorporate generative AI into its Alexa digital assistant. Arguably, the best-known expression of how smart home hardware and software fit together in products is the line of Echo devices.
The power behind the products is the use of AI and the integration of an Amazon-built large language model (LLM) for more natural communication to and from an Amazon device. This makes them more natural, intuitive, and conversational, increasing situational awareness. The LLM, in combination with the newly announced Dynamic Controller, will make it possible to tell Alexa “the floor is dirty,” rather than “Start the vacuum.” The system’s intelligence will interpret that to mean that a connected vacuum or other floor cleaning device should start up and perform its appointed task. This power is intended for use beyond Amazon devices, but also with other brands and products like GE appliances and iRobot.
Before diving into the AI details, here are some quick details on the new Echo products just announced.
The new Gen 3 Echo Show 8 is available for preorder now and will ship at the end of October with a retail price of $149.99. It’s upgraded with a 13 megapixel camera, edge-to-edge glass and an improved processor that delivers up to 40% faster on common requests. Audio improvements include spatial audio, improved bass and an enhanced audio pipeline that minimizes background noise. On the smart home side, a built-in hub includes support for Zigbee, Thread, Matter and Bluetooth.
To take advantage of the new hardware package, Adaptive Content introduces the ability of the display to adjust the content based on the viewer’s distance to the device. For example, if you are using the Show to view a recipe, the display will adjust if you are across the kitchen or right in front of it. It will also add more personalized news and playlists along with shortcut icons for frequently used widgets.
The Echo Show 8 Photos Edition debuts at $159.99. This version makes user-selected personal photos the primary content on the home screen that rotate every 30 seconds. It includes a PhotosPlus subscription, free for the first six months then $1.99 per month after that. An additional 25GB of storage on Amazon Photos also comes with the subscription and can be used to back up videos.
A brand new product I’m pretty excited about is the Echo Hub, a wall-mountable smart home control panel. It’s basically the Show 8 display in a slim housing (0.6” deep versus 4.6”) designed for wall mounting and showing a more graphically oriented version of the Alexa app. The Echo Hub is designed to be an easy-to-use touch panel for control of more than 140,000 connected smart home devices using WiFi or Bluetooth LE Mesh. It’s also compatible with Zigbee, Thread, Matter and Alexa skills. Power is handled via an included adaptor, any USB-C PD adaptor capable of 5V/2.4A (12 watts) or via PoE using an external adaptor.
I’ve been looking for a device like the Echo Hub to control our devices and display images from compatible cameras as well as connect and play podcasts, playlists and audio books to home audio devices around our home. It will be interesting to see if the Echo Hub will be able compete with much more expensive solutions like Crestron for unified control. The Echo Hub will be available later this year for $179.99.
Two additional introductions were updated versions of existing products. Echo Pop Kids are updated versions of existing products — taking the form factor of the Echo Pop models and wrapping them in Disney-themed versions with “Disney Princess” and “Marvel.” They’ll be available in late October, at $49.99, with the Amazon Kids+ subscription service (first six months free and then $4.99/mo after that). Echo Pop Kids will feature content designed for ages three to 12 and enable parental control over software, friends lists and more. There is even a special “Hey Disney” wake word to make things more child friendly and age appropriate. These just might make Christmas gift giving a lot easier for our grand kids this year.
With this combination of continual advancements in the software that drives their devices and the features and power of the devices themselves, these new product introductions prove that Amazon clearly appears to be committed to developing their smart home devices. They are also looking to broaden the reach of their Fire TV and Eero products.
All of this seems to continue to drive Alexa to be the most popular virtual assistant. Like Siri, it uses natural language processing (NLP), a branch of AI that helps systems understand and naturally respond to human speech. Until now, these assistants have been limited and trained to respond to patterns with pre-determined scripts or replies that need to be processed.
Currently, Alexa can recite a bedtime story for your kids. With the addition of generative AI, Alexa will be able to produce unique stories each time, complete with your kids’ names for the characters and genres.
Essentially, generative AI would make Alexa smarter. This also means that Alexa would be able to answer open-ended questions without resorting to an internet search or an “Alexa answers contributor.” It appears these updates will roll out to all services that use Alexa and will be included in the Fire TV experience, which already includes the voice assistant.
Amazon announced a new “Alexa let’s chat” generative AI feature, which will be available for customers to preview on all available Echo devices. When users say “Alexa, let’s chat” they’ll experience more natural and fluid interactions with Alexa thanks to generative AI.
To support all this AI functionality and ongoing AI product integration, Amazon separately announced a billion-dollar investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. Anthropic is known for its AI-powered text-generating chatbot Claude 2 that rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Under the deal, Amazon will use Anthropic’s AI technology in its products and services. Amazon plans to incorporate future Anthropic models across its products, including Amazon Bedrock, an AI platform for businesses to build, train, and deploy machine learning models.
Also during the event, Amazon announced that customers will be able to use their Fire TV streaming devices and smart TVs to ask Alexa open-ended questions and get better content recommendations based not only on what they’ve watched but on previous interactions. Fire TV users will be able to ask Alexa questions like “show me action movies with car chases” or “animated movies that are free to me.” These generative AI updates will roll out later this year.
What do you think of these new developments at Amazon? Which would fit best in your smart home or enhance your current deployment? What advantages do you see these new/updated products bringing to your smart home? Or maybe you’ve built your smart home around Google Assistant or Apple HomeKit — does this make you consider Amazon devices?
Let Debbie and I know what you think in the comments, DMs and emails as we really enjoy hearing from you. Thanks again to all those following Debbie and I through our home building journey. It’s great to hear your success stories and suggestions as we move through the process. And if you like the content I’m posting each week, don’t forget to ‘Like’ and ‘Follow.’
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