This isn’t hardware, per se, but Alexa has proven that this is one of the biggest moves Amazon has made in the consumer product space. And the now ubiquitous voice assistant debuted inside the first Echo speaker. It came five years after Siri, but when it arrived Alexa was far more useful and fun than Apple ‘s own voice assistant as it could reach far beyond the internet knowledge banks.
Echo’s first speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversational computing to the majors. Ask a question, get an answer? It looked like a novel at the time, but it clearly showed the future. And e grew the future is fast approaching after Amazon started pumping out dozens of Echo variants and enabling the voice technology in ways that allowed other hardware manufacturers to install Alexa to their own speakers… and alarm clocks, light bulbs, shower heads, microwave, headphones, and smart watches. Yes, Alexa’s limitations as a chat partner make it feel gimmicky even today, but the types of computer interactions that Alexa enjoys now look completely normal. We just talk to our computers these days! Sin biggie.
2017: Echo Watch
In April 2017, Amazon unveiled what was perhaps the most unusual device of its time: the Echo Look, a phallic smart camera with a four-microphone array that would snap hands-free images of your hands. clothes and telling you what to wear. This is not a joke. The camera was only available by invitation, although one of the WIRED writers was able to purchase it on eBay and review it for another publication at the time.
Ultimately, the Echo Look gave us a glimpse into the futures for computer vision. He used machine learning to make recommendations, as so many consumer results do these days, but he also found many of these “personalized” suggestions wrong and privacy advocates intimidated. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would suspend the Echo Look and the camera would no longer work starting in July 2020.
2017–2020: Echo… Everything
Here we break from our regular history. On a sunny Seattle morning in late September 2017, the tech media gathered at Amazon headquarters for… well, we didn’t know what to expect. Amazon had apparently decided to team up with its tech brethren in hosting an official hardware launch. That day, and again in the years that followed, Amazon released an unprecedented number of new products (both hardware and software).
We tried to list a few key outcomes here: Echo Plus; Echo shorter, fatter; Spot Echo; Button Echo; Echo Connection; Billy Mouth Big Bass by Alexa (again, this is not a joke); Echo Auto; Echo Sub; Echo Wall Clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more on Amazon kitchen appliances below); Echo Connection; Fire TV Repeat; Cam Stick-Up Ring; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Car alarm, cam car, and car connector; Echo spherical; and a cloud game service called Luna. Did we forget anything? Just kidding. We certainly did.
2017: Echo Showcase
One of the results that arrived on that September day in 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was a “smart display”, of course, a small tablet-like screen with speakers for playing music, a microphone for capturing your Alexa commands, and a camera for… wait, why was the camera? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform, which allows people to send audio, video, and texts to anyone with an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phones.
That chat service didn’t start at all, and all the cameras they did were putting people out. The Echo Show managed to show how useful Alexa can be when built into a dedicated touch screen. Nice displays became a sight to behold. Google made its own version that worked with its Google Assistant, and both companies licensed the tech to other hardware manufacturers that helped expand these countertop devices. Fortunately, there are plenty of options out there today that come with camera shutoff switches.
2018: Circle
