Amazon Announces New Amazon Echo and Echo Plus Smart Speakers and Introduces New Alexa Products

Amazon is not resting on its laurels in voice personal assistants. The company continues to severely undercut Google's ambitions with the Google Home, Assistant and Chromecast products, while jumping ahead to compete head to head with Apple and undermining Apple's plans for Siri and the smart home. The company just announced a completely revamped line of Echo speakers with lower prices and improved everything, as well as new classes of Echo devices.

Founded in 2010, British company TIBO was one of the brands that had honors of debuting its new Choros Tap on the Amazon booth during the 2017 IFA Show in Berlin. The TIBO Choros Tap was the UK’s first third party, multi-play, multi-connect active speaker supported by Amazon Alexa. The UK is the second largest market for voice-assisted products after the US, followed closely by Germany.

When NPR and Edison Research released The Smart Audio Report in June 2017, one thing was clear: Voice-activated smart speakers are becoming a must-have device in American homes. The original report revealed that 42% of smart speaker owners consider their device "essential" to everyday life and 65% wouldn't want to go back to life without one. Now available now NPR and Edison Research, a second part of the report reveals how smart speakers influence purchase behavior.

FABRIQ unveiled the next generation of its Alexa-enabled, multi-room speaker. Named Chorus, the smart speaker combines the voice activated Alexa service powered by far-field voice recognition with high-quality sound and multi-room connectivity. The development was once again based on Linkplay's AVS platform, which uses Conexant’s microphone solutions and Sensory’s voice awake technology.

At IFA 2017, Harman International introduced the Harman Kardon Allure, a smart speaker with Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS) that complements any home space with 360-degree sound. By pairing Harman Kardon’s refined audio performance with Alexa’s intuitive voice technology, Harman expects to attract music enthusiasts and voice-activated speaker users frustrated with the low quality sound experience of the Amazon Echo speaker.

In previous editorials, I have highlighted the important role of smart speakers in promoting the user case for voice personal assistants (VPAs) and voice recognition applications - given the ideal combination of far-field microphone arrays with a complete audio ecosystem that encompasses digital signal processing, acoustic echo cancelation, noise cancellation, and many other technologies. This opens significant opportunities for the audio industry, given we understand the challenges.