"Engagement with Echo devices is at an all-time high," says Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV. "Customers rely on Alexa for so much, including managing their smart homes, keeping up with the latest news, setting birthday reminders, and keeping their homes stocked with essentials. These new Echo devices give customers more ways to experience the world’s best personal AI — and the growing generative AI capabilities that will be coming to Alexa soon — at home and on the go."
To create an ideal interface for the Alexa ecosystem the new Echo Show 8 smart display ($149.99) introduces a refined design, with a speaker in the back that is promoted as being able to reproduce Spatial Audio (the Amazon music streaming service includes the unlimited tier with support for Dolby Atmos and 360 Reality Audio, and it is important to promote the spatial audio processing concept in all products). As much as a smart display can do a variety of things, Amazon knows that an Echo Show is essentially a great bedside alarm clock, or a Smart Home Hub if positioned in the kitchen or living room.
As Amazon explains, the new Echo Show 8 is an upgraded design, inside and out. A new industrial design includes edge-to-edge glass and soft curvatures, while an improved processor delivers even faster display responses than the previous generation. It also runs a new model enabling Alexa to process common smart home requests locally for 40% faster responses to common requests, such as turning on a smart light, switch, or plug. An enhanced audio system provides improved clarity and bass, with room adaptation technology and spatial audio processing.
Video calls are another use case, now centered on a new 13-megapixel camera, plus an enhanced audio pipeline which minimizes background noise from around the home. Additionally, the built-in smart home hub includes support for Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter, enabling easy control of compatible lights, locks, and sensors.
The new Echo Show 8 also features Adaptive Content — a new home screen experience that uses on-device computer vision technology to adjust on-screen content based on a customer’s proximity to the device. With this, a user positioned across the room will see content that is easily viewed from a distance — such as a simplified news headline or recipe inspiration — with the screen automatically transitioning to a more detailed view as he approaches the device. If the user is enrolled in visual ID, the content will also be personalized, highlighting things like a recent playlist or additional news articles from any preferred provider. The new adaptive home screen also includes shortcut icons that make it easy to access their most used widgets, which can be opened with just a tap. Adaptive Content will be available on Echo Show 8 2nd and 3rd generation next month and roll out to other Echo Show devices early next year.
Also coming this fall is Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, which unlocks a photo-forward mode on Echo Show 8’s high-resolution screen. The Photos Edition experience makes customer-selected personal photos the primary rotating content on the ambient screen. Photos rotate every 30-seconds and users receive 25GB of storage from Amazon Photos. Prime Members already receive free, unlimited high-resolution photo storage and can use this additional storage to back-up videos as well. The Echo Show 8 Photos Edition is available for $159.99 and includes a six-month PhotosPlus subscription which will renew after six months for $1.99 per month, and can be cancelled at any time.
Echo Hub
The all-new Echo Hub ($179.99) is an Alexa-enabled smart home control panel, purpose-built to give users a simple and intuitive way to manage smart home devices. It’s easy to install, and features a thin, eight-inch, touch-enabled display with a customizable smart home dashboard that makes it simple to group and manage smart devices, arm a security system, start a Routine, organize widgets, and view multiple camera feeds. With Adaptive Content, the Echo Hub uses infrared technology to detect when someone is nearby, and naturally transitions from a home screen with a beautiful clock, to the smart home control screen.
Echo Hub can be mounted on a wall or placed on a counter with a stand accessory, includes a built-in smart home hub with support for Zigbee, Sidewalk, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter — and it’s compatible with more than 140,000 connected cameras, lights, locks, plugs, thermostats, speakers, and more. Echo Hub can connect to the internet wirelessly, or via ethernet with a compatible power-over-ethernet (PoE) adapter.
Echo Frames
For the new Echo Frames, Amazon collaborated with Safilo, one of the world’s leading eyewear manufacturers. Looking for a use case that is not clear at all - forcing users of eyewear to remember to charge another device every night - Amazon is trying to stay ahead of the curve on the concept. The next-generation Amazon Echo Frames combine Alexa with five new styles of frames, including sunglass, prescription-ready, or blue light lens options.
As Amazon says, all frame styles have been designed with premium materials to be lightweight, with 15% slimmer temples for comfortable all-day wear, and improved battery life that delivers up to six hours of continuous media playback or talk time on a full charge. A redesigned audio architecture and new custom-built speakers deliver three-times more bass than the previous generation, and more accurately direct sound to customers’ ears, while minimizing outside noise. Plus, Echo Frames are built with upgraded speech processing technology that improves Alexa’s performance, with up to ten-times better recognition in loud or windy conditions than the previous generation.
The use case, beyond calls, is that users can listen to a favorite playlist or podcast, or control smart home devices — all hands free by interacting with Alexa. Amazon says that all the new Echo devices and frames include multiple layers of privacy controls, including built-in camera shutters and a microphone on/off button on Echo devices. The microphones on Echo Frames can be muted with the double-press of a button and users have full control over their voice recordings and can view, hear, or delete them at any time.
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