Amazon Announces Echo Show ...and It's Not a Speaker!

Amazon announced its latest member of the Alexa voice service hardware family, following the original Echo Dot ($49.99) and Amazon Echo (now $149.99) devices that kick-started the whole Voice Personal Assistant (VPA) trend, motivating every single consumer electronics and mobile devices brand to respond with similar concepts. The only problem is that the new Amazon Echo Show ($229.99) is not so much a speaker but a complete Alexa "videophone" and home automation interface with a camera.

Amazon announced that for the first time it is making the high-performance far-field microphone array and voice processing technology found in Amazon Echo available to hardware makers who want to build the Alexa experience into their products. With the Amazon Alexa 7-Mic Far-Field Development Kit, Amazon is making it easier for commercial developers to build and launch far-field voice-initiated products with Alexa by reducing development time and cost.

During CES 2017, Vesper, together with DSP Group and Sensory, have demonstrated a turnkey development platform that boasts the lowest overall power consumption for far-field always-listening voice interfaces. At CES 2017, DSP Group also unveiled its new DBMD5 audio SoC built to drive clearer human-machine voice interactions.

Conexant’s new CX20924 is a 4 microphone far-field voice input DSP featuring the company’s new Smart Source Locator technology. The new DSP introduces superior 360-degree voice location capabilities and excellent speech recognition hit rates to smart voice applications. As part of Conexant’s Contextual Awareness product portfolio, it offers a highly accurate, robust way to control smart speakers, robots, security monitoring cameras and more.