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.

As reported, CEDIA 2016 was dominated with announcements of partnerships with Voice Personal Assistant technologies, including Amazon’s Alexa. Crestron even made an announcement earlier this year that they would not be exhibiting at the CEDIA show, later to be confirmed that Crestron would share demonstrations with selected partners, such as Sonos, and shared a booth with Amazon in order to demonstrate how homeowners can now ask Alexa to control music, lights, temperature, video distribution and other custom automation possibilities.

Orion Labs announced that its smart walkie-talkie with unlimited range, Onyx, is now available across the US and that Onyx will have Amazon Alexa integration in Q4 2016. Onyx is a different kind of smart miniature speaker, allowing voice connections at the touch of a button using cellular networks or Wi-Fi, including group conversations. A free software update will add integration with Amazon Alexa, creating an ideal portable and hands-free voice personal assistant.

While IFA 2016 was in full swing in Berlin, Germany, technology market research specialists Futuresource Consulting highlighted the importance that voice will play in next generation CE products. Following earlier announcements from Amazon, Google and Harman, the Berlin consumer electronics show was rich in product previews and demonstrations about the future of personal assistants and voice recognition applications.

Founded in 2002, Sonos is now present in more than 60 countries, and already supports dozens of streaming music providers. Still, the company’s networked home sound systems have remained a closed-garden concerning software and remote control integration. Now, Sonos wants to change all that and announced new partnerships with Amazon for voice control, a new level of software integration with Spotify, and control integration with AV control manufacturers such as Crestron, Lutron, Savant, Control4, and iPort, among others.