Amazon.com Announces Alexa-Powered Echo Show
- Paul Thurrott
- May 09, 2017
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Like Microsoft, Amazon.com came too late to the smartphone market. But unlike the software giant, Amazon has already found its Next Big Thing. And today, the online retailer unveiled its latest voice-activated, Alexa-powered appliance, the Echo Show. The differentiator? This one has a screen.
“Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things,” Amazon explains. “Watch video flash briefings and YouTube, see music lyrics, security cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and more. All hands-free—just ask.”
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Now available for pre-order, the Echo Show retails for $230 and will begin shipping on June 28, 2017. It is the latest in a growing family of Alexa-powered personal digital assistant appliances, but unlike previous Echos, this one has a screen.
That screen ties together various Amazon experiences, some of which will likely be quite unfamiliar to most customers. That is, while many are aware that Amazon makes voice-activated Echo appliances, fewer are probably aware that the firm has brought those capabilities to smartphones via an Alexa app. And even fewer probably know that Amazon already has powerful, cloud-based audio and video calling services. Which are now integrated into the Echo Show.
On that note, this new appliance can make voice and video calls, with the important caveat that it only works with other Alexa-powered products. So your friends and family will need an Echo device or the Alexa app on their phones.
This is an important capability, and it better positions the Alexa platform, already the digital assistant market leader, to compete with rivals such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. Each of those companies already offers popular voice and video calling services: Facetime, Hangouts, and Skype, respectively.
It’s a smart move for a company that, so far, has dominated the nascent market for personal digital assistants. And by making Alexa, and Echo devices, more of a central component of people’s homes, the retailer is helping to ensure that the fast-moving train of third-party Alexa “skills”—which improve on the Echo devices’ capabilities—continues.
Following Microsoft as I do, I am, I think, understandably concerned that the software giant is about to miss another major personal technology market. Microsoft’s Cortana is well-designed and is improving all the time. But the firm is late to the appliance game—the first such device, the Harmon Kardon Invoke, was just announced, three years after Echo—and it will have trouble making inroads in the home, and on smartphones, two markets in which it does not compete effectively.
So we’ll see what happens. But this new Echo device looks very interesting. And should help drive continued success for the platform that already controls this market.
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Conversation 14 comments
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Bats
<p>I feel bad for Microsoft. Again, they are coming out with outdated technology. It's actually kinda funny, because it's crazy how they are always late. No matter what they do, they can't create technology that effects everyday life. The only thing they can effect is the way we create documents and no one really likes to do that stuff. </p><p>The Amazon Echo Show will most certainly cause a response from Google and you can surely bet that they will. There is a word for this. It's called progress. Who knows, the near future might actually be androids going by the name Alexa and Google. Watch, this will happen days before Microsoft releases their new cortana device in the form of a screen. LOL.</p><p>LOL…Amazon is not the market leader in digital assistants. Where the heck did Paul Thurrott get that? Perhaps the same people that told him that Microsoft was the leader in augmented reality? </p><p>It's a safe bet to say that Google is the leader when it comes to digital assistants. Let's not forget that Apple's Siri was the first, then Google Now, the Cortana, then Alexa/Echo. Plus the Google Assistant is tied to the Google account which, in turn, ties into gmail,calendar, maps, playstore,etc…. Amazon does not have that. Google was the first to make their assistant, voice activated. Amazon's Alexa/Echo is the first to make their digital assistant a stand alone product and independent from a computer. Google's assistant is much much better, in terms of getting information, but Amazon's assistant is great because the interaction helps us get actual/physical stuff brought to our doorstep. That's pretty much all Amazon is great for, which is buying stuff without turning on a computer. This should scare MICROSOFT alot, as it makes people even more less dependent using a computer then ever. </p><p>All in all,both products (Alexa and Home) are great. Not just that, but IMO, owning both devices would be both reasonable and practical.</p><p>Siri and Cortana are practically useless and can't really join this fight. I actually expected Apple to make a standalone display, which they still can and perhaps will sell well. However, because of their lack of infrastructure in terms of managing data and physical goods, it would be hard for them to compete alone, meaning they would need partners. One thing for sure about Apple, if they did make a competing product, it would look much nicer than then the Amazon Echo Show.</p><p><br></p>