Thinking About Amazon’s Smart Home Ecosystem (Premium)

Every September, Amazon announces a tsunami of new smart home products. But this year was a little different, at least from my perspective. And in addition to the terrific new product updates were some even more meaningful rewards for those who have embraced Amazon’s smart home ecosystem.

I assume it’s obvious to most why ecosystems matter, and that Amazon is today not just a leader in the smart home, but the single most important player. That’s impressive when you consider that its chief competitors—Apple and Google, and, to a lesser degree, Samsung—aren’t what anyone would call lightweights. But Amazon continues to out-innovate them all and, more impressively, outpace them in broadening its ecosystem. (I’ve previously expressed my surprise and frustration with Google’s performance in this regard, given its core strengths in AI and how central this market is to its business model. But facts are facts.)

Wednesday’s Amazon devices and services event didn’t disappoint in a traditional sense. The new Kindle Scribe expands Amazon’s ebook reader product line past consumption and into content creation for the first time. There were new Echo smart speakers, including a new version of the Echo Studio I’ve considered for our Mexico City apartment and a new Echo Auto for those who wish to use Alexa for music, phone calls, and roadside assistance in the car. There were several new Fire devices, including a new Fire TV Cube and new higher-end Fire TV Omni QLED series smart TVs. And a new Halo Rise device will monitor your sleep without using creepy cameras or microphones.

But I was in some ways more impressed by the announcements that didn’t require Amazon’s customers to Click Once and buy an expensive new product: it was impressive how many of the announcements were enhancements to existing products you may already own.

Let me start with the one I found the most compelling: the newest generation Echo Dot smart speaker—this is the cute little ball-shaped speaker—and the previous-generation Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Dot with Clock all include built-in Eero capabilities that allow them to extend an existing Wi-Fi mesh network up to an additional 1000 square feet. And this will work with any existing mesh network based on Eero Wi-Fi 5, Wi-Fi 6, or Wi-Fi 6E technology.

Obviously, a $50 smart speaker can’t provide the same capabilities as a more expensive Eero node: they’re limited to 100 Mbps download speeds, for example, and can only support 10 simultaneous connected devices. But for those “last mile” issues that seem to dog those with big homes, like mine, this is a real solution to a real problem. 100 Mbps is good enough to stream 4K video, so it could solve my Sonos issues in the sunroom (assuming I adopt Eero, that is).

And that wasn’t the only Eero-related news at the event: Amazon also announced new eero PoE 6 and eero PoE Gateway power-over-ethernet (PoE) devices for connected homes and a new Internet Backup feature for existing customers that lets them configure a backup Internet connection from a smartphone or hotspot that will kick in if the primary connection is experiencing an outage. The idea here is to keep your smart devices working when the Internet goes down, and when connectivity is restored, Eero will switch back automatically. Eero Internet Backup will be available in the coming months to all eero Plus subscribers and select ISP customers, Amazon says.

I currently use a Google-powered smart display in the kitchen, mostly for family photos, but I’ve often considered getting an Echo Show 15 for its more expansive display. And at this week’s event, Amazon revealed that it’s going to make this smart display even more useful by adding the Fire TV experience to it, for free, via a software update. This makes sense—Amazon notes that 70 percent of users watch videos on the device—and it’s a better solution than casting to it from a phone or tablet. This may put the Echo Show 15 over the top.

When Amazon announced the Astro home robot last year, I was among those who rolled their eyes. But here, too, the firm is adding interesting new features that could make Astro make more sense to more customers. It will soon detect pets like cats and dogs, for example, so it can send you a video clip of them when it patrols your home.

That’s fun. But more impressively, Astro is the first Amazon product to feature “multimodal AI capability” that will let it learn about things in your home similar to how humans learn. This will start with doors and windows, objects that might be left open by mistake—or during a break-in—so that the robot can report these changes to you.

Astro is also integrating with Ring Virtual Security Guard (Ring being another key Amazon smart home brand) so that businesses can have inexpensive onsite patrols: if Ring triggers an alarm, the robot can investigate and deliver a live video feed. It can even use Two-Way Talk to tell an intruder that the authorities are on the way. Those 1980s sci-fi/horror movies I loved so much—like Chopping Mall—are coming to life.

There’s more, but you get the idea. Next week, Google will host its own hardware event, and I assume we’re going to see some smart home advances in addition to the telegraphed Pixel devices. But if the past is any guide, it’s unlikely that Google will come close to matching what Amazon does in the smart home. And as it continues to sleepwalk in this crucial market, it seems like Amazon’s lead will only widen.

Either way, I’ve got some shopping to do, starting with upgrading my aging Wi-Fi 5-based Google WiFi system to something more modern. I’ll see what Google has to say before pulling the trigger. But I suspect I’ll be going in a different direction.