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//www.youtube.com/embed/KkOCeAtKHIcAmazon has about $83 million in unsold Fire phones laying around inside its warehouses, but apparently, it hasn't run out of shelf space just yet. On Thursday, the online retailer took another strange turn in the world of hardware by unveiling a wireless speaker with a Siri-like ability to recognize speech and answer questions.
Called the Amazon Echo, the device is ostensibly about playing music and providing information. But ultimately, it looks like yet another gadget Amazon hopes to use as a way of driving retail purchases. It's also Amazon's most visible contribution yet to an accelerating push among tech giants towards an internet that's controlled by voice.
The Echo is a small cylinder that sits on a table and has an array of seven microphones on the top that Amazon says can pick up speech even when music is playing. It can stream music from Amazon directly, or connect by Bluetooth to phones and tablets. Instead of "Siri" or "Okay, Google," the "wake word" for the always-on device is "Alexa." (Why Amazon chose that word is unclear.)*
For Amazon, the sound of you making your shopping list has the ring of money in the bank.
Once the Echo is awake, Amazon says, it can answer questions and supply information on the weather, news, and anything you might look up on Wikipedia. You can also use your voice to set alarms and control music playback. But though the company doesn't play it up, the most significant feature for Amazon is shopping lists.
By allowing users to make shopping lists by voice alone, Amazon is moving closer to a time when "one-click" shopping becomes "no-click" shopping. Already Amazon offers some users of its Prime Fresh grocery deliver service a device, called the Dash, that includes a barcode scanner and a microphone for adding items to your order queue.
While the Dash was free, the Echo costs $199—or, tellingly, just $99 for Prime members, who already buy a lot more stuff from Amazon. (Either way, the device for now is only available by invitation.) Neither the Dash nor the Echo will actually place orders yet, but it's not hard to see that day coming.
In a report earlier this year, Forrester Research predicted a near-future when voice would become the primary way of interacting with computers, especially in the home. The home of the future, Forrester's James McQuivey wrote, will teem with tiny connected microphones tied to the cloud. And the company perhaps in the best position to perfect this "voice layer," he said, is Amazon, since it has the most obvious financial motivation—the better Amazon gets at listening, the easier it makes buying.
Unlike the Dash, which you need to speak into directly, the Echo is designed to hear voices from anywhere in a room. And for Amazon, the sound of you making your shopping list has the ring of money in the bank.
*Update (November 6, 2014, 5pm PT): Alexa Internet is the name of the web traffic data company bought by Amazon back in 1999. Among its operations, Alexa donates data from its web crawls to the Internet Archive, whose stated mission is "universal access to all knowledge." (h/t @WIZARDISHUNGRY)
Update (November 6, 2014, 5:25pm PT): Forrester's James McQuivey offered some thoughts on the Echo:
