Your mouth tells Amazon's Echo speaker what to play

Ziggy | 09 Nov, 2014 08:42PM | Leave a comment
If you've mastered the art of conversation with Siri, Google Voice and Cortana, there's a new device on the block keen for you to address it directly.

Amazon has lifted the lid on a speaker called the Echo, which it wants you to command with your voice. It's no replacement for human company, but -- if it's doing it's job properly -- it will do as it's told and there will be no answering back.

Ask the speaker a question and it will be able to return information including the news and the weather, but will also allow you to control your music by voice, making it easy to switch between tracks while baking, or doing DIY or taking a bath. This only applies if you're using Amazon-approved music services including Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn, however. You're welcome to use other music services such as Spotify with the speaker as well of course, but you'll have to your hands like a chump.

If you do use voice control, you'll be glad to know that Echo can listen to you even while music is playing thanks to in-built noise-cancelling technology, and it can also pick up your voice from any direction.

To activate the speaker you have to use the codeword "Alexa" -- a strange choice given that it the speaker already has a name, and probably doesn't need to be anthropomorphised any further. It could also be confusing if there actually is someone named Alexa around.

Echo is both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled and keeps it "brain" in the cloud. Amazon claims that this means its constantly getting smarter and learning to understand you better over time. As you use it, it will adapt to you speech patterns, vocabulary and personal preferences.

From what we can tell, it seems to have a pretty swish design, utilising the same elongated can shape that can be seen on the popular Logitech UE Boom, and offering a blue glowing ring around the top rim. Whether you need a speaker with this level of complexity is of course debatable, and if you are going to start buying connected devices for your home, you might want to be careful about tying yourself into closed systems (the Echo runs on Amazon Web Services).

-wired.co.uk