It’s not hardware in itself, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest moves in the consumer product space. And the now ubiquitous vocal assistant debuted inside the first Echo speaker. It appeared five years after Siri, but on arrival Alexa was much more useful and fun than Apple’s voice assistant, because she could go much further in the knowledge banks of the Internet.
The first Echo speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversational computing to the masses. Ask a question, get an answer? It seemed new at the time, but it clearly indicated the future. And he became the future is pretty fast after Amazon started pumping dozens of Echo variants and licensing voice technology in ways that allowed other hardware manufacturers to put Alexa in their own speakers … and alarm clocks, light bulbs, showers, microwaves, headphones and smart watches. Sure, Alexa’s limitations as a conversation partner make him feel weird even today, but the types of computational interactions that Alexa has now popularized seem completely normal. We only talk to our computers these days! Not big.
2017: Echo Look
In April 2017, Amazon revealed what was probably its most bizarre gadget at the time: Echo Look, a phallic smart camera with an array of four microphones that would take hands-free photos of your outfits and tell you what to wear. . This is not a joke. The camera was only available by invitation, although one of the WIRED writers managed to buy one on eBay and review it for another publication at the time.
Finally, Echo Look gave us a look at our future on the computer. He used machine learning to make recommendations, as many consumer products do nowadays, but he also received a lot of wrong “personalized” suggestions and alarmed advocates for privacy. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would discontinue Echo Look and that the camera would no longer work from July 2020.
2017–2020: Echo … Everything
Here we break with our usual chronology. On a sunny morning in Seattle, in late September 2017, the tech press gathered at Amazon’s headquarters for … well, we didn’t know what to expect. It seems that Amazon has decided to join its technology brothers to host an official hardware launch. That day, and again in the following years, Amazon vomited countless new products (both hardware and software).
We tried to list some key products here: Echo Plus; a shorter, fatter echo; Echo Spot; Echo Buttons; Echo Connect; a Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa (again, this is no joke); Echo Auto; Echo Sub; Echo wall clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more about Amazon kitchen appliances below); Echo Link; Fire TV Recast; Stick-Up Cam Ring; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Car bell alarm, Cam Car and Car Connect; a spherical Echo; and a cloud gaming service called Luna. I forgot something? I was kidding. I definitely did.
2017: Echo Show
One of the products that arrived on that day in September 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was essentially a “smart display,” a small tablet screen with speakers for playing music, a microphone for capturing your Alexa commands, and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform that allows people to send audio, video and text to anyone who has an Alexa device or Alexa app on their phones.
This chat service didn’t really take off and all the camera did was take people out. Echo Show was able to show how useful Alexa could be when incorporated into a dedicated touch screen. Smart screens have become a hit. Google created its own version that worked with the Google Assistant, and both companies licensed the technology to other hardware manufacturers that helped proliferate these countertop devices. Fortunately, there are plenty of options today that come with room lock switches.
2018: Inel
