Amazon is releasing its wireless, voice-controlled speaker, the Echo, in the UK and Germany, along with its Alexa personal assistant.
The Echo is a Wi-Fi speaker that users speak questions, commands and playback requests to, with Alexa – Amazon’s challenger to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana – replying in kind, only now in a British accent.
It uses a ring of far-field mics to pick up voices and a complex artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition system, which some have said is the best in the business – Amazon has spent the last year teaching various British accents to the AI in order to hopefully avoid users having to repeat themselves.
Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices at Amazon said: “About five years ago, we set off on a big vision – we wanted to build a computer in the cloud that we controlled with our voice.
“It started with Star Trek, where you could be anywhere on the Enterprise and talk to the computer to get an accurate and fast answer.
“Voice is the most natural of interfaces, the one we use from birth. It’s simple for humans, but it’s a very hard challenge for computers. When it’s done right, it’s delightful for customers.”
A coloured ring of lights on the top indicates when the speaker has woken up in response to the command “Alexa” and is actively listening to your requests, sending your voice to the cloud to be recognised and interpreted. It can control your music from various sources, including Prime Music, TuneIn, Radioplayer and Spotify, but that’s just the starting point.
The real selling point of the Echo is its ability to command and controlvarious other devices and services. It will order goods from Amazon for you; pull news from the internet, including the Guardian, the Telegraph and Sky; track your steps with Fibit; order a cab with Uber; order food with Just Eat; get recipes from Jamie Oliver and answer questions like most other voice assistants.
“A connected home will be easily achievable for most in a few years. The use of voice as a command for connected home solutions is easier to use than an app: why use an app to control your home when you can just ‘shout’ at it?” said Jessica Ekholm, research director for analysts Gartner.
It also has integrations with various smart home appliances, from Samsung’s SmartThings and Philips Hue lights to Alphabet’s Nest, Hive, Honeywell and Sonos speakers and other appliances. You can tell it to turn the lights off, change the TV channel, or perhaps ask it for facts about cats.
Amazon is also launching a new version of its Echo Dot, a smaller Alexa-enabled device without a speaker designed to be a smart home voice controller and costing £49.99 in the UK and €59.99 in Germany. The Dot has a line out for connecting existing speakers and is capable of identifying where the person issuing commands is, so that only the device closest to the user responds.
Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices have become a sleeper hit in the US, with Amazon’s open Alexa Skills strategy that allows developers to add almost any capability to it making it one of the must-have smart home accessories.
Whether British consumers, who are less comfortable talking to their inanimate yet artificially smart devices and more cautious about their privacy, will take to this Star Trek-like future as readily as their US counterparts remains to be seen. But Amazon promises Echo to be everything that Apple’s Siri advertises for home control and more.
Limp said: “With a product that has microphones sitting in the home, you can’t think about privacy as an afterthought, it has to be built in from the ground up.
“With Echo it starts with the hardware, there’s a bright ring light on the top and a big mute button. We’ve connected the mute button light to the microphones so it’s not physically possible to power the microphones when the red light is on.
“When it hears the Alexa word, the blue light comes on, signifying that [the user’s] next words are being streamed to the cloud.”
Amazon gives Alexa users the ability to delete the data sent to the cloud through the Amazon website. The company keeps user data within the EU, currently in Ireland.
Echo will cost £149.99 in the UK and on sale from today in either black or white and ships on 28 September. Prime customers will get a £50 discount. It will cost €179.99 in Germany by invitation only. A €50 Prime discount is also available.
The Echo Dot is available in either six packs sold as buy five get one free, or packs of 12, buy 10 get two free.
