It’s not hardware in itself, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest moves in consumer products. And the currently ubiquitous voice assistant debuts in the first Echo speaker. It took a full five years to come to Siri, but Alexa was much more helpful and pleasant on arrival than Apple’s own voice assistant, because it could go much further in the internet’s knowledge banks.
The first Echo speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversation computers to the masses. Ask a question, get an answer? It looked new at the time, but it also clearly pointed to the future. And this has become the future pretty quickly after Amazon started pumping dozens of Echo variants and licensing voice technology in other ways other hardware makers could put Alexa in their own speakers … and alarm clocks, light bulbs, shower heads, microwaves, headphones and smart watches. Sure, Alexa’s limitations as a conversation partner make it feel gimmicky even today, but the kinds of computer interactions that Alexa enjoyed now seem completely normal. We only talk to our computers these days! No biggie.
2017: Echo Look
In April 2017, Amazon unveiled what might have been the bizarre gadget at the time: the Echo Look, a phallic smart camera with a four-microphone range that would take hands-free photos of your outfits and tell you what to wear. This is not a joke. The camera was available by invitation only, though one of WIRED’s authors managed to buy one on eBay and review it for another publication at the time.
Finally, the Echo Look gave us a glimpse into our future of computer vision. It used machine learning to make recommendations, as so many consumer products do nowadays, but many of the “personalized” suggestions got wrong and worried private advocates. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said that it would discontinue the Echo Look and that the camera would no longer function from July 2020.
2017–2020: Echo … Everything
Here we break from our regular chronology. On a sunny Seattle morning at the end of September 2017, the technical press meets at Amazon’s headquarters for … well, we do not know what to expect. It appears that Amazon has decided to launch an official hardware launch with its tech brothers. That day, and again in subsequent years, Amazon launched a myriad of new products (both hardware and software).
We tried to name a few key products here: Echo Plus; a shorter, fatter Echo; Echo kol; Echo buttons; Echo Connect; A Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa (this is not a joke); Echo Outo; Echo Sub; Echo wall clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more on Amazon’s kitchen appliances below); Echo Link; Four TV Arrangement; Ring Ignition Comb; Echo Dot Children; new Eero routers; Ring alarm, car call and car connection; a spherical echo; and a cloud game service called Luna. Did we forget something? I’m not kidding. We definitely did.
2017: Echo Show
One of the products that arrived on that September day in 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was a ‘smart show’, essentially a small tablet-like screen with speakers to play music, a microphone to capture your Alexa commands and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform that lets people send audio, video and texts to anyone using an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phones.
That chat service did not really start, and all the camera did was move people out. The Echo Show has managed to show how much more useful Alexa can be if it’s built into a dedicated touch screen. Smart exhibits have become a hit. Google has created its own version that works with its Google Assistant, and both companies have licensed the technology to other hardware manufacturers to help increase these workspace devices. Fortunately, today there are many options associated with the switches of the camera.
2018: Ring
