This isn’t hardware per se, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest steps forward in consumer products. And the now ubiquitous voice assistant debuted in the first Echo speaker. It came five full years after Siri, but on arrival, Alexa was clearly more useful and fun than Apple’s own voice assistant, as it could reach much further into the knowledge bases 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 a response? It seemed new at the time, but also clearly pointed to the future. And the became the future pretty soon after Amazon began releasing dozens of Echo variants and licensing the speech technology in ways that would allow other hardware manufacturers to put Alexa into 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 types of computer interactions that made Alexa popular seem perfectly normal now. We just talk to our computers these days! No biggie.
2017: Echo look
In April 2017, Amazon unveiled what was arguably its most bizarre gadget at the time: the 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 available by invitation only, although one of WIRED’s writers had bought one from eBay at the time and viewed it for another publication.
Ultimately, the Echo Look gave us a glimpse into our future in computer vision. It used machine learning to make recommendations, like so many consumer products do today, but it also got many of those “ personalized ” suggestions wrong and alarmed privacy advocates. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would discontinue the Echo Look and the camera would stop working from July 2020.
2017–2020: Echo… Everything
Here we break with our regular chronology. On a sunny Seattle morning in late September 2017, the tech press gathered at Amazon headquarters for … well, we didn’t know what to expect. Amazon, it turns out, had decided to organize an official hardware launch with its tech brethren. That day, and again in the years that followed, Amazon regurgitated a myriad of new products (both hardware and software).
We’ve tried to list a few key products here: Echo Plus; a shorter, thicker ultrasound; 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 on Amazon’s kitchen appliances below); Echo Link; Fire TV recast; Ring Stick-Up Cam; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam and Car Connect; a spherical Echo; and a cloud gaming service called Luna. Have we forgotten anything? Just kidding. We certainly 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 display”, essentially a small tablet-like screen with speakers to play music, a microphone to pick up your Alexa commands, and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform, which allows people to send audio, video, and text messages to anyone with an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phone.
That chat service didn’t really get off the ground, and the camera only turned people out. The Echo Show managed to show how much more useful Alexa could be if built into a dedicated touchscreen. Smart displays became a hit. Google created its own version that worked with its Google Assistant, and both companies licensed the technology to other hardware makers who helped spread these countertop devices. Fortunately, there are plenty of options these days that come with camera disconnects.
2018: Ring
