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Amazon's Echo: a $200, Multi-Function, Audio-Centric Device
An anonymous reader writes Amazon today quietly unveiled a new product dubbed Amazon Echo. The $200 device appears to be a voice-activated wireless speaker that can answer your questions, offer updates on what's going in the world, and of course play music. Echo is currently available for purchase via an invite-only system. If you have Amazon Prime, however, you can get it for $100. I've put in a request for one; hopefully we'll get a hands-on look at the Echo soon. It looks useful and interesting for random searches, and for controlling devices, but one small speaker (interesting driver arrangement notwithstanding) doesn't bode well for "fill[ing] any room with immersive sound," as Amazon's promo materials claim.
Now we got two giants churning out failure after failure
It looks a lot like Ivee (http://www.helloivee.com) which was Kickstarted a while back. Ivee costs much less, and integrates with home automation gear (Hue, Nest, etc.), which is useful. It doesn't stream internet audio, though. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Echo as in, Echo the Fires miserable failure? Because if that's what you're trying to do... good job!
Seriously, it seems that recently Amazon must have fired the guy with all the common sense.
This would be perfect if it only had a faithful synthesis of Majel Barrett's voice.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Masters of only one (Let Kindle Slide). Online Shopping. I simply do not understand all of these devices that Amazon is trying to pimp. Phones? Tablets? I love shopping at Amazon but their brain dead hardware makes zero sense.
You just shout "SLICE! CHOP! SLICE!" at it and it makes fruit slicing noises and tells you afterwards how well you did. When you're not using it, it quietly keeps a compressed log of human presence information and keyword flags that get sent to Amazon's supercustomers. Just like the Kinect, but no Xbox required. Awesome innovation.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Amazon Prime costs $99 a year, and this device is $100 off if you have that...
If you go to amazon.com, you'll see a ginormous advert taking a big chunk out of the very top of the page.
#DeleteChrome
Gee - 30-some comments and not one about privacy concerns. An always-on mic in my house? I think not!
Suppose, you are disciplining your child, or singing in the shower, or having a tender moment with your spouse... The device listens — and is connected to the cloud "getting smarter".
Will it start offering suggestions? Will it start reminding us to wash hands — if it hears flushing, but not running water in the sink? Will it call police upon detecting "domestic violence" — and wouldn't Amazon some day be sued for not doing so?
The Big Brother we were warned about nearly 100 years ago, does not necessarily need to be entirely for monitoring — the watching interface could also deliver weather reports and other useful information.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you actually scroll down the page a http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo you'll see it actually has two speakers, a "woofer" and a tweeter.
More interesting is the array of 7 mics. Should be possible to get some good positional audio capture and noise reduction that way.
I picked up an el-cheapo bluetooth speaker/mic a while ago, and it works decently enough. I can see people paying 10x more for a "premium" version of something like http://www.amazon.com/Wireless... I suppose... "Real" speakerphones for conference rooms with good NC and AEC are pretty expensive.
I'd like to say WTF? Over.
All indications on this device is it is going to be tightly wound into Amazon's services. Unless it has an open API as well, it's going to be dead in the water, because me telling amazon to "Remind me to get milk tomorrow" is not very useful when it has no integration to my Google or Apple calendar.
The second barrier is, all this thing can do can already be done by Google Now. So you are competing with a device people already have in their pocket.
Anyway it will be interesting to see if it works out for Amazon.
It is said the average human life of 76 produces 1.5 years on the toilet. I'd like to believe I've done some good thinking and improving during that goodly bit of quiet time.
If we can do nothing else productive with our cumulative years on /., we ought to be able to convince folks to type in their own url. Crikey!
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So if I'm at home AND I'm in the same room with it AND I don't have my phone in my pocket AND it's otherwise quiet in the room, I can totally ask it stuff. SIGN ME UP!
This will be so great for all those times that I'm standing alone in my living room with my hands full and I suddenly need to know "what's 28 degrees fahrenheit in celsius?"
Seriously, Amazon, just throw this useless piece of shit into the bargain bin with the Microsoft Kin and the Google Nexus Q and the Facebook Phone and oh yeah the Amazon Fire Phone. Call me in a few months when they announce what the write-down is on this turd.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Your every spoken word reverberates back at the Amazon.com mother roach.
Just like your every spoken word on your cellphone and computer microphone goes to Microsoft, Apple, and/or the NSA.
It could be that losing screen is as essential for voice interface as losing keyboard and stylus was for multitouch tablets. Not in a technical sense, but to get both users and developers to embrace new way of interacting and discover what works. I see this working very well with kids, especially if wrapped in a cute toy and an age-appropriate content selection. If nothing else, this device will have terrific accessibility for blind users.
If only NSA didn't spoil the fun by displaying complete disregard for law and common sense! Now people will never trust the hotword detection and assume it can be overridden from remote to listen all the time.
Alexa mod parent troll
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Agreed. If it did not spy, it might be a neat gadget, but you just can't be sure, especially as it is networked connected and apparently always updating itself. I worked on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant, a small handheld device that did speech recognition for command-and-control, in the late 1990s, but it had a push-to-talk button. Of course, we are so surrounded these days with devices with microphones and cameras which auto-update (cell phones, laptops, tablets) that it is becoming harder to know what any of them are doing. But I'm assuming this system explicitly sends audio over the network to Amazon. Maybe it has special hardware to not send audio unless you say the keyword? When I was musing about building speech recognition into a physical keyboard, we talked about that idea at IBM as a way to save power, with special low-power hardware to listen for just one keyword without needing to wake up the entire system. Anyway, this privacy issue needs thinking through...
Also, there is some other social aspect of it that feels weird somehow. The video about it with the white Yuppi couple with three kids (or was one a babysitter?) was a little creepy in some ways, since Echo is made to look almost like a new person joining the family, taking the role of an unmarried aunt or uncle, say. Perhaps this device subconsciously addresses a need unfulfilled by the USA's lack of an extended family living together (which has been the historic norm during human history, like in longhouses)? Is there an implication that this device might end up pushing real people out of the home, like when the dad has to ask how to spell "cantaloupe", displaced by a device...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It's also strange how the video shows it in several rooms, like either people move it or they bought several? Somehow a physical robot might not feel as weird -- although it would have the same privacy and social issues or more because a robot could move things. From a top Google match or robots and privacy: ... It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them (Denning et al 2008; Singer 2009, 67). Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we've put that instrument has been surveillance. ... There are a number of different ways one might categorize or group the impact of robotics on privacy. This chapter breaks the effects into three categories--direct surveillance, access, and social meaning--with the goal of introducing the reader to a wide variety of issues. Where possible, the chapter points toward ways in which we might mitigate or redress the potential impact of robots on privacy, but acknowledges that in some cases redress will be difficult under the current state of privacy law. ..."
"Robots and Privacy - American University Washington College of Law"
https://www.wcl.american.edu/p...
"M. Ryan Calo, "Robots and Privacy," in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, eds.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming)
Anyway, we'll see how this plays out with Echo as a sort of robot without hands...
There are a lot of things I like about Amazon (ignoring employment conditions for packers), even its Kindle hardware, but the Fire phone and now this seem like overreach. That is not because they are not interesting products, but more because, as
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They really should have called this Siri on a Stick. Maybe SOS for short. Amazon SOS sounds better than Echo. What echo?
Wow. Just wow. Some AC probably just made a shitload of cash by tricking mods into upvoting his peronsal referrral link (hint: that's what the ref_=blahblah part is).
http://www.amazon.com/oc/echo works just fine without the referral.
Can't she just read your mind anyway
Its about 5 weeks too late for Amazon - I have had to reduce my spending there since they now charge sales tax.
The only difference, of course, is that we don't expect your cell phone or tablet to relay EVERY word to the NSA. The "Echo" device would appear to do just that. We always suspected that Big Brother was going to subcontract the work; now we know who got the bid!
Not sure if you're saying that makes it OK, or if you just wanted to point that out.
I'm Wiki Bear!
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All it needs to say is "Yes Dear" and give compliments, save me a lifetime of grief. Of course, it'll also need to learn how to apologise when it's right... That might be a bit trickier.
"lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
Now, go ahead and mod me down.
Looks like someone is in need of a spanking.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Wish i had mod points.
I see what you did there... (when you get a "ref=" part in an Amazon URL, it means it's an affiliate link.)
Nice cheap way to earn a few extra bucks by using your own affiliate link, I see, all in the guise of "web surfing safety".
I don't think it will work without a pretty wide-open connection to Amazon. All of those queries that we saw were not being satisfied by the local box. The shopping list was internet connected. That thing is not going in my house.
Get one of these and then play nothing but movies with terrorists in them right by the mic.
Actually ref= is for the referrer. Amazon uses this to track from which page users are coming from. It's redundant when the HTTP referer is there, but it's still helpful for links shared outside or posted on other websites, etc.
Affiliate links have a tag= URL parameter, not ref=.
Is why, when not at home, set a computer to play random video-clips from YouTube - Amazon will have fun figuring out what-is-what.
more like a wireless microphone and the cloud is listening in.
some drunken folks are arguing about the speed of light in vacume vs water.
bartender gets weary of the pedantic noise and nods the folks over to Echo and say "Oh wise one... what is the speed of light in vacume vs water?"
the crowd goes silent as it speaks. "answer is... 42!"
How will they make money, no one here reads the articles anyways.
Have gnu, will travel.
Alexa, what's the best way to be tax-efficient?
Alexa, what were Mummy and Daddy whispering about on Christmas Eve?
Requiem for the American Dream
Leave it to the world's largest book seller to combine 1984 and Brave New World into one product. Personally, I'm holding out for the brain implant from Mozilla.