Amazon Said to Plan Premium Alexa Speaker With Large Screen (bloomberg.com)

Amazon's Echo speakers have garnered a lot of interest over the past few months. Many people believe that they like Amazon Echo because of how easy it's to operate -- there is no display, you talk with Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, which is reasonably good at understanding your queries. But in what seems like a deviation from the idea that made Echos so popular, Amazon is reportedly working on an Echo-like speaker, only this time it is more premium and has a 7-inch display, too. From a report on Bloomberg: The new device will have a touchscreen measuring about seven inches, a major departure from Amazon's existing cylindrical home devices that are controlled and respond mostly through the company's voice-based Alexa digital assistant, according to two people familiar with the matter. This will make it easier to access content such as weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and news, the people said. The latest Amazon speaker will be larger and tilt upwards so the screen can be seen when it sits on a counter and the user is standing, one of the people said.

Comments

Re:What could I possibly use it for?

[slaker]

I've bought pretty much all my audio CDs from Amazon (well, CDNow, originally) since about 1997. I buy a lot of music on disc. Turns out it's kind of hard to pirate contemporary classical music. In any case, I had a massive library of content available through Amazon's Cloud starting from the day they announced that everyone's music purchases would be put in there. That stuff just plays through the Dot. That's kind of great, really. I say "Alexa, play Kevin Puts And Legions Will Rise" and Kevin Puts plays. "Alexa, play Pandora; Alexa and set a sleep timer for 30 minutes." and I get a half hour of music random music.

Something else that's great? "Alexa, give me a news briefing" No more timing my shower so I catch the news at the top of the hour while I'm getting ready for work.

I can do that stuff about 10 different ways in my house, but the voice activation is legitimately handy. Especially since it's one step closer to getting to be Deckard in the middle of Blade Runner. Easily worth $50, anyway.