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Amazon Just Announced the Touchscreen Echo Nobody Asked For (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon just announced a new grandmaster Echo gadget with the company's voice-assistant technology built in. It's called the Echo Show. It's got a touchscreen. It's got wi-fi and Bluetooth. It costs $230. And it's even creepier than its siblings. At its core, the Echo Show is just a regular Echo with a 7-inch screen. That screen lets you watch YouTube videos and see the weather forecast after you've asked for it. The new gadget also lets you make calls, video calls, and send text messages to other people using Echos or to mobile devices with the Alexa app installed. Thanks to Alexa integration with gadgets from Arlo and Ring, you can also see what your nanny cam sees. But check this out: the Echo Show also has a 5-megapixel, front-facing camera. So now, instead of your Echo just listening to your commands, it can watch you as well. The Echo Show joins the screen-free Echo Look as the second Amazon Echo device to feature a camera. On a sidenote, Amazon said it will bring the voice-calling ability to all other Echo devices.
Chalk this one up with the Fire Phone and, in the near future, the Echo Look as yet another Amazon hardware device destined to fail.
After I heard about the Echo Look, I presented the idea of it to my non-technical, "normal" wife in a positive light, trying to frame it as a good thing, just to see how she'd react. When she suggested without any prodding on my part that it could be a bit creepy, I gave her the Amazon talking points and kept moving along, hoping to gloss over those details, but to no avail. By the end of the description she was so creeped out by the very notion of the product that she made it clear she would never allow one in the house. To say the least, she was quite glad when I dropped the charade and made it clear I was on the same page as her.
I don't get why Amazon keeps making these things, given that both technical people and "normal people" find these sorts of products incredibly creepy.
Umm.... that's exactly the same way the Echo and all other Alexa devices work. They only transmit audio after the wake word is spoken, until the end of your utterance. This comes up in every single story on Alexa and Echo here on Slashdot, and this has been posted a zillion times here.
The wake word engine runs locally. Amazon does not transmit audio until you say "Alexa" or whatever your configured wake word is, full stop.