Be the First to Get the Amazon Echo...!
Amazon Echo (shortened and referred to as Echo) is a brand of smart speakers developed by Amazon.com. The devices connect to the voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant service Alexa, which responds to the name "Alexa". This "wake word" can be changed by the user to "Amazon", "Echo" or "Computer". The device is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real-time information. It can also control several smart devices acting as a home automation hub.
Amazon had been developing Echo devices inside its Lab126 offices in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts since at least 2010 in confirmed reports. The device was part of Amazon’s first attempts to expand its device portfolio beyond the Kindle e-reader. The Echo was prominently featured in Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl ad in 2016.
The first-generation Echo was initially limited to Amazon Prime members or by invitation, but became widely available in the United States on June 23, 2015. Press speculated that it would make its Canadian debut in mid-to-late 2016, after Amazon posted job listings for developers for Alexa and co-hosted a hackathon in Toronto. The Echo became available in the United Kingdom on 28 September 2016. Additionally, the Alexa voice service is available to be added to other devices and other companies' devices and services are encouraged to connect to it.
Features
Overview of operation
In the default mode, the device continuously listens to all speech, monitoring for the wake word to be spoken, which is primarily set up as "Alexa" (derived from Alexa Internet, the Amazon-owned Internet indexing company). Echo's microphones can be manually disabled by pressing a mute button to turn off the audio processing circuit.
Echo devices require a wireless Internet connection in order to work. Echo's voice recognition capability is based on Amazon Web Services and the voice platform Amazon acquired from Yap, Evi, and IVONA (a Polish-based specialist in voice technologies used in the Kindle Fire).
The smart speakers perform well with a 'good' (low-latency) Internet connection which minimizes processing time due to minimal communication round trips, streamable responses and geo-distributed service endpoints. While the application is free, an Amazon account is required, and setup is not possible without one.
Available services
Echo device offers weather from AccuWeather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, iHeartRadio, BBC, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn. Echo can play music from the owner's Amazon Music accounts and has built-in support for the Pandora and Spotify streaming music services and has support for IFTTT and Nest thermostats. Echo can also play music from streaming services such as Apple Music, and Google Play Music from a phone or tablet. Echo maintains voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping and to-do lists and can access Wikipedia articles. Echo will respond to your questions about items in your Google calendar. It also integrates with Yonomi, Philips Hue, Belkin Wemo, SmartThings, Insteon, and Wink. Additionally, integration with the Echo is in the works for Countertop by Orange Chef, Sonos, Scout Alarm, Garageio, Toymail, MARA, and Mojio. Questions like "Who is Kim Kardashian?" are answered by reading the first few lines of the corresponding Wikipedia article.
It does not appear to be capable of playing music streamed from a local UPnP/DLNA media server.[citation needed]
Echo devices also have access to 'skills' built with the Alexa Skills Kit. These are third-party-developed voice experiences that add to the capabilities of any Alexa-enabled device (such as the Echo). Examples of skills include the ability to play music, answer general questions, set an alarm, order a pizza, get an Uber, and more. Skills are continuously being added to increase the capabilities available to the user. The Alexa Skills Kit is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples that make it fast and easy for any developer to add skills to Alexa. Developers can also use the "Smart Home Skill API", a new addition to the Alexa Skills Kit, to easily teach Alexa how to control cloud-controlled lighting and thermostat devices. All of the code runs in the cloud – nothing is on any user device. A developer can follow tutorials to learn how to quickly build voice experiences for their new and existing applications.
Voice system
The devices have natural lifelike voices resulting from speech-unit technology.[additional citation(s) needed] High speech accuracy is achieved through sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) algorithms built into the Echo's text-to-speech (TTS) engine.[citation needed]
Software updates
As with all Alexa devices, the functionality of Echo smart speakers periodically evolves as Amazon releases new software for it. Most new releases will fix bugs in addition to including enhanced functionality. New releases are pushed to the devices on a gradual basis so it may take several days to a week or more for a particular device to be updated. Because much of Echo's intelligence lies in the cloud, significant functional enhancements can be made to Echo without updating the software version it is running. For example, in April 2015, the Echo added the ability to give live sports scores without updating the software version, running on the device.
Get the Brand New Amazon Echo!
Reviewed by nahida4070
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March 31, 2018
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