Amazon announced the Echo back in 2014 and customers that were interested in buying the device were put on a waiting list. Now, the giant online retailer sent out more invites for Echo and is attracting customers to buy it. The Amazon Echo is a sort of personal assistant and functions as a cylinder-shaped speaker as well.
Some of these devices were already shipped and Amazon even sent out more invitations on Tuesday.
The Amazon website, however, states that the Echo won’t ship out until June, either because the inventory is low or there is a very high demand for it. But customers must decide pretty soon if they choose to purchase the Echo because the invites last for only seven days.
Amazon Echo plays music, tracks news, keeps track of your shopping list, gives you a weather report and can even tell jokes and is considered to be Amazon’s first try at entering the smart home market. The company could also learn a lot from feedback from the users who buy the device by making it available only for a few people at a time and thus, they could polish the device before making it available for everyone.
We had our hands on one of these devices and can give you a short review of what you can expect from it.
The Amazon Echo uses Alexa, which is the voice behind it. The device is voice activated and relies on a cloud to perform different tasks as your personal assistant. Even though she’s pretty limited as of now, she still has some nice functions. Yes, we will call Alexa a “she” from now on, not an “it”.
Even though there are a few problems with voice recognition, it’s still one of the best voice controlled devices we’ve used. It does a good job in understanding what you are saying and it’s even better than Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana personal assistants.
It features seven microphones inside the 9.25 inch cylinder casing. The ring which controls volume on top of the Amazon Echo lights up when you say the word “Alexa”. The light means the device is ready to hear your command and we can honestly tell you that Alexa understood most of the commands we gave to her. You can also say “Amazon” before giving commands but that doesn’t really seem natural. There is no way you can change the gender of the voice or the wake word as of now.
To start using it, you have to connect the Amazon Echo to a Wi-Fi network with the use of an app available on the Amazon Fire, Android, Apple and desktop devices. You can connect directly to it via Bluetooth and use the device as a wireless speaker as well. Unfortunately, even though the device holds seven microphones, we couldn’t use it as a hands free device for our phones. To be fair, it’s still in its early days and this function will probably be made available later.
The Amazon Echo works especially well for receiving a weather forecast both for just one day or the whole week. The device can also tell you the time, set up a timer or alarm, manage a shopping list and give definitions on various words. Alexa can even tell jokes.
The device has to always be plugged in as it doesn’t have a battery of its own. You can move it around your house as long as it can still connect to the Wi-Fi network. If you move it in a place where there is a different network than the one you used before you will have to go through the setup process once more. It’s not very difficult, but it’s inconvenient.
You also get a remote that has a microphone built in it so you can speak to Alexa when you’re very far away from the microphones or the room is very noisy. That being said, we were able to tell Alexa to turn the volume down when music was playing quite loudly, so the internal microphones work really well, partially because they have a noise cancellation feature.
A great limitation at this point is the fact that Alexa can only use Wikipedia and a few other data bases, but not Google or Bing. The device will send a Bing link to your smartphone or tablet if she won’t be able to find what you’re looking for, however.
Alexa is expected to get a lot smarter in the future. She is capable of learning your voice better and there is also a tool for speech-training, but we’re uncertain of how the app works exactly considering that numerous people will talk to her, not just one.
The sound also seems to get distorted on higher volumes despite the speaker being able to produce good bass and projecting the sound at a 360 degree. But the sort of poor sound quality is probably because the speaker is designed mostly with Alexa’s voice in mind. The speaker works great for background music but it most likely won’t be your go to source of entertainment. It’s really hard to listen to music above the 60 percent volume mark as the sound will become very distorted. It’s very possible that the Amazon engineers will fiddle around with the EQ in the future to make it sound better but this is just our assumption.
At a price of $199, Amazon Echo isn’t much of a bargain and while it’s not without its quirks, we do see the potential in the device and there will probably be a time in the future when we will come to use it more. But that depends solely on Amazon and what they decide to improve on it.
Images source: cnet.com
