Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New Amazon Echo Plus first look”.
Hey I’m Lauren good from the verge and we’re here at the Amazon echo event in Seattle, where, as you might expect, we’ve seen new echoes today, we’ve seen a whole bunch of new stuff, but I’m gon na take you through these echoes speakers and I’m gon na Start with the echo plus, because I think this is the one that’s a little more interesting, even though this one looks different, so the echo plus looks just like the original echo. It’S the same tubular design. It has the same far-field microphone array. There are some differences to the speaker architecture inside of this, but the biggest thing about it is that it doubles as a smart home hub so for awhile. You’Ve been able to use echo devices, use alexa and echo devices to control certain aspects of your smart home, but now this will actually search for different wireless protocols around your home.
Look for smart phone gadgets that you’re trying to connect with and go through the setup and configuration process directly from the echo speaker. You just say: Alexa discover devices around the home and if you happen to have let’s say smart lightbulbs in the home, she’ll take you through the setup process. Amazon says this is going to support different wireless protocols. The one that we saw demonstrated today was ZigBee. I don’t think this supports z-wave, but it’ll also work across Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, as you might expect. Ok. So this is the other new echo speaker, as is obvious new form factor. It’S a shorter and a little bit squatter than the other echo.
We just took a look at also has a different speaker architecture built inside of it, as you might expect, because physically it’s different also has Dolby sound processing does all the stuff that you would expect an Alexa equipped echo speaker to do, but the most interesting thing About this is that it’s $ 99, so that is a pretty inexpensive. Echo speaker. It also comes in different designs, so this one’s wood, you can get one covered in fabric and here’s a little bonus echo for you. These are the new echo buttons that we saw today these pair with an existing echo device and then you’re supposed to use Alexa to trigger the buttons, and you can start playing some type of game.
You can play trivia games or just games that involve you tapping the buttons, as you might expect. We don’t know exactly when these are gon na go on sale yet, but we know that they’re selling for twenty dollars for a two pack of buttons. But, let’s be honest, probably gon na want to buy more of these if you’re the kind of person who wants to interact with your echo in this way, so yeah echo buttons. These are gon na, be the things that force you to interact with other human beings.
Rather than just interacting with your voice controlled speaker, we live in the future. The echo plus goes on sale. Today it starts shipping next month, it’s one hundred and forty nine dollars which is less expensive than the original price of the original echo from a few years ago, but still puts it at sort of the upper level of pricing for echo products. So yeah it’s been a pretty Ecco filled day. We also saw the echo spot, which we have another video on. We saw the echo connect it’s supposed to. Let you make phone calls, but yeah Amazon is really going all-in on its approach to sort of infiltrating your smart home and making Alexa be everywhere. I said it weird right: okay, .