It’s your KF on KND Editor in Chief April Hamilton here, with an exciting announcement!
Up until this morning it’s been an invitation-only affair, but today Amazon announced the Amazon Echo (4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $179.99) is available for anyone to order, with an estimated ship date of 7/14/15 for the Echo and 7/6/15 for the Echo Voice Remote (sold separately – 4.5/5 stars, currently priced at $29.99).
Note that the estimated ship dates are accurate as of this writing, on 6/23/15, but are subject to change as Amazon’s supply varies.
I’ve had the Echo and remote for about a month now, and I LOVE them!
What’s The Amazon Echo?
The way I’ve been describing it is this: it’s like a starter edition of Iron Man Tony Stark’s Jarvis. It combines the personal assistant features of Siri (e.g., weather, news reports, Wikipedia lookups, solving math problems, spelling words, helping you manage your schedule, shopping list and to-do list, more) with “smart home” integration that allows the Echo to control devices like Philips Hue/Lux lighting systems and Belkin WeMo smart electric outlets.
The features I use most are:
Playing Music – from my Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn streaming radio, Pandora and iHeartRadio.
Playing Audiobooks – from my Audible library – no need to download the book to a tablet or phone first!
Daily Weather Forecast & Flash News Briefing – so handy, and user-configurable so you can control your news sources and weather report location
Homework Help – before school let out for summer, my daughter used the Echo every day after school to help with her homework. The Echo can look up Wikipedia entries, answer factual questions (e.g., what’s the highest mountain on Earth?”), spell words, do unit conversions and much more in this area.
Current Functionality Is Just The Beginning!
The built-in features are pretty handy and the current Philips/WeMo integration adds another layer of functionality, but that’s only the beginning. Just since the Echo started shipping in its invite-only period, Amazon has added traffic reports, sports reports, Audible integration and Google Calendar integration.
Amazon developers and independent developers are hard at work creating new functions, device integration and apps for the Echo. In fact, I’m one of those independent developers, and I’m hard at work on fun, cool and useful new things for the Echo to do. The Echo is only going to keep getting better.
While Amazon has yet to make any official announcement about it, the fact that they’re working with developers to create new Echo apps is a clear indication that an Echo App Store will be coming. I can’t say exactly what it will look like or how it will work (since Amazon’s not providing those details yet), but I expect it’ll be much like Amazon’s current App Store for Android: an Amazon-based marketplace where Echo owners will be able to get free and paid apps to extend their Echo’s functionality.
Where To Learn More
When I first got my Echo I couldn’t find much information about online, outside of early reviews on tech sites, Amazon’s own product pages and discussion threads on Amazon and Reddit. There didn’t seem to be any full sites dedicated to this cool new device.
So I launched one of my own: Love My Echo, where I now post tips, tricks, articles about new features, news and opinion about the Echo.
Amazon Echo and Echo Voice Remote: get them and enter the era of the smart home!
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