When you think Amazon, you think e-commerce, but closer to the present, you’d also think about the Fire phone, its failure to make money and so forth, but you never would have imagined that the same company, at this time, would come up with a virtual assistant in the form of a speaker. It is surprising and yes, that’s Amazon’s new product, called Echo, a cloud-powered home speaker that you can talk to. The Echo, always listening and connected to Amazon’s cloud aka AWS, accepts input primarily in voice and can perform many of the functions of already existing virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana. It’s also a bold play for the living room, where information is less personal. The device, priced at $199 for regular people and $99 for Amazon’s Prime customers, is set to launch in the coming weeks, and is currently invite-only.
Continue reading “Amazon introduces Echo, a virtual assistant in the form of a home speaker”
