Amazon Echo is a brand new voice-controlled smart speaker recently launched by Amazon.com. It is a 9.25-inch high, 3.27-inch tall black cylinder with built-in microphones and speakers. From the promotion video, it appears to function like a home edition of Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, an intelligent personal assistant running on speech recognition and wireless technology to analyze and respond to a voice command. Connected to Internet through Wi-Fi, it can be pair up with other mobile devices through Bluetooth, as well.
Amazon.com emphasizes that Echo is equipped with 7 microphones, so the user can talk to it in normal speaking volume from any corner in the house, and it can still picks up the command—from here, it can then field your and your kids’ daily questions, stream music or news broadcast from Internet and your mobile device, and update your to-do and shopping lists.