june issue 126
suggested that the Echo was on a path to become Amazon’s next $1 billion business. “It’s one of the most sold-out things that I see on Amazon,” Wingo said. “It’s an unusual thing for Amazon to be out of something, but for the Echo, it’s usually in stock just for a couple weeks before it goes out of stock for a few days – so it feels like they’re having trouble making enough of the devices.” Wingo noted the Echo, which Amazon sells for $180 only through its own site, was selling for $200 to $300 on eBay. When the Echo was introduced in a goofy video in late 2014, on the heels of the failure of the Fire Phone, it was widely ridiculed. The Echo’s utility was not obvious, and in its earliest incarnation, it seemed a bit of a ditz. But there are a couple of reasons it has earned such raves from users. First, it’s simple to learn, and its voicerecognition capabilities are more intuitive than those of many other vocal assistants (like Apple’s Siri or Google Now). More than that, it keeps gaining new powers. During an interview at a media event recently, Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices, said the company created the Echo because it had seen interesting possibilities arising out of advances in microphone technology, speech recognition and cloud connectivity. Amazon’s engineers spent years perfecting the device’s unusual capabilities. Unlike competing assistants, the Echo can be activated hands-free from far across the room (Siri only works from about a metre away), and it can decipher your voice in noisy environments, even when it’s playing music. Amazon also worked to make sure the device responded very quickly. “Early on in the product, to play music took eight or nine seconds, and it’s just unusable when it’s like that,” Limp said. “Now it’s often 1,000 milliseconds or 1,200 milliseconds.” The speed makes a crucial difference. Compared with the trudge of chatting with 14 Siri, speaking to Alexa feels natural, closer to speaking to a human than a machine – and even when it gets your request wrong, which in your early days with the device will happen often, it doesn’t feel like you have paid a huge penalty for trying. Portfolio.
upfront / amazon echo
“Amazon seems on the verge of building something like Iron Man’s Jarvis, the artificial-intelligence brain at the centre of all your household activities”
More important, just like the early iPhone, Amazon has managed to turn the Echo into the centre of a new ecosystem. Developers are flocking to create voice-controlled apps for the device, or skills, as Amazon calls them. There are now more than 300 skills for the Echo, from the trivial – there is one to make Alexa produce rude body sounds on command – to the pretty handy. It can tell you transit schedules, start a seven-minute workout, read recipes, do math and conversions, and walk you through adventure games, among other possibilities. Makers of digital home devices like Nest are also rushing to make their products compatible with the Echo. Alexa can now control your internet-connected lights, home thermostats and a variety of other devices. Hardware makers can also add Alexa’s brain into their own devices,
so soon you won’t need an Echo to consult with Alexa – you could find it in your toaster, your refrigerator or your car. The Echo is far from perfect. It still gets queries wrong and it still feels like it’s missing potentially useful features. Limp concedes this. Amazon’s teams keep working to add new tricks to the Echo, he said. The device also faces limited retail distribution – it’s unusual enough that it would benefit from being displayed on shelves, but Amazon’s retail rivals are unlikely to stock it anytime soon. Amazon would be wise to hurry up because while the Echo has no direct competitors, a few may be emerging. Among them is SoundHound, a startup that has been working on voice-recognition for more than a decade, which is now offering hardware makers access to its service. Within the next year, according to the company, lots of gadgets will be using SoundHound’s software to talk to users. Do you want that? The FBI’s battle with Apple over encryption should prompt deep questions about a future of internet-connected devices spread around our homes. Amazon has strong privacy protections in the Echo. It doesn’t stream anything without the wake word and it has a physical mute button that electrically disconnects the microphone but, as with all groundbreaking technology, there is no doubt we are entering new territory here. Yet, the Echo is so useful it may be worth the gamble. Many in the industry have long looked to the smartphone as the remote control for your world. But the phone has limitations. A lot of times fiddling with a screen is just too much work. By perfecting an interface that is much better suited to home use – the determined yell! – Amazon seems on the verge of building something like Iron Man’s Jarvis, the artificial-intelligence brain at the centre of all your household activities. Who could say no to that?