This is not hardware in itself, but Alexa has proven to be one of Amazon’s biggest changes in the consumer products space. And the now ubiquitous voice assistant debuted on the first Echo speaker. It came five years after Siri, but on arrival, Alexa was noticeably more useful and fun than Apple’s own voice assistant, because it could reach far more Internet knowledge banks.
The first Echo speaker is also the device that made Alexa a household name and brought conversation computing to the masses. Ask a question, get an answer? It looked new at the time, but it also clearly pointed to the future. It is has became the future very quickly after Amazon started rolling out dozens of Echo variants and licensing voice technology in ways that allowed other hardware manufacturers to put Alexa on their own speakers … and alarm clocks, lamps, showers, micro -waves, headphones and smart watches. Sure, Alexa’s limitations as a conversation partner make it seem cryptic to this day, but the types of computing interactions that Alexa popularized now seem completely normal. We just chat with our computers today! It’s nothing much.
2017: Echo Look
In April 2017, Amazon revealed what was perhaps its most bizarre gadget at the time: the Echo Look, an intelligent phallic camera with a set of four microphones that took pictures of your clothes with your hands free and told you what to wear. This is not a joke. The camera was available by invitation only, although one of WIRED’s editors managed to buy one on eBay and review it for another publication at the time.
Ultimately, Echo Look gave us a glimpse into our future of computer vision. He used machine learning to make recommendations, as so many consumer products do today, but he also missed several of these “personalized” suggestions and alarmed privacy advocates. In the spring of 2020, Amazon said it would discontinue the Echo Look and that the camera would no longer work as of July 2020.
2017–2020: Eco … Everything
Here, we break our regular chronology. On a sunny Seattle morning in late September 2017, the tech press gathered at Amazon headquarters to … well, we didn’t know what to expect. Amazon, it seems, has decided to join its tech brothers to host an official hardware release. That day, and again in the years that followed, Amazon threw up countless new products (hardware and software).
We tried to list some main products here: Echo Plus; a lower and fatter Echo; Echo Spot; Echo buttons; Echo Connect; a Big Mouth Billy Bass with Alexa (again, this is not a joke); Echo Auto; Echo Sub; Echo wall clock; Amazon Basics Microwave (more on Amazon appliances below); Echo Link; Fire TV Recast; Stick-Up Cam ring; Echo Dot Kids; new Eero routers; Ring Car Alarm, Car Cam and Car Connect; a spherical echo; and a cloud gaming service called Luna. Did we forget something? Just kidding. Definitely yes.
2017: Echo Show
One of the products that arrived on that day in September 2017 was the first Echo Show. It was a “smart display”, essentially a small tablet-like screen with speakers to play music, a microphone to capture your Alexa commands and a camera for … wait, what was the camera for? For use with a new Alexa-based communication platform, which allows people to send audio, video and text to anyone with an Alexa device or the Alexa app on their phones.
This chat service didn’t really take off, and all the camera did was get people out of there. The Echo Show was successful in showing how Alexa could be much more useful when built on a dedicated touchscreen. Smart screens have become a hit. Google made its own version that worked with Google Assistant, and the two companies licensed the technology to other hardware manufacturers that helped to proliferate these benchtop devices. Fortunately, there are many options today that come with camera-off buttons.
2018: Ring
