With that, Amazon revealed Thursday that it built two new homes for Alexa: the Amazon Tap and the Echo Dot. Amazon devices SVP Dave Limp said at a press briefing in San Francisco Wednesday that the device turned out to be a lot more successful than his team had hoped for.
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Amazon designed the 8.64-ounce Dot as a version of Echo that you might place in any room of the house, including the bedroom where you might use it as alarm clock.
Amazon is getting serious about its voice-controlled speaker Echo, and it just made a move that will make Echo a bigger part of its business. With nine hours of battery life and Bluetooth connectivity, the Tap can be taken everywhere to play music from a nearby mobile device.
When you combine Amazon’s Alexa-fueled lineup with Dash, automated supply refill system, and integration with a bevy of devices the e-commerce giant will spread through households everywhere.
The Amazon Tap loudspeaker comes complete with a wireless charging cradle, but it doesn’t pack the complicated microphone technology integrated into the original Echo loudspeaker or the new Echo Dot. It’s why the Echo Dot is exclusively sold to current Prime members through Alexa Voice Shopping, the voice service that’s only available through the Echo or Fire TV. The reason is that Dot may be in short supply at first, and Amazon also wants to do more testing with the myriad wireless Bluetooth speakers that are out there, since not all may function properly out of the gate. “Consumer electronics are hard”, he said. All you have to do is enable it and ask Alexa to “open the Wayne Investigation”.
Limp attributed much of the Echo’s success to advancements natural language processing and speech synthesis over the past few years. In other words, an interactive radio adventure of sorts that will have supporting music, sound effects and different characters to add to the realism.
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In what has to be one of the most unusual pairings of Hollywood and the tech industry, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant can now guide you through an exploratory audio adventure focused on solving the mystery of Batman’s murdered parents. Plus, it’s an opportunity for Amazon to see how users interact with a Dot in a home already using an Echo. “At Amazon, we believe that the next big platform is voice”.
