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Although Apple has been taking over the tech news for the week, yesterday Amazon revealed five new Alexa-powered products—covering all bases of your smart home. We have the slightly larger Echo Show 16, a refreshed Echo Dot, a new Echo Studio with Home Camera built-in, an Alexa-powered Photo Frame, and the Echo Time, which is a Dot with a cutout for a clock.
Starting with the new Echo Dot, which is the company’s latest smart speaker. The newest model brings forth a faster AZ3 chip for more natural Alexa conversations, an upgraded speaker, and up to four mics with better noise reduction to better interpret your Alexa commands. It also doubles as a smart home hub and a Wi-Fi extender for Eero routers. The new $100 Echo Dot is available now and arrives in four colors: graphite, glacier white, agave green, and coral pink.
There’s the Echo Time, which is an Alexa-powered smart clock to help users sleep better. It looks like an Echo Dot but has a 2.3-inch circular screen that can get pretty dim to not disturb your rest. It includes an ultrasonic transducer to identify if you’re sleeping and use light to wake you up. Amazon included hundreds of ways to customize your clock faces, and it can play white noise or music from your favorite playlists. It’s available today for $200 and arrives in graphite, glacier white, and coral pink colors.
Next, there’s the new Echo Studio with Home Camera, which is essentially its Studio speaker with a camera built in. The camera doesn’t record footage but rather captures a live feed of your home. The new camera also supports facial recognition to access user profiles and can tune the room audio by detecting the people in the space and adapt the acoustics; this is in addition to Voice ID support via its mics. The Echo Studio with Home Camera is available now and will be sold for $250, alongside the standard Echo Studio.
The Alexa Photo Frame, which is the company’s first smart picture frame. It’s a 10-inch touch display powered by Alexa+ and integrated with Amazon Photos. You can also ask Alexa to find any photo for you instead of swiping forever and record a voice note to add context behind the photo. Amazon includes a button to disable your mics for privacy. The $200 Alexa Photo Frame is available now and comes in your choice of birch, black, or walnut finishes for your frame. The latter two options will cost you $30 more.
And lastly, the Echo Show 16, which is completely redesigned to have 40% thinner and 80% thinner bezels than previous models. It can be hung on the wall or added to a $70 stand; however, Amazon sells a tilting and swiveling stand for $125 as well. It boasts four beamform mics, eight woofers, and two tweeters handling the audio, with a 13 MP camera that can recognize users from up to 17 ft away. Like the other Ech Show models, you can use it as a smart home hub, Fire TV interface, photo frame, and family calendar. The Show 16 includes a button that can disable the camera and mics, in addition to providing night vision support. Pre-orders went live yesterday, and the standard model costs $500 and $70 more for the nanomatte display. If you reserve one now, you’ll get a $100 discount.
