Amazon’s Echo: genius or hubris?

Can you hear me at the back? Amazon’s new Echo is one of those rarest of tech beasts: a new launch that genuinely seems to have caught everyone on the hop. And, as per usual with tech giants nowadays, it’s either an astounding innovation or something destined for landfill and a quiet disposal of inventory somewhere rather remote.

When it boils right down to its essentials, Echo is simply a WiFi-connected standalone speaker (or “a crazy speaker that talks to you” as The Verge adroitly put it). Currently available only in the US, it comes with a $199 price tag, or will be available for a limited time for $99 for those Prime members that secure an invite.

Here’s why it’s interesting:

• It takes the battle for the living room out of the, er, living room, and round the rest of the house by decoupling it’s service from the TV. Much of the promo material has an Echo sitting resplendent in the kitchen…
• It exemplifies the scatter-gun approach of major tech companies nowadays that seem to be operating on a ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Amazon is currently sitting on a whole heap of unsold Fire Phones. How many? The company’s Q3 results included a $170m write-down due to "Fire Phone inventory valuation and supplier commitment costs.”
• It’s platform agnostic. While it is, of course, deeply tied in to Amazon music serbices, it will also stream material from iTunes etc via Bluetooth
• If it can get the technology right it signifies a mass market entrance by one of the biggest players in the field into the home automation field.

The last is especially interesting. If the voice recognition is reliable and good — at least as good as the much improved Siri — then it’s not hard to imagine this becoming just a component of a house-wide system. Amazon’s promo bumph has users firing questions at it such as How many teaspoons in a tablespoon, what the weather will be like in Runcorn this weekend (okay, I admit it, I localised that one somewhat) and so on.

A recent survey suggested that by 2020 the average house in the averagely developed world will have an average of 60 internet-connected devices. Being the gate-keeper that provides access to them would be a powerful position.

In the meantime, it will be interesting to see what the reviews make of it when they start rolling in. Key will be audio quality and what Amazon says is the ability to fill a room with 360º music. If the company has cracked that at the price point and in the form factor, then it could have a hit on its hands in the here and now.