Yesterday, Amazon announced Echo, a device that could be best summed up as Siri in a can.
The $199 cylinder plugs into the wall, and when activated with a “wake word.” Once it’s listening, it can handle all sorts of requests according to Amazon:
- News, weather, and information: Hear up-to-the-minute weather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn.
- Music: Listen to your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.
- Alarms, timers, and lists: Stay on time and organized with voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping and to-do lists.
- Questions and answers: Get information from Wikipedia, definitions, answers to common questions, and more.
The introduction video, although a little hokey, shows the device in action, in the daily lives of a family:
In some ways, a device like — or bringing Siri to the TV — this feels like an inevitable move from Apple, but as Siri is still bound to iOS devices, it’s hard to predict when it’ll happen. In hindsight, Yosemite seems like the perfect time to bring Siri to the Mac, but it didn’t happen.
David Mark on The Loop is bullish on the device for this very reason:
I think Amazon will sell a ton of these. Why? Because they are filling a niche that is completely unserved right now. The butler robot is coming, but it is not here yet. And your cell phone is in your pocket and requires some amount of effort to access. Like that butler robot, Echo will be forever waiting for your command, waiting to serve you up some cloud-based information, assist you with a reminder, or help make an Amazon purchase, perhaps.
One key here is that Echo does not require a subscription fee. If you do not have a Siri-like capability on your cell phone, this adds that capability, and in a form that works well in your home.
There’s a problem with the butler robot idea, however, as John Gruber points out:
First, I think it’s problematic that Echo is anchored in a room. How will anyone get in the habit of using this instead of Siri or Google Now when they can only use it in one room? In their demo video, the family seemingly bought three or four of these things, because they have one in their living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Your phone is in your pocket all the time.
In the perfect world, Siri — or Amazon Echo, or Google Now or Microsoft Cortana — would be context-aware, able to take requests no matter the circumstance or location.
However, flexibility in reachability is only part of the equation. Any virtual assistant needs to be smart and powerful. Currently, all of the major services are more or less locked into the ecosystem of their creator, and that’s going to hurt Amazon the most, as the company’s devices are basically islands.
In many ways, that’s sort of Amazon’s modus operandi, as Dustin Curtis points out:
It’s extremely hard for me to understand Amazon’s consumer hardware strategy. Usually, when a company has a strategy I don’t understand, I can look deeper, ask employees, or analyze the greater market to get a faint idea of what is driving the company’s behavior. But with Amazon, I can’t. There is simply no rational explanation for its products. The only thing I can come up with is this: Amazon continues to make hardware because it doesn’t know that it sucks, and it has a fundamentally flawed understanding of media. With Amazon.com, it can heavily and successfully promote and sell its products, giving it false indicators of success.
Amazon’s smartphone support is the most telling sign of this:
Echo doesn’t stop working when you’re away from home. With the free companion app on Fire OS and Android, plus desktop and iOS browsers, you can easily manage your alarms, music, shopping lists, and more.
Any Internet-of-Things device needs better integration an iOS app. Period. Amazon’s unwillingness or inability to see past their own fork of Android is going to deeply hurt this product.
I don’t think Echo is going to be a run-away success. I think only Google or Apple are big enough to make something like this work, but even then, there are flaws.
Perhaps the largest one is the creepiness factor. While the Echo isn’t always listening, anything that’s just verbally activated feels more intrusive than a device the relies on a button press. I think that’s one reason — besides battery life — that the “Hey Siri” feature of iOS 8 only works when a device is plugged into power. It’s not going to be activated when you’re walking around.
Voice-based technology that’s helpful in everyday life isn’t here yet, and Amazon Echo isn’t the answer, but I think it does kick the can a little further down the road, despite its shortcomings.