Facial Recognition, a Lost-Dog Finder, and 3 More Big Announcements From Amazon’s Fall Event
Amazon announced a fleet of new Echo devices, including the oxymoronically named Echo Dot Max, a pair of Echo Show models, and an Echo Studio (all are available for preorder now, with the Max and Studio arriving October 29 and the Show models on November 12). All of the devices will contain a built-in smart hub.
The Echo Show models have a revamped interface that was substantially crisper and snappier in performance during a hands-on demo. One welcome improvement to the interface is Media Entertainment Center, which consolidates all your video and audio content and makes it readily accessible. In a hands-on test, I picked a song on one Echo Show and then selected which other Echo speakers to stream it to without any fuss or latency (it may feel familiar to Sonos users).
Alexa Home Theater Mode allows you to pair up to five Echo Studio units together and set them up using a built-in service called Omnisense, which custom-tunes the speakers to the room where they’re located and enables the output of spatial audio. In a demo featuring both music and video content, the effect was powerful and immersive, as trucks zooming by on screen moved convincingly from speaker to speaker in sync. We plan to test how well this home theater setup compares with options from Google and Apple.
