Sparkfun wishlist imports have been deprecated

Amazon Announces New Smart Home Echo Devices and Gives Alexa Generative AI Smarts

From conversations about your smart home to Alexa-on-your-face, Amazon is pushing hard into the Internet of Things.

Amazon has announced a range of new Echo devices, including the Echo Hub wall-mountable smart home control panel and Echo Frames wearable smart glasses, while pledging to improve Alexa's capabilities through the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

"Engagement with Echo devices is at an all-time high," claims Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Fire TV at Amazon. "Customers rely on Alexa for so much, including managing their smart homes, keeping up with the latest news, setting birthday reminders, and keeping their homes stocked with essentials. These new Echo devices give customers more ways to experience the world’s best personal AI — and the growing generative AI capabilities that will be coming to Alexa soon — at home and on the go."

First among these new devices is the Echo Hub, the company's first Echo device to be built with smart home interactivity as its primary focus. Designed for wall mounting, though with an optional stand for desktop use, the Echo Hub includes a multi-standard hub with Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth, and Matter support as well as Amazon's own Sidewalk Internet of Things (IoT) communication standard, and features an infrared sensor to detect when someone's approaching and switch the eight-inch touchscreen display from a clock to a smart home control panel automatically.

A revised Echo Show 8 has also been announced, featuring the same multi-standard smart home hub as the Echo Hub along with a new edge-to-edge glass screen encasement. The biggest improvement, though: a new machine learning model which, Amazon claims, can process "common smart home requests" entirely on-device without having to send the audio data to Amazon's servers for processing — boosting response speed by around 40 per cent. An on-device computer vision model is also used to adjust screen content based on the user's proximity — and will be rolled out as a firmware update to Echo Show 8 2nd and 3rd generation devices next month and other Echo Show devices next year.

The company has also updated its wearables platform, Echo Frames — smart glasses with integrated Alexa support. The new variants are lighter than their predecessor, 15 per cent slimmer at the temples, and can deliver up to six hours of continuous media playback or talk time on per charge, Amazon says. The new variants also include improve speech processing technology, with recognition now a claimed ten times better in loud or windy environments. The new Echo Frames are joined by Carrera Smart Glasses, which takes the core technology and embeds it into Carrera Cruiser and Carrera Sprinter frames.

Finally, Amazon has also pledged to make its Echo and Fire TV platforms smarter — or, at least, more conversationally engaging — through the adoption of generative AI technologies. Due to roll out in the US by the end of the year, the first example of this will be in giving Alexa speech-to-image capabilities to create custom backgrounds for Fire TV systems by simply describing the desired picture — with style-transfer to follow, allowing personal photos to be redrawn in a variety of different art styles.

Alexa is set to get new conversational capabilities, and even image generation, using generative AI technologies like large language models (LLMs). (📹: Amazon)

Generative AI will also feature in Fire TV search, allowing the user to drill recommendations down in a conversational manner, while a large language model (LLM) will allow all Alexa devices to carry out conversations or interpret more complex requests — including responding correctly to multiple instructions per request.

The Echo Show 8 will launch this October for $149.99, Amazon has confirmed, with the Echo Hub to follow later this year at $179.99 with the desktop stand an additional $29.99 and wooden, metallic, and paintable white decorative frames $19.99 each. The Echo Frames start at $269.99, with the Carerra Smart Glasses starting at $389.99; pre-orders are due to open soon.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
Latest articles
Sponsored articles
Related articles
Get our weekly newsletter when you join Hackster.
Latest articles
Read more
Related articles