Amazon Reveals Echo

Today Amazon revealed Echo, a cylinder piece of hardware with a Siri like style voice assistant that allows you to answer a variety of requests and perform functions like playing music. Echo is entirely controlled by voice and will wake to answer a question when the word "Alexa" is spoken. Similar to Siri, it can answer questions like "What time is it?" "What's the weather like?" and more. It is also able to complete tasks like setting an alarm or creating a shopping list. According to Amazon, Echo uses far field voice recognition capabilities with 7 microphones to detect a request from anywhere in a room. Echo lets users have access to Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, and with built- n Bluetooth, Echo is also able to play music from a phone or tablet. As it's connected to the cloud and Amazon Web Services, Echo is designed to learn and gain functionality over time, and an accompanying Amazon Echo app, which is Android and Fire OS only. Echo is priced at $99 for Amazon Prime members and $199 for non Prime members, but currently users must request an invitation from Amazon to be allowed to purchase the device.