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AI Hardware

Amazon Said to Plan Premium Alexa Speaker With Large Screen (bloomberg.com) 84

Amazon's Echo speakers have garnered a lot of interest over the past few months. Many people believe that they like Amazon Echo because of how easy it's to operate -- there is no display, you talk with Alexa, Amazon's digital assistant, which is reasonably good at understanding your queries. But in what seems like a deviation from the idea that made Echos so popular, Amazon is reportedly working on an Echo-like speaker, only this time it is more premium and has a 7-inch display, too. From a report on Bloomberg: The new device will have a touchscreen measuring about seven inches, a major departure from Amazon's existing cylindrical home devices that are controlled and respond mostly through the company's voice-based Alexa digital assistant, according to two people familiar with the matter. This will make it easier to access content such as weather forecasts, calendar appointments, and news, the people said. The latest Amazon speaker will be larger and tilt upwards so the screen can be seen when it sits on a counter and the user is standing, one of the people said.
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Amazon Said to Plan Premium Alexa Speaker With Large Screen

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  • Did Amazon just invent a tablet?

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      Did Amazon just invent a tablet?

      Sounds more like the tablet equivalent of an old fashioned console TV.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Did Amazon just invent a tablet?

      A future version promises the ability to call people, and be small enough to fit in your pocket.

  • So it will be a 7" tablet with a huge speaker bulging at its back :) great design choice :) So, just thinking here, if you were to release a 7" regular tablet with all Alexa functions that could connect to a bluetooth speaker, so you could put the tablet and the speaker wherever you please, now, by all means, that would be the most revolutionary product ever :)

    Now the only thing left to try to decode is what the freaking hell "this time it is more premium" means. Maybe they will make a less premium, a pre
  • The Amazon Echo is not popular, even though all these fake "articles" obliquely claim that it is (always in passing of course). Of course some guy will say "oh I have seen tons of them in peoples houses". Sure you have. Just like the Microsoft Surface is supposedly everywhere, but no one has actually seen one outside of a store.
    • If you notice fewer and fewer relevant stories are making it onto the front page of slashdot and the firehose is largely full of shit (Not that it hasn't always been). I think we're starting to see the beginnings of SlashDot's death spiral
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by garcia ( 6573 )

      I am not a shill and I have a Tap because a friend of my had an Echo and I loved it, mostly b/c I use Prime Music a ton and my young kids can easily interact w/the device to play what they want. Several of my friends have purchased the devices after using mine.

      I mean, popular? No, not nearly as much as Amazon may like you to believe; however, they are pretty great devices for what they are and I think the recognition software is world's better than Siri (which, IMO, is completely and utterly useless and I n

    • Uh, well, from what I've seen iPhone is not popular, Android users outnumbering em at least 15:1.

      Or maybe anecdotal, personal samples are not representative? I've seen a Surface and an Echo up close outside a store.
      • 15:1 is not accurate overall, though I can't say what your personal sample looks like. Worldwide Apple has about 15% of the smartphone market, which makes it a bit less than 7:1 Android. In the US, Apple has about 40% of the market; 52% is Android and the rest is all other platforms (Windows Phone, people still hanging on to their BlackBerry).
        • That's my entire point. I knew the correct figure was somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3 in America, but since my circle of friends and family is mostly a mixture of Apple-hating geeks and relatively poor people (and also I told my family early on that they are getting zero tech support from me if they choose to buy Apple products), my own personal experience is skewed.

          So, if the binary guy (10010110 whatever) wants to smugly pretend that the world revolves around his own personal life experience instead of
    • I have seen plenty of Surfaces in the wild. I even recently spotted a DJ using a Surface Book rather than a computer with a glowing fruit on the back.
  • I haven't tried them. Are any of these particularly useful? Will they act as hands free interfaces while driving? Can they truly parse human language? If I ask it how much a ten inch by ten inch by ten inch cube of water weighs, can it put together an answer?

    • Siri and Cortana work. Alexa not so good.
    • Or better yet, ask it whether there's a way to reduce the total entropy on the universe.

    • Android's combined with Android Auto (in a car that supports it, or now with your phone if you have it mounted) is pretty good. No, it can't parse human language at all. It's like playing King's Quest by voice. There's a dictionary of set commands and some variation in syntax allowed. It's not without its bugs, but it's really useful in the car. One physical touch to play a voicemail/text/hangouts/facebook message, and you can reply by voice, including punctuation (if you want), and verify before sendi

    • My question is - is the task of making a digital assistant so difficult that only large corporations can do it? I'm really amazed that there isn't a reasonably powerful, speaker-independent, non-cloud-based, digital assistant program available for a PC where the audio is processed locally.
      • There is things like Dragon Naturally but you need a big database on the "cloud" to get any useful replies to queries.
  • The next iteration after that will feature a keyboard and a pointing device! Amazon will eventually take us back to using a desktop computer.

    • The next iteration after that will feature a keyboard and a pointing device! Amazon will eventually take us back to using a desktop computer.

      No, the next iteration will feature a CAMERA.

      Think about it.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I'm surprised by the negativity in these /. posts. Do you all own an Amazon Echo? I can honestly say that the Echo in our kitchen gets more use than our TV's and and Stereos. So if I were to rank our non-work related tech usage by hours each day:

    1) iPhones (of course)
    2) Laptops and iPads
    3) Amazon Echo
    4) TV's
    5) Various CD/MP3/Radio/Stereo players

    We use the Echo for music, news, kitchen timers, weather, podcasts, jokes, etc. I probably use the "flash news briefing" the most, followed by playing music. When yo

    • Straight out of the marketing materials. Seriously, who needs to do that while cooking? You marketing people need to join the real world.
      • I do all that with my phone while I'm cooking... but I don't need another device because I do all that with my phone.
    • "Alexa Play Pandora Fallout Boy", "Alexa how many tablespoons are in a cup"

      I'm struggling to figure out which of these two is the more retarded request.

  • by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @10:47AM (#53385089)
    I like how this got posted right next to the article about UK legalizing mass surveillance. Between the government on one side and consumerism on the other we may yet get to 1984!
  • It's basically a glorified bluetooth speaker costing 5x as much as some others. Oh and it does a bunch of other things that can be done much better by other means.
  • Oh man, have I been waiting for something like this... Guys, if you're at someone's home with one of these gizmos, try to get alone with it, then: "Hey dumb box, order me 50 pounds of cat food, overnight it...every month, from now on..."

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann

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