The Echo Show: Alexa makes her screen debut
The battle to be king, or queen of the digital assistant is hotting up. Amazon’s Alexa got a head-start but Siri is getting better and Samsung’s Bixby is chasing the pack. These assistants are built into our phones, smart speakers and even televisions. They make calls, look up contacts or convert ounces to grams while you cook. As useful as they are now, big tech companies want these assistants to be everywhere, from door-locks to our cars.
The first smart speaker with an assistant was Amazon’s Echo. Now it comes in various shapes and formats with prices to match, but the Echo Show is the premium way to get Alexa in to your home and daily life.
Unpacking the Echo Show reveals a slightly retro-styled gadget. It’s sturdy, available in black or white and is dominated by its seven-inch video screen. The device itself is just over three inches deep and seven inches tall, nicely sized for placing on a coffee table. Its weight isn’t that important as you probably won’t move it, but it sits firmly on a table as it weighs almost 1.2kg.
Amazon has produced enough Echos to know how to make this easy, and you can use the Android or iOS Alexa app to get the device connected to your home WiFi. Almost all the functionality is accessed via your voice or the app, but there are a few buttons on the Echo Show. There’s a mute button which stops Alexa listening, and prevents access to the builtin camera. There’s also a volume up or down button, but I tend to say, ‘Alexa, volume up’ to adjust the output. There’s no line-out or speaker jack but you can connect the Echo Show to wireless speakers using built-in Bluetooth if your speakers are compatible.
Once the Echo Show is set up and on your WiFi, if you have any smart-home devices you just ask Alexa to discover them, and she does. There are various apps for smart home devices and most of them have been converted to skills for Alexa so she has no trouble turning the heat or lights on or off. That’s the regular stuff that Alexa does, but this new Echo Show has many more talents. When I ask Alexa for the news each morning, instead of playing the news like a radio, I get the most recent RTÉ and BBC TV newscasts on the video screen. Perhaps the stand-out feature is the ability to make video calls and it’s ideal for ‘dropping in’, via Alexa, to a relative or family overseas or down the road. The Echo Show’s design is very different and some people may think a little odd looking. While it’s the most expensive of the Echo range it is also an incredibly useful device. The ability to search at will and see the results, all hands free, ensured that it quickly became part of my daily life. This version of Amazon’s Echo really is the best yet, and Alexa remains the cleverest digital assistant, by some away.