A familiar voice for 2 new products
Alexa pipes up in Amazon’s Tap and Dot
Amazon is encouraging Alexa to get out more.
The obedient cloud-based voice inside Amazon’s cylindrical Echo speaker (and versions of Fire TV) is moving into two new spinoff products. There’s Amazon Tap, which is essentially a portable, battery operated version of Echo. And there’s Echo Dot, which looks like Amazon chopped the top inch-and-a-half off the full-size Echo model.
The just over one-pound, beercan size $129.99 Tap speaker is so named because of the way you summon Alexa – by tapping a microphone button and then putting in your request – for music (via the likes of Amazon Prime Music, Spotify, Pandora, iHeart Radio and TuneIn), for headlines, to fetch an Uber, order a pizza and so on.
Tap delivers all the same functionality as the original, full-size Echo.
It connects through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and has a dual speaker system that is backed by Dolby audio processing and produces, Amazon says, 360-degree omnidirectional sound. The battery inside Tap is supposed to last up to nine hours, and Alexa will pipe in and warn you shortly before Tap is about to run out of juice. The product will ship with a charging cable.
But Tap lacks the far-field voice recognition technology inside the original Echo, and now the new $89.99 Echo Dot as well. What that means is that you can wake up Echo or Dot by saying the name “Alexa” out loud. Echo and Dot are always listening for that “wake word” but that’s not practical for a battery-operated product such as Tap. Dot has an array of seven microphones.