What’s the Big Deal About Amazon Echo and Is It Coming to India?

Amazon is coming out with a portable version of Echo, but what’s so special about it?

The Echo is a wireless speaker and a voice command device from Amazon. These guys have given us the Kindle and now they want to satisfy our entertainment needs with this wireless gadget.

It’s basically a cylindrical speaker that is 9.25-inches tall and just like your iPhone responds if you say ‘hey Siri’, the Amazon Echo responds to ‘Alexa’.

So if you want to play some music, the wake command for the Echo is ‘Alexa, play some blues.’ The speaker is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real-time information. It can also control several smart devices.

So, it’s a gadget that comes in the category of Internet of Things (IoT). It’s basically your personal assistant, just not in a phone but a Bluetooth speaker.

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Amazon had been developing Echo in its lab for quite some time now and in the coming weeks, the company expects to release a smaller, portable version. It’s code-named “Fox.”

Amazon wanted to expand its portfolio beyond Kindle the e-book reader.

It also wants the Alexa Voice Service to be added to other devices that are not by Amazon so that the Echo can talk to them wirelessly and make the user’s life easier. Ford at CES announced that it will be adopting this service in their future connected cars.

The Echo hardware includes ARM Cortex-A8 processor that’s backed by 256MB of LPDDR1 RAM and 4GB of storage space. The connectivity is via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.

High speech accuracy is achieved through sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) algorithms built into the Echo’s text-to-speech (TTS) engine. And the best part is that even if music is playing, it can still hear you speak.

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Before the release of the portable version, the Amazon Echo will be back in stock on January 22, 2016 on Amazon. But, hold your horses as it may still take time for this smart speaker to come to India. But, it’s definitely on the calendar in 2016.