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Amazon's new Echo Dot and Studio speakers have several smart home features new to the lineup.
Amazon dropped a flurry of new and updated smart home devices today, including its first-ever smart frame and an alarm clock that apparently knows when you’re in a deep sleep and automatically snoozes the alarm until your slumber lightens.
At the heart of the Echo smart speaker lineup are the Echo Dot, which brings simple smart home convenience, and the Echo Studio, Amazon’s premium listening speaker with a richer sound. Both received big upgrades: The Dot now includes a built-in smart home hub and Wi-Fi extender, while a new Studio adds a camera for live in-home monitoring.
Cameras are making their way into products they have no logical business being in, like dishwashers, but a camera in the $250 Echo Studio with Home Camera turns the humble smart speaker into a useful nanny cam, letting you keep tabs on family and pets via its live view. If you’re deciding between a pet cam and a smart speaker, the Echo device should offer a reliable version of both.
You can still buy the Echo Studio without a camera for $220.
Through the Home Camera, Alexa “gains visual intelligence to make everyday experiences more personal and helpful,” according to Amazon. Alexa can “see and understand what’s in front of the camera and help. Pull out a board game box and ask Alexa to explain the rules or hold up a cereal box and Alexa can recognize it and help you reorder more flavors.”
Expect the same souped-up sound quality that Studio built its name on, including a high-excursion woofer for deep, immersive bass, three optimally placed full-range drivers, and Dolby Atmos to fill the room with immersive spatial audio.
A new feature called Advanced Room Adaptation adjusts the sound to your space’s unique acoustics, while Adaptive Volume adjusts the volume based on how close or far you are from the device. The latter sounds particularly useful for those of us who doddle about the house cooking and cleaning while trying to follow a podcast or audiobook.
The smaller Echo Dot gets its own updates, including a smart home hub feature and a built-in Wi-Fi extender.
For the first time, Amazon has integrated a smart home hub to connect and control compatible devices like your smart thermostat, lights and locks without the need for a standalone hub. The latest iteration adds a built-in Eero Wi-Fi extender that extends internet coverage by up to 1,000 square feet to an existing Eero network.
Echo Dot is now powered by AZ3, Amazon’s custom-designed silicon, enabling advanced on-deviceprocessing for faster, more natural conversations with Alexa Plus. Speaking of Alexa, there’s now a fourth speaker (all the better to hear you with, my dear).