Gadgetory

hey guys this is Ken as you might have noticed I'm not Austin and that's cuz he couldn't make it today so welcome to the first episode of Ken goes to things that Austin can't go to we're here at Amazon's day1 HQ to take a look at some of the new products they dropped and they dropped a lot and I don't think I can cover all of it in this video but this will just be the things that I found most interesting today firstly they announced a lot of improvements to Alexa so one of the things that they're doing is making her seem a lot more human-like so for example one of the focuses is contextual conversation so you ask Alexa question and she asks normally but what you can do now is ask her follow-up questions without having to manually trigger her it seems a lot more natural unlike other assistants on other platforms Siri apart from that one of the main focuses of the show were the new slate of echo products so there's a lot to cover there but some of the ones that stood out to me were for example the echo dot up next to the original echo dot it's definitely way more chunkier it has a felt finish but most importantly it's supposed to be 70% louder and sound way more fuller than the original echo dot and at a $50 price point which puts it right up next to the Google home Mini which is really cool I actually want to grab one of those right now so one of the things that people did with the original echo dot was plug it into speakers they already had well Amazon saw the opportunity so they made the echo input what is basically an echo dot but without the speaker or the felt which is cool it's at $35 which is a decent chunk of change compared to the echo dot that's going on sale if you want to save money and just plug it into speaker well this is a really good option so on the higher end of that where the echo input is a lower end solution to plugging into setup that you already have the echo link and the echo link amp are meant to plug into your hi-fi setup that you might have already both of them have 24-bit Doc's to work with your existing hi-fi setup at home which will work great for services like tidal which they just added support for you can just plug in the link to a receiver you have already or you can buy the amp which is basically a kind of receiver that can drive speakers with dual 60 watt channels as well the link will be available for $1.99 and the link amp will be available for two the former will be available sometime this year and the amp will be available sometime in 2019 they're also giving Sonos a run for its money with its multiple and stereo room capabilities so you can tie multiple echoes together and essentially play them in different rooms or if you have two in the same room you can have them run in stereo they actually have a demo of it right there with echo dots and it sounded pretty good don't but it sounded pretty good they also added the echo sub which is at $130 and you can add that to any echo setup that you have if you say have to echo dots that are at $50 each and you have the echo sub that's at $130 for what is essentially $230 you have a decent 2.1 set up that will have a decent punch and sound great so among the other announcement noise amazon also unveiled Echo Auto so it's available later this year for $50 or $25 for an invite only thing whatever that means it's a module that connects to your car via bluetooth or auxin basically makes your car a smart car so Echo Auto uses your phone your voice and Alexa to control things like your music or you can ask it directions and it'll open up whatever GPS or map app you use and you can even control your home stuff because Alexa's in it and it does that oh don't don't stop stop let's just mute these we're good now so Amazon down this hallway may or may not have the future of the kitchen or something like that so right behind me is the thing that I've been looking forward to forever it's the amazonbasics microwave that cost $60 and if you pair it with an echo you can basically have a bunch of presets on tap to say heat up a potato or popcorn or my pizza rolls I guess a ton of microwave microwaving is done by customers for popcorn so this microwave actually keep track of how much popcorn you've cooked and then order more so that you never run out will never never be popcorn less the futures here welcome to 2018 [Laughter]