Gadgetory

I'm here in Amazon's UX lab in San Francisco where Alexis set to get some new hardware this month first up is the Amazon tap which is a new battery-powered echo like device you'll press this button here to activate it and then talk to Alexa like you do with the echo you can ask it to play music or any of the skills that you already use with Alexa Amazon tells us that the battery lasts about nine hours or three weeks of standby time and that when you need to recharge you'll just pop it back into the included dock that'll sell for a hundred and twenty nine dollars next up is the $90 echo dot just looks like the top part of the Amazon echo that's sawed off and that's basically what it is it's those same far-field microphones that can hear you from across the room without the same speaker body that echo has the cool thing about this is that you can connect it with your own speakers using the line out port in the back or over Bluetooth and that'll give you the voice controls of Alexa to power any speaker that you like in your home you'll find the same connected home controls you get with that go in the new tap and dot devices so here if I press this button turn the lights on okay you see the lamp comes right on one last thing to watch for this month is the new thermostat API that's coming to Amazon's Alexa family of devices with it you'll be able to control popular smart thermostats from Honeywell Insteon and nest alongside the Eco b3 that means you'll be able to talk to any of these devices and ask Alexa to turn the temperature up and down regardless of what kind of smart thermostat you're actually using all in all a busy day for Amazon lots of new stuff we'll see how it plays out when the devices arrived by the end of March