Gadgetory

hey I'm Lauren good from the verge and we're here at the Amazon echo event in Seattle where as you might expect we've seen new echoes today we've seen a whole bunch of new stuff but I'm gonna take you through these echoes speakers and I'm gonna start with the echo plus because I think this is the one that's a little more interesting even though this one looks different so the echo plus looks just like the original echo it's the same tubular design it has the same far-field microphone array there are some differences to the speaker architecture inside of this but the biggest thing about it is that it doubles as a smart home hub so for awhile you've been able to use echo devices use alexa and echo devices to control certain aspects of your smart home but now this will actually search for different wireless protocols around your home look for smart phone gadgets that you're trying to connect with and go through the setup and configuration process directly from the echo speaker you just say Alexa discover devices around the home and if you happen to have let's say smart lightbulbs in the home she'll take you through the setup process amazon says this is going to support different wireless protocols the one that we saw demonstrated today was ZigBee I don't think this supports z-wave but it'll also work across Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as you might expect ok so this is the other new echo speaker as is obvious new form factor it's a shorter and a little bit squatter than the other echo we just took a look at also has a different speaker architecture built inside of it as you might expect because physically it's different also has Dolby sound processing does all the stuff that you would expect an Alexa equipped echo speaker to do but the most interesting thing about this is that it's $99 so that is a pretty inexpensive echo speaker it also comes in different designs so this one's wood you can get one covered in fabric and here's a little bonus echo for you these are the new echo buttons that we saw today these pair with an existing echo device and then you're supposed to use Alexa to trigger the buttons and you can start playing some type of game you can play trivia games or just games that involve you tapping the buttons as you might expect we don't know exactly when these are gonna go on sale yet but we know that they're selling for twenty dollars for a two pack of buttons but let's be honest probably gonna want to buy more of these if you're the kind of person who wants to interact with your echo in this way so yeah echo buttons these are gonna be the things that force you to interact with other human beings rather than just interacting with your voice controlled speaker we live in the future the echo plus goes on sale today it starts shipping next month it's one hundred and forty nine dollars which is less expensive than the original price of the original echo from a few years ago but still puts it at sort of the upper level of pricing for echo products so yeah it's been a pretty Ecco filled day we also saw the echo spot which we have another video on we saw the echo connect it's supposed to let you make phone calls but yeah Amazon is really going all-in on its approach to sort of infiltrating your smart home and making Alexa be everywhere I said it weird right okay