“Alexa” is at your service: Amazon presents speaker “Echo” – Business Week

Amazon launches a new offensive Device: The speaker called Echo will not only play music, but also answer questions. It is controlled via voice commands.

Amazon has gone under the speaker manufacturer. The world’s largest online retailer introduced on Thursday a networked device called Echo ago, which can not only play music, but also act as a personal assistant.

The speaker listens to voice commands and can approximately satisfy even the alarm clock, seek out the weather forecast and answer various questions with the help of internet sources such as Wikipedia.

To enable echo, the user has to pronounce the name “Alexa” Amazon explained. The choice of music can also specify the voice, the speaker falls back alongside Amazon’s own house music also offer a selection of online radio services. The voice commands are processed on Amazon’s servers in the Internet cloud. For the first device you can pre-register in the United States.

Amazon has expanded its equipment offering in recent years more and more. On E-reader Tablets followed, a TV box and this year even a smartphone. The Fire-phone has so far been an expensive flop, had to write off $ 170 million on the Amazon in the last quarter.