Amazon's Echo

The computer of the future

Last week Amazon revealed a strange product: Echo. It's not a tablet, a smartphone, or a laptop, but a stand-alone smart speaker with a Siri-like voice-controlled service and with no screen. It plays music and connects to internet to do a large variety of things like answer questions, provide news updates and set personal reminders for you.

It's built with microphones using voice cancellation and "far-field voice recognition" allowing to pick up voice commands at normal speaking volume from all across the room. With the keyword "Alexa" the speaker's virtual assistant switch on and it gets ready to answer your questions. Also it's connected to the Cloud, running on Amazon Web Services, so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

Bizzarrely, before buying this product, you have to request an invitation to Amazon, and many ones have doubts about Echo: why would I need Echo, when I can have the same things on my iPhone or Android? Anyway, Echo makes me realize we're extremely close to the future we're dreaming of: the development of a smart home device could be the ancestor of a fully automated home like the ones in sci-fi films. In a few years, we will fill our home with "smart" clocks, refrigerators, TVs, and security systems. Future is in front of our eyes.