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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Echo

Amazon’s Echo Show 10 Swivels to Follow You. That Might be Useful in the Kitchen

Amazon introduced the latest version of its Echo Show at its hardware event today. The new Echo Show 10 features the usual Alexa-powered smart assistant, screen and speakers, but includes one new feature that might be particularly useful in the kitchen: it rotates to follow you around.

Think about how you move around when cooking from a recipe. You shift between your prep area to the fridge to the oven to pantry. Being able to always have the recipe in view means no problem if you forget what temperature to set the oven or how many eggs you need to grab.

Even if you aren’t following an on-screen recipe, the ability for the screen to swing around so you can watch a show as you cook or hold a video call is pretty neat.

We haven’t had a chance to play around with the Echo Show 10 yet, so it may not work all that well in reality. And not everyone will be comfortable with an Amazon device watching you and silently following you around with its camera eye.

But, if you’ve already given in and have an Alexa powered assistant, this seems like it could give you a little more mobility and utility. I mean, it doesn’t seem as strange as the indoor drone Amazon also announced today that pops up and flies around your house acting as a security camera.

The new Echo Show 10 will cost $249.99, will be available in Charcoal and Glacier White. Amazon says it will ship in time for the holidays.

Amazon: Instant Pots, Avocados and, of course, Amazon Devices are Big Sellers This Year

In what is becoming its own holiday tradition, Amazon sent out a press release this week explaining how Amazon and Amazon devices in particular crushed it this past Cyber Monday.

In Amazon’s typical vague fashion, the company didn’t release any hard numbers, saying only that “Customers purchased millions more Amazon Devices compared to the same period last year in Amazon’s Stores globally and the best-selling items were Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote.”

It’s no real surprise that the biggest e-commerce site in the world could pull levers and buttons on its biggest shopping day of the year to generate millions of sales of its own products. But if we look back, during last year’s Cyber Monday holiday weekend, Echo Dot was also a big seller, with millions of Echo devices sold. And in 2017, Amazon said that over that entire holiday shopping season that it had sold tens of millions of Alexa devices.

In short, dominance perpetuates itself, and with Amazon owning 70 percent of the smart speaker market, its dominance doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. For the smart kitchen, this means appliance makers will continue to bake Alexa capabilities into their devices, which will beget more sales of Alexa-enabled devices, and the cycle continues.

Quick sidenote: It’s interesting to see Amazon’s wording evolve over the past three years. In 2017 it was “Alexa” enabled devices. In 2018 they were “Echo” devices and this year they are “Amazon” devices. This evolution is a reflection of how Amazon has broadened its first-party offerings with items like the Fire TV devices and Ring connected doorbells and lights.

But it wasn’t all Amazon, Amazon, Amazon this holiday season. The company also announced its “Best of Prime 2019” this week and among the winners were Instant Pot and… avocados.

The Instant Pot (which merged with the maker of Pyrex earlier this year) is indefatigable. Amazon said it has been a top seller for the past three years, and the Instant Pot DUO60 was among the most gifted items by Prime members this year as well.

And while it really didn’t provide any other context or numbers, Avocados were also a big seller throughout 2019 for Amazon Prime members as well.

OK. Sure.

This is just the first round of Amazon’s “Aren’t We Great?” press releases. Expect another after Christmas as well, telling (in vague terms only) how many millions of devices it sold throughout this holiday season.

Alexa Adds Thousands Of Buzzfeed Tasty Recipes To Echo Show

This week Amazon and Buzzfeed announced a partnership that brings thousands of Buzzfeed Tasty’s famous quick-play social videos to Amazon’s video-enabled digital assistants.

According to email sent to The Spoon, here’s how it works: First ask Alexa to find a recipe by saying something like, “Alexa, find pork recipes from Tasty.” Alexa will then show you options, and you can tell the device which recipe to select by saying something like, “Alexa, select recipe number three.”

From there, say, “Alexa, start recipe” and Alexa will read off each step in the recipe as well as list them on the left-hand side of the screen of the Echo Show. It will also show a looping video of the recipe on the right. You can also ask Alexa to read off ingredients by saying “Alexa, read ingredients” and add it to a shopping list by saying “Alexa, add to shopping list.”

I wish I could tell you how well it works, but at the time of this writing I couldn’t get either of my Echo Show devices to actually find Buzzfeed Tasty recipes. The new feature is supposed to be available to anyone in the U.S. with an Echo Show as of this week, so I assume I will be able to access the program over the next few days as the kinks are worked out.

Too bad, since I am very curious about how well turning a Buzzfeed Tasty recipe into a more instructional/step-by-step format on a screen will work. Like many, I’ve watched a lot of Buzzfeed recipes online but have never actually cooked to one of them, in part because they seem designed more for entertainment than to be functional. Putting them onto the Echo Show could change that, so I’ll update this post once I can actually cook with one.

One thing that struck me about this integration is that it is simply turned on and available to work (once it works) for anyone with an Echo Show. This is different from earlier Alexa Echo Show integrations like that of Allrecipes, which required the user to add as an Alexa Skill.

My suspicion is that Amazon is having trouble getting people to add new skills to their voice assistants, so at this point the company is, in some cases, just doing it for the consumer. Makes sense, actually, since a “cloud computer” like Alexa isn’t exactly short on storage. That and it just seems a bit more magical if you one day could just ask Alexa to do something and she does it rather than going through an “add skill” extra-step.

I am also curious how the “add to shopping list” feature works. This news follows an integration with Walmart (via shoppable recipe platform Northfork) that allows Tasty app users to make recipes shoppable by adding them their Walmart shopping lists and online grocery carts. The Alexa/Tasty integration doesn’t quite look like it takes recipes all the way to the Amazon cart, but if I know Amazon, I expect that will eventually change.

What Amazon Did (and Didn’t) Mention in its Holiday Sales Press Release

With Christmas now over it’s time for the annual releasing of the vague holiday sales stats from Amazon! This year, Bezos’ behemoth did not disappoint and shared with us a press announcement filled with unspecific terms like “record breaking” and “millions more.”

As we said back in November, though these puff pieces from Amazon are light on actual hard content, they are good to check in on and parse through if only to get even an iota of understanding as to what’s selling (and what Amazon is pushing) during one of the busiest shopping times of the year.

However, it might be most interesting to start with what Amazon was not touting this year: namely, it’s Alexa-powered microwave. Sure, a microwave probably isn’t topping a whole lot of holiday wish lists, but Amazon debuted the inexpensive device with plenty of fanfare earlier this year, in plenty of time for the holiday season. Plus, Amazon took the time in this press release to highlight how robust sales were for other mundane-and-not-necessarily-holiday-wishlist-toppers like Blink connected security camera, Amazon Smart Plug, Ring Video Doorbell 2, and TP-Link Kasa Smart Plug Mini Outlet.

Perhaps the middling to negative reviews of the Amazon microwave turned people off. But for a device that is meant to showcase how an Alexa integration could/should work, it’s absence from a year end wrap up — even in the vaguest terms — still stands out.

Also, last year’s holiday press release gave a specific shout out to the then just launched Amazon Key in-home delivery service. No mention of that this year either. Is this a change in strategy, or do people just not want to give strangers access to their front door? (Or both?)

But back to what the company did sell:

Echo devices. Amazon said it sold “millions more Amazon Devices this holiday season compared to last year – the best-selling Amazon Devices this holiday included all-new Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick 4K with all-new Alexa Voice Remote, and Echo.” The emphasis is ours there, since the company said it sold “tens of millions” of Alexa-enabled devices during the 2017 holiday season. It’s important to keep an eye on sales of voice assistants because whoever grabs the most market share will help determine who dominates the smart kitchen/home of the not-too-distant future.

Other food-related bits from the Amazon holiday round up include:

  • Shopping via Alexa tripled this year compared to last.
  • The DASH rapid egg cooker was a top-seller at the new Amazon Four Star store. (Probably because it is amazing.)
  • Customers nearly tripled the number of requested recipes this holiday season over last year and asked Alexa for cooking-related advice twice as much.
  • “Alexa helped mix hundreds of thousands of cocktails this holiday season – with eggnog and Moscow Mule being the most requested drinks.” (Last year Alexa only helped make “tens of thousands” of cocktails with Martini and Manhattan being the most requested.)
  • Theo Dark Chocolate Bar, Cacao with Sea Salt and the fresh chicken bahn mi sandwich were top sellers at Amazon Go stores.
  • The best-selling items for Prime Now pick up at Whole Foods were organic honeycrisp apples, boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and Atlantic farm-raised salmon filets.
  • The fastest grocery delivery was in St. Paul, MN, where that grocery order got to its destination in 12 minutes and 19 seconds.
  • Boston, Hoboken, NJ and San Francisco were the cities with the most grocery delivery via Prime Now and Whole Foods.

So that puts a bow on this Christmas. Join us again next year for this holiday tradition, when we’ll see if “thousands of people” have bought an Amazon House.

Surprise! Amazon Says it Sold a Lot of Amazon Devices (and Instant Pots, too!)

Amazon put out a news release today touting its record-breaking holiday shopping weekend. And, in what will come as a shock to absolutely no one, the company said the best-selling products across all categories sold on Amazon.com were Amazon devices like the Amazon Echo Dot, which Amazon just happened to put on sale… on Amazon.

Get where we’re going with this?

The retail giant is always vague on details, and this release proved no exception, saying only that it was the “Biggest holiday shopping weekend ever for Echo devices, with millions sold worldwide—all-new Echo Dot was the #1 selling product on Amazon globally, from any manufacturer, in any category.”

FWIW, last December, when Amazon released a similar batch of vague statistics, the company reported selling “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices” worldwide over the entire 2017 holiday season.

OK, obviously Amazon releasing glowing stats about Amazon devices sold at a discount is a total corporate puffery, and I am complicit in writing about it. But, as vague as these stats may be, they are important to consider as more people adopt smart kitchen tech. Amazon’s Alexa is locked in a battle with Google Home to be your preferred voice ecosystem. Dominating voice control could in turn determine which kitchen appliances you buy, or impact where you buy your groceries.

Hardware startups, software developers and appliance makers alike want to align with a winner when it comes to incorporating new smart tech into their products. Amazon can create its own dominance by dint of controlling one of the largest e-commerce companies on the planet. Consider that at last count, Amazon had 100 million Amazon Prime subscribers worldwide. That’s a huge user base to be potentially guided into buying an Amazon Echo device.

The more Echo devices are sold, the more people will want to use Alexa in their homes, which means more third-party support for even more devices and apps. The more third party devices and apps that incorporate Alexa means that Amazon is collecting even more of our data, which Amazon can then use to sell us more stuff, more of its own stuff (like groceries from Whole Foods) or even create more of its own devices like the Alexa microwave, which, now that we mention it, was not mentioned in the Amazon press release.

The point is, the more Amazon can flex its retail power, the more it can dominate the emerging world of smart assistants and voice control in our homes.

Alas, Alexa devices weren’t the only thing the company sold over the Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday shopping season. I throw this in here as just a bit of Amazon sales trivia, but Instant Pots continue to steamroll other kitchen appliances, with Amazon saying the Instant Pot DUO60 was also a top seller this past weekend. During the 2017 holiday season, the Instant Pot DUO80 was the top-selling kitchen item.

So take these numbers with the appropriate amount of salt, and be on the lookout for a release from Google touting its own Google Home Cyber Monday sales, followed by another holiday season recap from Amazon at the end of December.

Could Alexa in Hotel Rooms Boost Amazon’s Restaurant Delivery Biz?

My wife is a frequent business traveler, and before I could even finish asking her if she’d like Alexa in her hotel room, she answered “Hell yeah.” Evidently, her first impulse upon walking into her hotel room is to ask Alexa what time it is, and what the weather will be the next day. If she could order up room service — she’d be all set.

So it appears that Amazon is on to something with its new Alexa for Hospitality program. Amazon’s virtual assistant will be available this summer in select Marriott, Westin, and St. Regis hotels, among others.

Alexa enabled rooms will allow guests to play music, find local businesses, order room service, contact housecleaning, call the front desk, check out and more all by just asking. Amazon says that soon guests will be able to connect their own Alexa accounts so they can call contacts, access personal music and listen to their audiobooks.

Hanging over all this is whether you want an always-listening device in your hotel room. And that is a legitimate concern, but here at The Spoon, we’re most interested in the eating part of Alexa for Hospitality and where that will go.

At its most basic, the ability to order room service through Alexa is pretty cool! And this could be an easy way for hotels to increase the amount of money guests spend on food. Each time a guest walks into a room or wakes up or asks Alexa a question is an opportunity for the hotel to advertise a happy hour, wine tasting or other experience that involves spending money.

There’s also an opportunity to upsell guests as they order room service (“Would you like to add a glass of wine with that?”) And while the data hotels collect from Alexa will be anonymized and aggregated, creating an Alexa skill tied to loyalty or rewards programs could yield even more opportunities for personalization when you can connect your account to the hotel Echo.

As with most things with Amazon, Alexa for Hospitality isn’t just about selling a bunch of devices to hotels. It’s about broadening Amazon’s ecosystem to get you to use more of its services.

So consider what Alexa devices in hotel rooms could do for Amazon’s restaurant delivery business. You could ask Alexa for a local Thai restaurant recommendation, and have that food delivered to your door.

This assumes, of course, that hotels allow that type of functionality. They may be inclined to block food ordering from outside restaurants and drive you to the hotel eatery’s $25 cheeseburger.

But money talks, yadda yadda, if Amazon figured out a way for the hotel to wet their beak on the outside delivery transaction, management could probably find a way to make it happen. In fact, funneling all of the guests through Alexa to order food from the outside could ensure that the hotel gets a cut of every transaction instead of missing out as people just order food on their own through Grubhub or UberEats or Dominoes.

Given the popularity of virtual assistants, I wouldn’t be surprised if they became as standard as mini-bars in hotel rooms. With the ability to add skills that increase revenue and choice for the guests? That could have everyone saying “hell yeah.”

Silent Hack Could Send Malicious Instructions to Virtual Assistants

As virtual assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri become more popular, so too will they become a more popular target for hackers. The New York Times reports that researchers in China and the U.S. have discovered a way to surreptitiously activate and command those virtual assistants by broadcasting instructions that are inaudible to the human ear.

From that NYT story:

A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website.

This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text. So while a human listener hears someone talking or an orchestra playing, Amazon’s Echo speaker might hear an instruction to add something to your shopping list.

Hackers might not care about your shopping list, but considering 41.4 percent of smart speakers are in the kitchen, it’s important to consider whether they could be used to turn on an oven while you’re out, or secretly start up a video call.

You should read the full Times article for a nice dive into the world of AI, speech recognition and modern hacking techniques. For our purposes here at The Spoon, these security notices are good to be aware of as companies look to use food as a way to get further into — and control more parts of — our homes.

Consider that Amazon, which is behind Alexa, wants to use a series of connected locks and cameras to allow deliveries into your home or car while you’re not there. Or that Google just this week announced more native control over kitchen appliances and a strikingly human sounding AI that can make calls on your behalf to set up appointments. And shortly after launching last year, a WiFi exploit created a security hole in Amazon Key’s connected camera setup.

Now before you toss your Echo into the ocean, you should know that there’s no evidence that this type of attack has ever happened outside the lab. But that won’t stop hackers from trying and improving their techniques.

The point is that it will obviously be incumbent upon companies to be as proactive and transparent as possible in determining and thwarting these type of attacks. But if we as consumers want to turn over more control over our lives to these virtual assistants, then it’s up to us as well to stay vigilant and educated about the new threats their use brings.

Is Amazon Considering Making A Smart Fridge? Probably Not (But Maybe)

Is Amazon working on a refrigerator?

Maybe.

Recent patent applications suggest the company is researching advanced refrigerator technology around spoilage detection while they also expand efforts to help you order groceries and have them delivered inside your home. Taken together with their investment in smart home tech and growing interest in the kitchen, one scenario could have the company creating a smart fridge.

Skeptical? You should be. It probably won’t happen. But there are signals it is at least a remote possibility, so let’s analyze them and speculate about the possibility of an Amazon Smart Fridge.

First the patent applications.

Amazon Files Fridge Patents

In September, Amazon filed two related patent applications that centered around spoiled food detection in refrigerators.  The first patent application, filed on September 14th of this year, is called “Image-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” and centers around utilizing internal cameras to detect spoiled food. The system would use both infrared and visible spectrum cameras to detect spoilage of food and then send an alert to a mobile device.

This patent application was designed to work in concert with a scent-based sensing system defined in another patent application (also filed on September 14th) called “Scent-Based Spoilage Sensing Refrigerator” that utilizes a variety of sensors to detect gasses emitted from spoiled food and then sends an alert to a mobile device.

Here is a mockup drawing of the fridge included in both of the patent applications that show where gas-based spoilage sensors would be placed in the fridge:

Both patent applications go into a lot of detail about how exactly the systems would work, but the essence of these concepts is that Amazon wants to put digital eyes and a nose into your refrigerator to automatically detect when food is spoiled and let you know.

As with any patent applications, you need to take them with a grain of salt. Amazon files a whole lot of patents these days and more often these do not turn into granted patents. But the very fact Amazon is researching spoilage detection is interesting in itself, even if it’s not enough.

Amazon Investment in Kitchen Commerce

For the last few years, Amazon has invested in kitchen replenishment and ordering platforms. First, there’s Amazon Dash Replenishment Service, the integrated automated ordering system that today is largely about replenishing non-spoilables like coffee filters or printer ink. However, there’s no reason why the same technology couldn’t work in a fridge.

Then there’s the Amazon Echo and Alexa. Over half of all Amazon Echos are ending up in the kitchen, and Amazon continues to build out the capabilities of their Alexa-powered voice assistants to act as virtual grocery shoppers.

We’ve also seen Amazon continuing to invest in their own mobile app to enable new commerce possibilities. Just this week the company announced it had added augmented reality capabilities to its mobile app. One could easily imagine the mobile app getting alerts from a smart fridge to tee up a new set of groceries.

Amazon’s Recipe-Driven Commerce Patent

Amazon’s fridge patent applications are no doubt intriguing, but things get even more interesting when considering Amazon IP such as its patent for recipe-driven commerce. Amazon was issued a patent in 2015 to enable for recipe-driven commerce that breaks down a recipe and inserts ingredients into a virtual shopping cart.

Here’s an image from the patent filing showing a recipe with a commerce/shopping cart component:

The patent application was originally filed in 2011, which shows you how long Amazon has been thinking about food and automated ordering.

Amazon Is Investing in Unattended Delivery

Last week, Amazon revealed Amazon Key, a new initiative centered around unattended delivery. The idea here is an Amazon delivery person would be able to enter your home to deliver a product while you aren’t there. The system utilizes an Amazon smart video doorbell and works with smart lock partners to enable access.

While Amazon Key could be used for pretty much anything Amazon delivers, unattended delivery makes lots of sense for groceries given fresh food needs to be put into a fridge at some point. Of course, an Amazon fridge isn’t necessary to make this all happen, but as long as Amazon is moving down the path of automated ordering, it could be one of many potential scenarios.

Amazon’s Partnership With Kenmore

A couple of months ago, Kenmore made news by announcing it would start selling its appliances via Amazon. It was a big deal since this was the first time in the brand’s century-plus history that it would sell outside of a Sears’ sales channel.

As I wrote here, the deal was a big win for Amazon, while Sears/Kenmore will also benefit from Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities. At the same time, Sears continues to struggle and, long-term, this deal could the first step towards new business models where Kenmore works with other players to help develop partner products. Who’s to say that at some point Amazon doesn’t consider working with Kenmore to make a refrigerator or – as they did with Whole Foods – just buy the company?

Amazon Loves Food

This one might seem obvious, but Amazon loves the food business. If the surprising acquisition of Whole Foods wasn’t enough to convince you, certainly their decade-long investment in grocery delivery, experimentation with new store formats, their drive-through pick up concept, Fresh subscriptions and various other initiatives are signs of how excited Amazon is about the food market. And why not? They know along with Walmart that food is the biggest portion of consumer wallet spend outside of housing and transportation (roughly 13% of consumer household budgets go towards food).

Much how Amazon eventually invested in hardware for entertainment because they saw a huge opportunity for new business models as the living room became digitized, who’s to say they won’t think the same thing about food as the kitchen goes through the same digital transformation?

The Fridge Is The Heart Of The Kitchen

In some ways, one could argue the fridge is the heart of the kitchen. Samsung certainly thinks so, doubling down on a strategy around their Family Hub refrigerator this year and likely continuing to bet on the smart fridge. Rumors have been floating for the last couple years that Amazon was making a kitchen computer – which eventually turned into was the Echo Show – but who’s to say Amazon wouldn’t just consider moving the technology for the Show into the fridge itself alongside all the other tech they are have developed for the kitchen?

All The Reasons They Won’t Make a Fridge

As I said, there are lots of reasons not to make a fridge. One is the company usually invests in smaller, low-cost hardware products in new categories. Another is there’s a good chance that if Amazon wanted inside our fridge, they would simply consider making a retrofit solution similar to the Smarter fridge cam.  And if they wanted to make a home storage device, why not just make a front-door locker system, something akin to an Amazon locker for the front door?

But still…

Conclusion: Gene Munster, My Apologies

The Amazon fridge question reminds me of a few years ago when folks speculated whether Apple would make a TV. One analyst in particular, Gene Munster, seemed to bet his whole career on the idea before eventually admitting he’d been wrong.

Part of the reason Munster speculated for years about an Apple TV was there were lots of signals.  Patent filings, investment in digital entertainment platforms and the recurring pattern of Apple coming up with a new hero consumer product every couple years fed into Munster’s thinking.

So, while I don’t intend to become the Gene Munster of the Amazon fridge and wage a multiyear speculation battle about why its the right thing to do, I figured I’d at least play Munster for a day and ask the question: will Amazon make a smart fridge?

Probably not.

Buy maybe.

Sonos gets Alexa (and soon Google and Siri)

If you’re like me, Amazon’s Echo plays a central role in your kitchen. Player of music, answerer of questions, setter of timers, forecaster of weather. The Echo is super convenient, but the sound quality is definitely lacking.

Since it was announced last year, I’ve eagerly anticipated the marriage of Alexa’s voice control with the room-filling sound of Sonos Play speakers. Today, Sonos announced that Alexa integration is finally here, along with a new Sonos One speaker with Alexa built in — as well as forthcoming Google Assistant and Siri support.

For existing Sonos and Alexa owners, the Amazon connected assistant is available via a Sonos app beta update available today. With it, you’ll be able to control your Sonos speakers with your voice via the Echo and Echo Dot.

With the Sonos One (available October 24), Sonos is vying to become Switzerland of connected home assistants. The $199 speaker sports Alex integration out of the box, with support for Google Assistant and Siri (via iOS) coming in 2018.

This is probably the best position for Sonos to take as it feels the squeeze between cumbersome traditional high-end audio and the more convenient but lower fidelity smart home devices like the Echo. The timing is good too, given that today Google unveiled its beefy Google Home Max smart speaker and the upcoming Apple Homepod bills itself as having superior audio. Being agnostic to your assistant ecosystem of choice could give Sonos an edge and a chance to regain some lustre.

We had three Sonos speakers in our house, and almost immediately stopped using all of them once we got an Amazon Echo. Despite having worse sound, the device was in the kitchen, so it was more convenient to where our family mostly congregates. It’s such a high-class problem, but after experiencing Alexa’s voice control, running to get my phone to control my speaker felt like so much… work.

But was we played more music in the kitchen — whether to cook to, do homework by, or just throw an impromptu dance party — sound quality became more important. My pre-Sonos One solution was to plug an Echo Dot into a Sonos Play:5, but that takes up a lot of counter space, has dangling cords and can make it harder for Alexa to hear my voice. With its smaller footprint and newer technology, the Sonos One becomes an interesting proposition.

Curious About The Echo Show? Here’s My ‘One Day’ Review

The Echo Show arrived this week. Like many, I was excited to put the latest addition to the Echo lineup through its paces.

Welcome to my one day review.

Why write a review after using a product one day? Doesn’t one need to spend weeks – maybe even months – with a product like the Echo Show to really understand the possibilities of this complicated and interesting new product?

Yes, but here’s the thing: For most products, you also are able to notice things right away. Not unlike a first date when you show up at the restaurant and notice your date for the night has three eyebrows or is a loud talker, there are things you notice right away when you’re around someone or something.

So here goes:

Out of Box Experience

The install experience was painless, quick and well optimized. Once I pulled the Show out of the box and plugged it in, it walked (and talked) me through the installation.

The device found my Wi-Fi network, had me enter my password, and within a minute it had checked in with the cloud and knew this was Michael Wolf’s new Echo Show. The Show started to download a software update, which took about five minutes. Overall, the product was installed and running in 10 minutes.

The Sound

For about five minutes, I thought this device sounded horrible. Then I saw the layer of protective plastic over the speaker.

This is why I don’t write five minute reviews.

Plastic removed, the Echo Show sounds good. Not quite as good as my Sonos Play 3, but it could give my Play 1 a run for its money.  Turned up, the Echo Show is fairly loud.

Volume is controllable via Alexa, but it also has volume up and down buttons on top of the device, which I like. Sometimes you just like old fashioned physical buttons.

The Echo Show Shape and Look

Like many this week, I was surprised at the beefiness of the Show when it arrived at my house. This is mostly due to Amazon’s early press images and videos which showed the the latest Echo mainly from the front of the device. When you actually see the Show in all its glory, it’s a lot deeper than you expect.

So Amazon intended for you to mainly see the Show from one side: its front. This is clear not only because of how deep and heavy the back side of the Show is, but also because the sides of the device are angled inward. It reminded me of those early big screen TVs before everything became ultra-thin.

Because of these angled sides, you can walk from side to side and still have the illusion that this is a thin device. See video below:

Given the shape of the device, it works best against a wall. While I’m sure that with so many of today’s modern kitchens having islands, I’m sure many Echo Shows will end up stranded one one (sorry), but I’d suggest putting it up against a backsplash as it just looks better.

The device’s front screen leans ever-so-slightly backward. When I pushed the device with my hand and tried to tip it over from the front, it stuck stubbornly in place. It’s clear that Amazon gave some thought to how this device would sit on a surface like a kitchen counter as people and things moved around it and possibly bump into it.

Visual Information + Voice = Game Changer

Here’s something I realized right away: By finally giving Alexa a screen, Amazon has opened up immense new possibilities for potential applications and content opportunities.

This may sound like an overstatement, but it isn’t.

The main reason for this is the powerful combination of synchronized voice control/visual information. While the Amazon visual skill cupboard is slightly bare at this point, you can see from what few samples there are that by adding visual information, Amazon’s created a new and exciting direction for the Echo.

I spent the most time with new Allrecipes visual skill. While the skill feels very much like a 1.0 effort (I’ll have a review of the Allrecipes skill soon), but I can nonetheless see the potential. I was able to bring up recipes, pick one I like, browse the ingredients and cooking instructions.

But the coolest feature of the Allrecipes app was the ability to play and pause videos.  This is really important because if you’re like me, you like to watch and rewatch videos as you move through the cook process.

At the risk of being repetitive, let me say it again: it’s this combination of voice search and command with visually rich information in a shared-screen computing device is by far the most exciting thing about the Echo Show.

There are other aspects about having an always on screen that are important. The “sleep screen” info on the Echo Show is unobtrusive, natural and well placed. Maybe because Amazon has had so much practice creating sleep screen content  with the Kindle, but it’s clear Amazon thought about placing interesting and relevant info on a device. With the Echo Show, the device not only shows basic temperature and time info, but it scrolls through headlines, suggestions for using, etc.

The Camera

Of course, the camera’s most obvious benefit is the ability to communicate with others via voice chat. While I haven’t done a drop-in with my own Show yet, I did try it out in store at Amazon Books and the video quality seems really good.

Less obvious is the camera is being used as a sensor. When I turn out the lights the screen soon goes into soft-light mode, which I thought was a nice feature. And while it is early days for the Show, I expect at some point Amazon will unlock other computer vision capabilities that could really unlock contextually relevant information.

“I Would Use That”

When it comes to Alexa and our first two Echo devices, let’s just say my wife Tiffany has been indifferent to annoyed. Sure, she’ll ask Alexa to play music, but for the most part doesn’t see the value.

But after a few minutes playing with Echo Show, she was sold.

She tried out the Allrecipes app. She searched for a recipe and tried the video feature and liked it. She started, paused, played a video of making a strawberry smoothie, something my daughter wanted to make.

After a few minutes, my wife said, “this is something I would use.”

And of course, she then suggested I get rid of another one of my kitchen gadgets taking up counter space in order to put this one in the kitchen.

But hey, progress, right?

As Others Play Voice Catch Up, Amazon Turns Sights To Computer Vision

As everyone from Microsoft to Apple rolls out first-generation voice assistants for the home, the reigning voice control champ Amazon has turned its attention to a new area within the smart home AI universe: computer vision.

For evidence of this focus, one needs to look no further than two new products introduced by Amazon in the past month. While both the Echo Look and Show have the same built-in voice assistant power of Alexa as their predecessors, there is one big difference: both new entrants have cameras. And while Amazon hasn’t come out and said these two new devices are the beginning of a new strategic front in the AI-powered smart home, an examination of these products’ capabilities, recent efforts to bolster the AWS AI lineup and recent statements by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos help to connect all the dots.

Rekognizing A Pattern

So why the sudden interest in putting cameras in the home?  My guess is it’s in part due to what has been a growing emphasis over the past year by Amazon on its own computer vision powered AI capabilities.

That growing interest became more evident a year ago with the acquisition of Orbeus, the company which provided the foundation for Amazon’s current computer vision service from AWS, Rekognition. According to Richard Michael, former COO, Orbeus provided a “proprietary cloud based image analysis solution that makes sense of not just faces, but also scenes and objects”.

By last October, the company had relaunched the Rekognition service as part of its suite of AWS AI products. In a blog post, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr described how Rekognition could be used:

If you have a large collection of photos, you can tag and index them using Amazon Rekognition. Because Rekognition is a service, you can process millions of photos per day without having to worry about setting up, running, or scaling any infrastructure. You can implement visual search, tag-based browsing, and all sorts of interactive discovery models.

You can use Rekognition in several different authentication and security contexts. You can compare a face on a webcam to a badge photo before allowing an employee to enter a secure zone. You can perform visual surveillance, inspecting photos for objects or people of interest or concern.

You can build “smart” marketing billboards that collect demographic data about viewers.

While Amazon hasn’t come out and announced that Rekognition is being used to power the Echo Look, the company’s “fashion assistant,” the features of the Look tells me it most likely is. The device, which lets users take selfies and build a “style book” which the Look will then analyze to make recommendations, has a feature called Style Check:

Style Check keeps your look on point using advanced machine learning algorithms and advice from fashion specialists. Submit two photos for a second opinion on which outfit looks best on you based on fit, color, styling, and current trends. Over time, these decisions get smarter through your feedback and input from our team of experienced fashion specialists.

This is exactly what the Rekognition API does. By combining machine learning with computer vision, Rekognition is constantly learning, ultimately becoming better and better at analyzing images based on an ever-growing set of data based on those images. For the Echo Look, the end result is better recommendations. And while this is a fashion-centric use case that focused on color, style and fit, there’s no doubt that this technology can be used in a variety of use cases ranging of from home security to analyzing the contents of a refrigerator.

And what about the Echo Show? While Amazon doesn’t highlight the Show’s image recognition capabilities, my guess is that Amazon will give the Show Rekognition-powered computer vision over time to add enhanced functionality.

A “Horizontal Enabling Layer”

Recent comments from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos helps one understand the company’s ongoing effort to push AI services beyond just Alexa. In a recent interview at the Internet Association gala, he shared his thoughts on AI (per GeekWire):

“Machine learning and AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It will empower and improve every business, every government organization, every philanthropy — basically, there’s no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning. At Amazon, some of the things we’re doing are superficially obvious, and they’re interesting, and they’re cool. And you should pay attention. I’m thinking of things like Alexa and Echo, our voice assistant, I’m thinking about our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones. Those things use a tremendous amount of machine learning, machine vision systems, natural language understanding and a bunch of other techniques”.

“But those are kind of the showy ones. I would say, a lot of the value that we’re getting from machine learning is actually happening beneath the surface. It is things like improved search results. Improved product recommendations for customers. Improved forecasting for inventory management. Literally hundreds of other things beneath the surface.”

While Bezos points to the voice assistant tech in Alexa and Echo, he also gives a nod to machine vision. He describes all of these technologies as a “horizontal enabling layer.” What does he mean by this? In short, he is describing AI as a technology that is broadly applicable to almost every application, whether enterprise or consumer, and how the addition of which can add immense value to the end product.

With Alexa, Amazon was able to show, not tell, about that value of voice control. That is very powerful. I am sure they hope that, in a similar way, the Echo Look and Show can act as ambassadors for computer vision to the broader world. And while we may not witness the same kind of explosive adoption of Amazon powered computer vision AI as we did with Alexa,  in part because there are already a number of products that do basic image analysis using AI (such as Closeli) in the market, I do believe that Amazon can raise the awareness about how image recognition and detection AI enhance a variety of smart home and consumer use-cases.

Can Amazon Overcome The Creep Factor?

One last caveat: inward facing cameras in the home have plateaued in recent years, while outward facing security cameras like the Ring and Arlo have flown off shelves. The reason for this is people want to know what’s going on outside their home, but they don’t want people – including potential hackers – seeing what’s going on inside. With all the stories of security vulnerabilities, who can blame them?

While Amazon seems unbothered by this, it remains to be seen if their new interest in video AI will see any pushback from consumers.

Only time – and maybe Alexa – will tell.

Here’s Why The Echo Show Is Amazon’s Kitchen Computer

Two years after rumors first surfaced about a top secret Amazon project to develop a kitchen computer, today we may finally have a hint of what the company had in mind when rumors first surfaced in August 2015.

Not that Amazon is calling the Echo Show a kitchen computer since, after all, the new device can do a whole lot more. With a 7″ touch screen, full microphone array, a camera for machine vision and more, Amazon obviously sees this device as a video, voice and touch enabled Swiss Army knife for most any room in the home.

But let’s be honest, half of Echos ending up in the kitchen, and with the new features offered up by this new video-enabled Echo device, this is the most kitchen-friendly from Amazon yet.

Here’s why:

Video Skills: By adding a 7″ touchscreen and video-enabled skills, the Echo Show finally offers kitchen-centric content creators a medium to delivery visually rich content. The Food Network has already created an Alexa Skill to send recipes from your favorite cooking shows to the Amazon Echo, but I can pretty much guarantee they and other video-centric food content producers are chomping at the bit to create video-enabled skills.

All of which is good because…

Kitchen Use Cases Require Visual Communication: One could argue that outside of the entertainment area/living room, the kitchen is the most visual of all rooms. The combination of voice commands combined with visual display that can surface cooking videos, recipes, shopping lists, food inventories and so much more makes it a natural for the kitchen.

It Can Also See: Much like the Echo Look, the Show has a camera. While obviously for video communication, I also envision the camera being used to read bar or QR codes, identify products by sight, remote home monitoring and even enabling contextual recommendations based on whether its dad or daughter standing in front of it.

Video Communication And Monitoring: The kitchen is the central gathering place in the home, where family entertains, eats and just hangs out. With a built-in video intercom, this allows mom or dad to check in the kids while making dinner, see who is at the door, or even place a phone call to grandma using the built-in video intercom or calling technology.

Bottom line, while it isn’t just for the kitchen, I suspect the Show was made in large part with the kitchen in mind. And while I am not sure if the Show is what Amazon originally envisioned when it was dreaming of the kitchen computer back in 2015, I am pretty sure this is what the original project has become.

Stay tuned for more thoughts on the Echo Home….