- Information, music, news, weather, and more—instantly
- Controlled by your voice for hands-free convenience
- Voice recognition hears you from across the room
- Connected to the cloud so it’s always getting smarter
Tucked under Echo’s light ring is an array of seven microphones. These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it’s playing music. Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request
.. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound.
The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle and What it Means for Amazon’s Future
In many ways, the Fire Phone is the perfect symbol of these opposing perceptions of Amazon. It represents everything proponents love about the company—the wild experimentation, the appetite for risk-taking—as well as everything that critics now deride: its huge expenditures, its blithe embrace of an imagined future where the big bets pay off, and its inability to create anything with real style. Understanding Amazon’s journey to create a smartphone, and why it failed, is perhaps the best way to understand the company’s evolving mission and values as it struggles to unearth its next gusher of revenue. Because the Fire Phone, as with most big innovations inside Amazon, came straight from Bezos’s brain. As one founding team leader of the project puts it, “This was Jeff’s baby.”
.. “And I thought, This is a CEO who cares about design; what a wonderful place to be.” Eventually, however, this designer grew frustrated, as did others. “In essence, we were not building the phone for the customer—we were building it for Jeff,” this source says.
.. “I want this feature,” Bezos said, telling the team he didn’t care how long it took or how much it cost. Eventually, a solution was discovered: Four cameras had to be mounted at the corners of the phone, each capable of identifying facial features, whether in total darkness or obscured by sunglasses. But adding that to the phone created a serious battery drain.
And team members simply could not imagine truly useful applications for Dynamic Perspective. As far as anyone could tell, Bezos was in search of the Fire Phone’s version of Siri, a signature feature that could make the device a blockbuster.