Year: 2019

Out of all of the hardware announced so far at this morning’s big Amazon event, the Echo Glow is perhaps the oddest entry. It’s a $30 colorful glowing sphere. Why? Because Amazon said so. Tapping the top of the device will cycle through a number of different colors. It can blink. It has a campfire mode.

Beyond that, I’m a little at a loss to explain why the thing needs to exist. But, then, this is the company that introduced an Alexa-powered Big Mouth Billy Bass. At this point, the Amazon team seem more intent on demonstrating all of the different products that can work with the Alexa ecosystem — even those that aren’t particularly useful.

Anyway, here it is. It exists. And you can preorder it today for $30. Once it arrives, let me know if you figure out what it’s for.

Amazon is partnering up with Food Network on a new recipe service for its Echo Show line of devices, borne out of the interest it saw in users for recipes and cooking videos on the smart video speaker. The new Food Network Kitchen service, which is launching in October, will be available on phones and tablets, too, and will offer recipe saving and cooking directions – as well as exclusive live and on-demand cooking classes for Echo Show users.

On stage at their Amazon Devices Event in Seattle, Amazon showed off the upcoming service on stage, including a demo featuring an on-demand cooking class with celebrity chef Bobby Flay. It looks likely that you’ll at least get access to on-demand cooking lessons from a range of Food Network talent, since Amazon SVP of Devices Dave Limp also referenced Alton Brown on stage.

You can also ask Alexa for specific guidance at any step of the process, and she’ll provide answers to your clarifying questions.

Limp said that “you’re going to be able to have live classes as well,” which makes it sound like this will be a pretty full-featured competitor to something like what Peloton offers for fitness. Limp added that the live class instructors are still developing and “practising these in the studio,” so we didn’t get a chance to see yet how an actual live class will work on the Echo Show.

He did however have Bobby Flay speak directly about how he feels about the service, and the chef said that he’s excited about it because he “get(s) to be in basically any kitchen in the world, anywhere in the world, and I can teach people anywhere in the world how to cook.” Plus, he noted that it’ll have something like 80,000 recipes on board at launch.

This could be huge for Amazon, especially as it seeks to distinguish itself among the growing number of smart screen devices for use in the home. As it ramps up other efforts around health and fitness, too, this could be a key component.

BetterCloud started out as a way to add a missing operations layer on top of Google G Suite. Later it added support for other SaaS tools, and last year it built an API, so developers could build integrations on top of BetterCloud. Today, it announced a new Integration Center, a place where users can build and share integrations with the community.

Last year’s API announcement was really aimed at developers building integrations for a particular company. Today’s announcement is about sharing connectors and having a central place to exchange them, says BetterCloud’s chief product officer, Jim Brennan.

“We’re launching the new BetterCloud Integration Center, which is a single place for users to discover, install and configure any integration. Those integrations can be built by us, or now they can also be the integrations built by the community, because our users now have the ability to share anything they’ve built using that API [we announced last year],” Brennan explained.

In addition to having a place to exchange the integrations, the company has tried to make it easier to build them by offering step-by-step approach for those who need it, while leaving power users to use the API. Brennan says that original API involves more intensive developer knowledge, while also requiring you to go to a separate developer portal. The new experience is not only simpler, it’s also integrated right inside BetterCloud.

To show how these integrations work, the company is including 32 integrations out of the box with today’s announcement to such popular services as Zoom, Atlassian, GitHub, PagerDuty, Intercom, AWS, Tableau, Duo, Splunk and Datadog.

BetterCloud was founded in 2011. It has raised almost $107 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its most recent round was a $60 million Series E led by Bain Capital Ventures in 2018.

Starting today, there really is an Echo Show for every need. In amongst this morning’s deluge of Alexa hardware, Amazon announced yet another version of the smart screen. As the name implies, the Echo Show 8 is an eight inch version of the device — one that looks an awful lot like an upscaled version of the recently introduced Echo Show 5.

The new model borrows the better audio from the 10 inch flagship and also sports a built-in privacy shutter — something lacking in the Google Nest Hub Max that honestly ought to be standard in any smart home device with a built-in camera.

Aside from real estate, we didn’t get much information on the distinctions between the 10 and 8, but undercutting the competition is the name of the game this morning, and as such, the Echo Show 8 will be priced at an extremely reasonable $129.

Preorders for the device open today and Amazon expects that it will start shipping ahead of the holidays.

At its hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced that it is launching a new Neural Text to Speech model for its Alexa personal assistant. This new model, which isn’t unlike what some of Amazon’s competitors like Google and Microsoft have launched in the past, uses the latest machine learning techniques to allow the company to build this new model which is meant to be more “emotive and expressive.”

In addition, the company today announced that your Echo can soon sound like Samuel L. Jackson, too. Using the same technology (instead of pre-recorded phrases), Alexa can now mimic celebrity voices, with Jackson’s being the first of them. That Samuel L. Jackson mode also comes in an explicit version.

Additional voices will roll out next year, but they won’t be available for free. Instead, they’ll cost $0.99 each (at least at first). It’s a fun gimmick, I guess, but it’s really not much more than that and harkens back to the days of stand-alone GPS units that often had a similar feature.

“The pace of innovation is incredible and what we can do with machine learning really never ceases to amaze me,” Amazon’s Dave Limp said in today’s keynote. “This same neural network technology though gives us a lot more flexibility now in and around what we can do with the Alexa voice.”

Today at a special event Amazon unveiled a bevy of new Echo devices including several aimed a bit upmarket.  The Echo Studio is Amazon’s answer to the Google Nest Max and Apple HomePod. It’s larger than a normal Echo, supports 3D audio and Dolby Atmos.

The seems to have device five drivers: one, downward facing woofer, front-firing tweeter and three mid-range speakers aimed at different directions. Inside are several microphones that allow the speaker to work like a standard Echo device.

“It is the most innovative speaker we have ever built and has unbelievable sound,” David Limp, SVP of Devices. “It has space, it has clarity, has depth.”

Amazon entered this market last year with the Amazon Echo Link and Echo Link Amp. Both were clearly designed for consumers looking for a better way to bring voice services to existing home audio systems. The Echo Studio enters the same space but in a different way. Consumers looking for better sound with Alexa no longer have to lean on a traditional audio system.

Amazon’s just getting started with the new hardware this morning. In addition to the Echo Dot With Clock (which, as mentioned, is an Echo Dot that has a Clock), the company refreshed the baseline Echo. Once again, the refresh revolves around improved sound.

The new version incorporates audio improvements introduced on the Echo Plus, though it doesn’t appear to have the Plus’s Hub functionality built in, leave the two products distinct. The new audio hardware includes neodymium drivers, more volume and a stronger midrange.

The new Echo features a new, multicolored fabric covers, as well. Like the new Dot, it’s available for preorder starting today. It will be priced the same as its predecessor, at $99.

Facebook has pumped billions into virtual reality and it may be a long way from making that investment back, but it is making a little money.

Onstage at Oculus Connect, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company had surpassed $100 million in revenue in the Oculus store. This figure spans several different virtual reality headsets, but Zuckerberg noted than 20% of that revenue was for Quest titles sold in the past four months, suggesting that users of the new headset are spending plenty of cash on content.

The company has marketed its standalone Quest headset heavily and it’s clear the company sees the low-friction product as its best ticket to mass user adoption. This milestone is a long time coming after hundreds of million in content investments specifically, but Facebook hasn’t shown signs of slowing investment.

Amazon is launching multilingual mode for its Alexa-supporting devices, the company announced today at its Devices event in Seattle. The new multilingual mode will initially be available in the U.S., where it’ll work with English and Spanish; Canada, where it’ll offer French and English support, and Hindi and English in India.

These bilingual modes will mean that households can use their Alexa devices in both languages simultaneously, which is obviously a great feature for families where more than one language is spoken at home. Alexa will switch between languages, and employ new natural-sounded voices modeled using neural network processing to provide more realistic and expressive responses.

This multi-lingual mode is just a start, Amazon says, since Amazon SVP of Devices Dave Limp noted at the event that there are “billions of households around the world that have dual speakers, and sometimes three languages, in a single household,” all of which would benefit from expanded multilingual options.

Facebook today announced a virtual reality sandbox game where you can build your own environments and games, socialize with friends, and more.