Amazon on Thursday unveiled Echo, a cylindrical-shaped speaker that can do a lot more than just play music.
Echo is controlled by your voice, and can do things like give you the news and weather, create to-do lists, set a timer, wake you up in the morning, and even tell you jokes. According to Amazon's product page, Echo is always on and connected to Wi-Fi, but it only hears you when you use a "wake word" that you choose when you first set it up.
So, for instance, if you chose the wake word "Alexa," you could say "Alexa, play rock music," and it would queue up the jams. When you've had enough, you can just tell it to stop. You can also ask Echo questions like "What time is it?" or "How tall is Mount Everest?"
As a speaker, it offers hands-free voice control for Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. It's Bluetooth-enabled so you can stream music from services like Spotify, iTunes, and Pandora from your phone or tablet.
At this point, Echo is only available to those with an invitation. You can head over to Amazon's website to request an invite. It costs $199, but Prime members can get it for $99 for a limited time.
Measuring 9.25 inches tall, Echo has seven microphones and uses so-called far-field voice-recognition technology, so it should be able to hear you from anywhere in the room, even while it's playing music.
"Echo's brain is in the cloud … so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time," Amazon's product page reads. "The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences."
Amazon is also releasing a free companion app for Fire and Android devices, plus desktop and iOS browsers, that lets you do things like start playing music on Echo from your phone, manage your alarms, music, and shopping lists.
For more on Echo, check out the video below.